For those who don't know, attacking with a sword while standing still now damages all mobs in a 1 block radius of your target. This means that if you attack one zombie in a crowd, other nearby zombies are also damaged.

However, there is the serious possibility that you don't want to damage all nearby mobs. If you have a wolf near some zombies that you are fighting, attacking the zombies may attack the wolf. If you want to pick a certain amount cows out of a crowd after you bred them, you may kill too many cows and possibly end up slicing up the baby cows in the process.

It's incredibly annoying making sure that your attack meter is empty or deliberately moving while attacking so that you don't screw up and hit the wrong thing. I could only imagine the chaos that would occur if you were to play team PvP and accidentally damage one of your allies.

The solution is simple: Require the player to sneak to use the sweep attack. If you wanted to preform a sweep attack on a crowd of mobs, it's simple enough to hold down the shift key. For those who don't want to damage everything nearby, then they can simply not use the shift key and happily slice whatever they want, taking solace in the fact that they won't chop their beloved pets in half. This already appeared in the snapshots, but was removed for some reason.

How hard would it be to add it back?