Normally it is, but this game simply isn't designed to support that. What you're suggesting basically boils down to "grindfest". Sorry to disappoint.

I disagree. The expense and hassle of re-specializing has always been a big problem for people who try to enjoy more than one aspect of the game. This is especially true for support classes like tanks and healers who may wish to farm or DPS or PvP every once in a while.

Hopefully they will give us the ability to switch between two sets of inscriptions to match our changable specs.

It does seem odd that they'd suggest implementing easily-swappable talent specs to let players participate in different aspects of the game, and then also implement a glyph system that significantly hinders one's ability to engage in those different aspects.

On the other hand, if there are no trade-offs to be made and everyone can have every glyph and switch them at will, is there really anything interesting about the profession? In that case you may as well just build glyph functionality into the base skills and save everyone a few clicks.

Glyphs are talent points, that you buy with gold, nothing more. They are only "interesting" due to their novelty.

Build 8770 Changes - Class Skills and Professions



I'm sure a few PvPers are breathing a sigh of relief that they won't have to hop around from spec to spec each season to max out their gear.

Hmmm. We keep thinking of glyphs as expensive items similar to gems or enchants. Perhaps the costs of top end glyphs will be similar to that of top end ELIXIRS.

It is clear that Glyphs will be very situational (this is especially evident if you look just at the healing glyphs). Raiders will probably want to change glyphs from boss to boss. You will also want to re-glyph for PvP and maybe for farming. This makes much more sense if you can change your glyphs for just 2g or 3g each.

Ever stop to consider that some people personally identify with the ability to swap roles easily and be good at them all? There are some truly amazing paladins out there who are really good.. Not just at healing, not just at tanking, but all 3 aspects of their class. You want to punish other people because of your view of personalization?

If they cost similar to consumables, then they might be used just like a consumable. If they are expensive however, they must not be. I think that stands to reason.

Now Blizzard can only give guidelines of cost via scarcity of the required materials. The rest is in the player's hand who really control the economy of a specific realm in the end. If reglyphing is looked upon as required when switching your talent trees and the cost of that is high, then we don't have much improvement of todays situation. It would be worse actually, since today at least the respec price has an upper bound and you only need to walk to an NPC, you don't need another player with inscription or stockpiling your glyphs in advance.

And it would punish players who wish to both engage in high-end raiding and arena more, as well as the traditionally already disadvantaged support classes like tanks and healers.

Hopefully Blizzard has thought this through and will provide a good solution.

Maybe in Blizzard's mind they can finally justify double talent specs because they know players will still have to pay to replace glyphs if they want to completely optimize their character towards a role. Or maybe Blizzard was thinking "50g respec cost + glyph replacement is going to be too expensive to do weekly, so lets make the talent respec part free to make it a little bit more reasonable"

Or, maybe Blizzard wants glyphs to be too expensive to replace on a weekly basis, so that people who want to PVP and PVE have to roll new alts, encouraging new account creation for triple xp.

Current Flasks take 3 of one type of herb, 7 of another, and 1 rare herb. On most servers this results in a large inflation of the specific herbs that are needed for the most desired flasks, in addition to extreme prices on the rare herb (on my server, Black Lotus is up to almost 40g each, and Fel Lotus floats between 40g and 60g each). Each flask is good for 2 hours, so 4 hours of raiding runs about 130g worth of flasks. There is obviously no flask usage in arenas, though you could use them in BGs.

Inscription appears to be based on a system of Inks, derived from herbs. 5 herbs of an identical type gives you 2.5 pomaces of a certain type. Herbs are categorized by level, and all herbs of that same level give a certain pomace type. This in itself is significant, as it means there will never be an over inflation of a specific herb. Whatever the cheapest one is will get purchased for milling. So you will see a baseline value of all herbs (no more 8g Felweed stacks), but nothing out of hand (60g Nightmare Vine stacks). Now, we don't know how many pomaces will be needed for advanced inks, nor how many inks will be needed for advanced Glyphs. However, if an Ink takes 3 pomaces and a Glyph takes 3 inks, that's still only one stack of 20 herbs to make the glyph. Yes, it's twice as many herbs as a flask, but it also doesn't have the rare herb requirement, and the herb used will always be the cheapest one available. As a result, the price of that shouldn't be much higher than flasks. Also, you'd never need more than one of a type of glyph per raid, and could even keep glyphs for multiple days of raiding.

As we surmised early on in this thread, the idea of semi-expensive glyphs as consumables is the most logical implementation. Yes, hybrids will get hosed the most, especially if you are trying to min/max, but it shouldn't be super easy for one class to fill two roles anyway. With three major glyph slots, you may find that you can cover the important ones and be perfectly functional 99% of the time, even as a hybrid. They obviously weren't going to make the glyphs just another trinket slot by making them removable. As long as we don't have situations where the best glyphs are rare drops that you'd never want to remove (and if so, those glyphs should be like the T5 class trinkets, covering all specs), it shouldn't result in a substantial problem. There's always going to be a certain amount of consumable usage in playing, and semi-permanent ones like glyphs will probably end up being a lower cost to the vast majority of the raiding base than flasks are now.

If Glyphs are powerful and expensive, having swappable talent specs becomes a purely soloing/farming advantage. This may well be in line with Blizzard's intention.

