Blizzard has tried hard to make so much of the game smooth and fun, cutting out factors other MMOs think necessary (like, say, corpse runs or XP loss on death) because they recognised they’re not fun.
Take tradeskills. For the most part, they’re streamlined and simple to execute – I have some issues with the amount of reward they offer, but there’s no “because we can” obstacles…
…except in Enchanting.
If I’m levelling up Alchemy on an alt, I can give her a couple of stacks of herbs, a stack of vials, and click one button. I walk away to get a coffee, I come back, I’ve got a stack of elixirs in my bag and 20 shiny new skill points.
Getting those skill points for an Enchanter? You have to execute your recipe individually each time – and if you’re grinding your skill up a bit, you’re probably re-enchanting the same item over and over with the most efficient recipe you’ve got. Each re-enchant requires an extra click to confirm that you really did mean to overwrite the last enchantment on the item, which is identical anyway. So your twenty skill points cost you forty mouse clicks instead of one, and a lot of boring staring at the screen. It’s as bad as fishing, and you don’t even get to get out and look at the scenery.
It’s only a minor niggle, and the world’s not gonna end if they don’t fix it – but it’s so jarring and tedious in an otherwise streamlined world.
Hear hear! Thank Elune my enchanting is 375; however, I’m not excited by the prospect of raising it to 450 or whatever for the expansion.
Ya, is a good point. Ellspeth got her skill up nearly 40 points this weekend, and it were a dang lotta clicking.
I’ve already got a 375 Enchanter, my priest. But I’m levelling up an alt with a friend and we’re doing a lot of instancing, so I want to be able to DE the blues we’re just vendoring at the moment. It’s painful.
http://aspectofthecapricious.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-pity-enchants-dont-stack.html
And yes, you can put those two in a single macro and it works great.
Maybe they could add a “skilling up” mode where you would be assumed to be casting all enchants on a dedicated item in your inventory, and the interface would look similar to other trade skills (like jemcutting). Maybe they could make this the default mode when you hit the “enchant” button, and they could have a separate button for “enchant something”.
Note that in WotLK, we’re supposed to be getting “enchant item” scrolls being crafted by Inscribers; in that case, you could probably buy a stack of the appropriate scroll and just enchant a whole stack of them. (maybe for your alts?) This won’t help for stupid enchants (like +9 spirit to shield or whatever), because you won’t really be selling those, but it might be a help if you’ve got a moderately-pricey enchant that you think you could sell (think Crusader, Fiery, or just +strength/+stamina enchants), but you don’t want to be hassled with 25 minutes hawking your wares and running from town to town trying to find somebody who’s not going to flake on half the materials and ask for a loan…
Also, with other professions, the items you make from levelling your skill up, you can resell on AH. Even if it’s for like 50s, it’s still painfully easy.
But Enchanting is like spamming chat with ‘Giving away free Enchant Bracers – Spirit for free with my mats’, and you still don’t get many people rushing to you :(
I wished I had Enchanting for a variety of reasons, but the many factors including the above just put me off.
There is a way to write a macro to ignore the 2nd click… I know I have seen something similar on Auctioneer forums.
On a slightly related note, AutoMagic (a component of Auctioneer Advanced), semi-automates the DE process.
When you grab items from the mail into your bags, it will prompt you to DE each item. Which you can DE, ignore-temporarily, or ignore permanently (unless you manually DE)
Too bad there isn’t a bag that you could throw mats into, shake it up and poof, you get XX skill points.
But MMOs aren’t interested entirely on speed and convenience. It’s about spending time.