Going LD while in combat

[Tecmos Deception]

So after a recent incident involving hair in my mouse's laser and accidentally Xing out of my client leading to a death (even though if I'm ingame I can tank the fucking thing I was fighting for 2 minutes or more without heals. oh well)... it got me to thinking about how LD characters behave when in combat.

I thought I remembered in classic (and previously on blue too?) that a LD character will cast spells that it had memorized (healing self, nuking mobs, etc), and will melee things that come into melee range, until the character disappears after a minute or two. Didn't melee swings from a player start hitting as hard as an NPC's swings at that level would have, too?

Why isn't that happening anymore? I didn't see any threads on it with a quick search, but I didn't want to make a bug report before seeing what other peoples' recollections of this were.