Five minor gripes in the Legion Alpha.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Below is an edited transcript of my latest video.
TL;DR - Video is the top link in my sig.
TL;DW - Cooking sort of sucks, it's messing with engineering (which doesn't suck), some immersion issues, finding artifact questlines could flow better, and ret aura for prot pallies can be more interesting with this suggestion.

There’re a lot of things I like and am excited about with Legion. I’ve talked about a good bit of it and you’ll hear more from me about it as we get closer to launch. But I wanted to talk about five random things that make me go hm.

Cooking

I feel that for all the work that’s been put into revamping professions and getting players more involved with leveling them, cooking feels like the worst of it. Here’s how it works in Legion.
Once you get to dalaran, an NPC in your faction’s kitchen will give you a quest to learn six Legion cooking recipes.
These six recipes are scattered across each of the zones in the broken isles and are earned from a quest, which are just kind of thrown in there and built into existing questlines.
So it takes you potentially a long time before you can find all these recipes. There’s a good chance you’ll hit max level if you’re the type to complete an entire zone before moving on, and still not find all six recipes.
But eventually you do, you turn them in and then what? Now you turn in five of any of the cooking materials in Legion like fish meat and veggies and create a work order. Work orders last for four hours and for each one completed, you might get a recipe. And so far I have not been very successful at getting a lot of recipes; I’ve been getting a lot of burnt food and vendor junk.
And as far as I’ve seen, that’s it. That’s cooking. And to be perfectly honest I think the the design team dropped the ball on this one. The cooking experience feels super disconnected from gameplay; I do have to go out and get cooking materials, but them I pump them into a system I don’t have any control of. I don’t even know if certain materials will give me certain recipes. It’s random. So it’s boring, not immersive and random.
If blizzard put in that cooking minigame they did for the mists of pandaria noodle carts, and had me do that to earn every recipe and mastery upgrade, that would be a better experience for me than sit and wait for something else to do it for me.

Engineering

Engineering on the other hand looks really neat. I like that there’re quests behind learning the recipes. But there’s a quest called modular modifications. It’s really early into the engineering quests, but I got roadblocked here, learning the first module thing for reaves, my awesome bot. Why? Because I need five feasts. Well crap how do I learn feasts? Oh heck, the cooking work orders.
So, in order to learn like my second engineering schematic on my own, I need to have traveled to every zone, do most of the quests to get the recipes, and spend an unknown number of days waiting to hopefully get access to the feast recipe. That sucks for engineers. Please oh please, instead of feasts, change it to like, a bunch of cooking materials, or a cooking recipe that we at least have easier access to. It’s a bummer that I have to wait till someone on my server has feasts before I can get past the early engineering experience.

The word “artifact” being used in spoken dialogue

A good while back I posted a video about the word artifact being used in game. In a nutshell I thought it didn’t really sit right to hear the word artifact used so freely, and posted a bunch of screenshots where I saw them. We call our weapons artifacts because that’s what the system feature is called. But it breaks immersion if an NPC were to call it out and he did, literally. Same would go if he called me a protection paladin. Now you might disagree with me, but since that video, all the references to the artifact I mentioned have been removed so someone at Blizzard agrees with me.

When the reference to to the artifact is mentioned, Both Kayn and Altruis speak in the written text, but we only see Kayn. I’m guessing that this’ll eventually be fixed like the others. If not, well, I tried.

Additional artifact quests behind mission tables

When you start your legion experience, you’ll choose your first artifact, and get access to the other ones later. However the item that kicks off the other artifact quests is earned through a table mission. I don’t think having to do that is bad. A lot of players aren’t too happy with table missions and as much as I try to explain that they’re not nearly as big of a deal as they are in warlords, you can’t just cure PTSD with reasoning.
I do have a problem that you can fail the mission though, even though it’s hard to not fail it. I think that one of the tutorial missions can reward players with the artifact quest, maybe even let players choose which one to go for. Or just not let it fail. Or just have an NPC start the quest at some opportune time.
There’s an argument that players should have faster access to their other artifacts because they actively switch between their specs. Not having their artifact isn’t the end of the world, and on occasion, weapons from other specs do drop from mobs. That said, I still think that making at least our 2nd artifact more predictable to earn would please people.

Retribution Aura

Protection paladins have ret aura again, which is pretty neat. The numbers aren’t, however. In fact they’re absolutely unappealing. I’m only using it because I’m not in a group and there’s otherwise nothing else to take.

It’s boring. I think we can add an additional active ability to this to make the talent a bit more interesting. Keep the little bit of damage there but if you activate it as a skill, for the next few seconds it will take a snapshot of all the damage taken by all party or raid members in those few seconds, and when the time’s up, the paladin explodes, dealing the damage it absorbed and splitting it between all enemies. It’s more of a dps cooldown than anything. It won’t reduce anyone’s damage taken so it’s not like an additional defensive cooldown. Or maybe it can be, and it can replace blessing of sacrifice.
I don’t know, but as a passive, ret aura just doesn’t do anything appealing at the moment. Blizzard said that prot would get a big damage boost in an upcoming build so we’ll have to see how things go.

[Tylaeus]

Hopefully you posted this on the actual beta forums. This type of feedback can do much more good over there.

[Paula Deen]

Hopefully you posted this on the actual beta forums. This type of feedback can do much more good over there.

I am willing to put 20k down his feedback would never be seen by anyone that cared and or it would ignored, despite the fact that it brings up multiple good points.

[Asotcha]

I am willing to put 20k down his feedback would never be seen by anyone that cared and or it would ignored, despite the fact that it brings up multiple good points.

Well its hard to say whether or not it would be noticed, but we know for Certain its not going to be seen over here, so it makes sense for the OP to copy/paste this post just in case.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Hopefully you posted this on the actual beta forums. This type of feedback can do much more good over there.

They were =).

[Spunt]

One of my main professions I level first is Engineering and it's rather disheartening to here that it is so dependent on another profession. And holy fuck, they still have work orders BS?! WTF? Why do I have to wait 4 fucking hours? I hated that system in WoD and apparently it's still going strong in Legion