The mace's falling smash attack activates while the mace is on cooldown (the sword icon isn't fully filled up after an attack and you won't do full damage). This is in contrast to a sword's sweep attack, which will never activate while attacking during cooldown.
How to reproduce:
Take a sword and spam-attack a mob.
Notice how the sweep attack does not activate if you attack before the cooldown is done.
Take a mace and fall onto a ravager from high enough to kill it.
Just before you hit the ravager, swing to the side, not hitting it, to activate the mace's cooldown.
Hit the ravager while cooldown is still active and you're still midair.
Notice how the mace's smash attack activates and the ravager dies despite the mace still being on cooldown, unlike the sword's sweep attack.
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Not quite. They're related to each other, but seperate things. That being said I think fixing this bug would make that one not an issue/exploit, if you get me.
Thanks 🙂
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I changed the reproduction steps because they were confusing, and I demonstrate them in these videos.
This one shows how the sword's sweep attack does not activate during cooldown. See me spam clicking and it not working. It only activates once cooldown is over and the sword bar has a plus next to it. https://youtu.be/grfc1kq4kxg
This one is for the mace. Pay attention to how I deliberately turn away from the ravager, hit the air to activate the weapon's cooldown and THEN hit the ravager which, unlike the sword, does activate the mace's special attack. You might need to watch it in slow motion to properly understand. This means that unlike the sword you can spam the mace while falling to make hitting something with the smash attack much more likely. https://youtu.be/tg3PS8zRd-U
Can confirm in 24w14a, though we'll see if this is fixed in the next snapshot with MC-270005 being fixed.

By the way, as what I mentioned in that ticket, this bug may be related to an old bug which hasn't been fixed for several years. I think the old bug has been reported, but I can't find it in Mojira, please help find it.

This ticket can be closed because MC-28289 can describe how the problem can be caused again

This issue doesn't require last moment swapping of items. See steps to reproduce.

Can confirm for 1.21.3
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After consideration, the issue is being closed as Working as Intended.
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Does MC-270005 describe this issue?