Auto-Attack On or Off????Follow

I just wanted to ask a couple of things about auto attacking...

1. Can you turn it off?

2. If it is possible to turn it off, is it better to use it or not?

Thanks for the input...

Joph, you're talking about auto attack on assist. Rhaiynebow's asking about plain old auto attack.

Don't new characters come with a "melee attack" button? I didn't test it (because I'm lazy and use auto attack), but I assumed it was a button that would allow one to manually time one's swings.

Auto attack will automatically swing your weapon(s) as quickly as they can.

I suppose someone will post some reason one would need precision timing on their weapon swings, but everyone I know uses auto attack.

Even though the game mechanics may be that fine tuned, once one factors in server lag, internet connection speeds, etc., trying to manually control the timing of your swings would seem impossible.

You're correct, Yanari. As far as I know, the "melee" button characters get to start with is an auto-attack. I've never remapped or changed mine (even on recently made alts) and its always acted as an auto-attack.

I don't think you can "manually" swing, aside from turning auto-attack on and off each swing.

Odd. I assumed the same thing that Joph did. Most folks care about whether you have autoattack turned on automatically when you /assist someone. This is the first time I've ever heard of someone wanting to attack without continuing to attack over and over.

The melee attack button you get simply turns on autoattack. It always has. I can't think of any real reason you'd want a button that just attacked once. You certainly could make one if you wanted (hotkey that did a doability X twice in a row, where X is the attack ability). I just can't think of any really good reason to need that.


The attack button simply toggles you in or out of attack mode. While in attack mode, you will continue to swing at whatever you have targeted as quickly as you can. There are times when you might want to turn that off though. I do this when retargeting for heals for example. I sometimes will want to target myself and drop a quick heal. I could just hit the tab button drop the heal, then tab back to hit the target. However, if a swing happens to come along while I've got myself targetted, it'll use up that swing and I'll have to wait delay number of seconds before I can swing on the mob. If I turn off attack first, then tab to target myself, then cast my heal, then reverse the process to retarget the mob, then if the delay of the weapon passes, it'll simply ungrey the attack button, and I'll get a swing immediately upon hitting it rather then wasting it swinging at myself.

For this reason, I have attack as the number 1 slot. That puts it right next to the tab button. I can kinda roll my fingers across the two to target myself for a quick heal, then roll them back when I'm done to target and resume attacking the mob. So if you want to know if that's possible, then it certainly is. You are free to turn attack on and off as you wish. If you want to swing at a target just once, then just hit attack, swing, then hit attack again to turn it off. Again. I don't know of any really good reason to need to do this (I suppose if you pull by running up and whacking a mob, that might qualify), but the ability is there if you want it.