The character and the leaned wall / lamp etc usually has an insane gap inbetween. I wish they would make the character a bit further back as a whole model, kinda sad most likely they will never ever fix this but hey, one can wish I guess. Oh by the way fix warrior. Thanks.
Edit: Also talking pulls you out of the lean, then your character zaps back to it. Very, very annoying. If not enough, if you pull up your map, the leaning animation stops too.
The gap is dependent on which walls you chose.
its not really the emotes fault, its a matter of collision boxes on the object you want to lean against.
I do hope they find something that lets you /say without getting yoinked off the wall.
Yes, and if they tried to use the /lean at least once in play testing, they would notice almost every single wall’s collision box creates a gap. Simply move the player model a bit further back, and voila, problem solved
And the male troll lean is a whole sit. A good sit that stay as an alternative sit, but a sit.
As far as I’ve tried with the lean emote, the orcish male lean is practically useless. There is no wall close enough to make it not look silly as hell.
And no doubt the /lean that makes people sit (pandaren male, troll male, etc.) will pretty much never be used when using /say a lot.
I have yet to test this, but how is it if you include what you say in an emote?
Example:
/e leans against the wall. “How are you today?” smiles, and takes a sip of tea.
Edit: It worked for me, did not take me out of the /lean 
Since /e doesn’t play any animations, this is the expected result and the best choice most of the time.
Indeed, but you never know for sure so I like to test it out!
Either way, simple solution to the problem.
It does get a bit cumbersome having to do a tiny emote for every part of a conversation, but it’s something
I don’t quite get why /s breaks lean this much, considering it only should affect the upper body.
Maybe they didn’t set it up right and /lean can’t overwrite the lower body animation like walking does for /s?
its possible
kneel, sit, sleep and others like it that change your body pose don’t break when you speak, so Lean could very well be coded wrong.
My only insight into this is that WoW’s old code allows for some rather specific positioning which is how chairs work. /lean is a different beast and WoW hasn’t done this kind of “agent snapping to surface” on the fly much at all besides mounting.
It’s tech the game applies well when glueing static npcs to walls for immersive presence but players having access means we’re using it in places it wasn’t designed for.
If you type /sleep then /lean it lets you lean on the floor, it’s really cool
My two copper coins think that the sole reason the gap exists is that if we actually lean into it, back and all, we would become unstoppable.