If that does prove to be the case, it may become tempting to take advantage of recruit-a-friend and have multiple alts of your favourite class. Raid tanking druid, Raid healing druid, PvP healing druid. The rumored(?) faction-grind-sharing-within-account changes may well facilitate that.

There are addons for that. Talented is one that respecs you to your preset templates. There's similar addons for action bar configurations.

Coming from a one-role class (even in PvP), this rubs me wrong. Not only will we have to gather triple the gear you do, as well as enchant triple the gear, but we'll also have to run glyphs and still pay for respecs while the DPS classes (which are basically the only ones who'll have one Raid build, one PvP build) can switch back n forth effortlessly ?

That seems beyond stupid.

That destroys Blizzard's stated ideal of players who play in all aspects of play having an advantage.

The fact is glyphs are essentially extra talent points and almost nobody does high level arena and high level PVE in the same spec. Unless Blizzard wants to go back on their philosophy of PVE<->PVP advantages they need to make glyphs easy enough to switch between the 2.

I'd prefer we didn't have to pay at all to switch them and had assumed they would with the respec changes, but I'm sure they'll at least know that they need to make them cheap.

I agree. Swapping Glyphs could cost money but you should be able to change them.

I remember how painful it was to get Blinding Powder in the beginning of TBC. We had a long arena night and stopped frequently to give me time to pickpocket mobs. On higher levels of arena play specialized glyphs will most likely be required. Many of them look really situational. And I think the min/maxing with different glyphs with different specs will be something requiring skill.

Regarding flasks: Why not change them to endure while staying inside an instance. A nice upgrade for Alchemist could be self-refilling potions or flasks, which are BoP.

Please don't be idiotic (and, for reference, invoking the "slippery slope" argument typically results in something idiotic in a sizable majority of cases).

If they're making talents easily swappable, and creating the "glyph" profession that's essentially just adding a slightly different type of talent, then it directly undermines the point of making talents easily swappable. It's pretty straightforward, and has nothing to do with what you're suggesting.

Coming from a one role class, that has no option to heal or tank, and that has to respec for pvp just like everyone else, I don't think reglyphing, especially in the way I described, is that bad a price to pay (my other two characters are a paladin and a shaman incidentally). As it stands, you will get a free spec's worth of gear in wrath (moonkin/tree gear being basically the same), and all the benefits of raiding as if you had your alt in your back pocket for loot. After all, how many of us have wished a drop that got disenchanted could go to an alt? Every resto shaman I know has at least one full raid level offspec set. If you are respeccing between bosses, you're probably switching flasks/elixirs as well. You at least have that option. As a warlock, if dps isn't needed, or if there's just another dps of any number of other classes including all the hybrids that can do the job as well, I'm sitting at home, rerolling a healer. Each side has advantages and disadvantages, they all exist today, the glyph system does not make that worse.

I'll repeat again more concisely, they will never make glyphs removable and reusable, as it trivializes the entire system to the point that it is simply adding 6 new trinket slots to the game. The original system of "enchantments for spells" made them sound more permanent, but the way they have implemented them is not that way. The best we can hope for is them as a reasonable cost consumable.

Hybrid or not, the ones hit hardest by this will be people who both hardcore arena and raid, and have to respec frequently as a result. Don't be too surprised if the solution to that is just to make Glyphs not work in the arena at all.

Quoting from the current Blizzcast: "But not only do they have a lot more punch to them, one inscription is probably worth like one to two talent points, and they’re not all just increasing power, sometime they’re a big power increase but they’ll change something else about the spell."

Initially, Inscription's glyphs were marketed as some cosmetically nice character customization with non-severe impact. Now however they've become a form of buyable ImproveOldSpell talents. Even Blizzard admits as much.

Now tell me again, why exactly should we be able to switch easily one form of talent points but not the other ? It makes no sense.

I think you are making some big assumptions.

Right now, you have 61 talent points to customize your character.

Taking paladins as an example, the talent spec you chose basically determines your role.

Trying to heal as ret or protection is a huge loss of efficiency and capability, probably 35% or more loss of healing.
Try to tank as ret or holy healing spec is similar, probably a loss of 35% or more survivability.
Trying to dps as a healing holy build or protection build, probably a loss of 35% or more dps.

How much of a difference do you really think glyphs will make? 3%? 5%? Maybe some really amazing glyphs will be revealed in a couple months that make me change my mind, but what I have seen so far is far less powerful than what you get from your talent spec.

I think the reason for the multiple talent specs is to make offspec stuff viable. You might have a minor disadvantage because you didn't replace all your glyphs, but you will certainly be able to heal as holy spec with tanking glyphs, and you will certainly be able to dps as ret with healing glyphs. You will be ever-so-slightly disadvantaged compared to a perfectly optimized character with the best glyphs, but isn't that how it should be? If there is zero penalty to completely change spec at will, there is no reason to ever stick with any spec. This would actually hurt hybrids in raids, because raid leaders will demand that you fill 2 roles, and collect gear for both roles, and your gear for either role is going to be inferior to single role players in any sort of DKP based loot system.

Glyph swapping could easily be a more significant problem than the current talent swapping mechanic if glyphs cause fundamental gameplay changes. As a member of a small guild, I switch regularly between PvE healing and DPS. Arena play translates to a third frequently-used spec for me. Even if they allow me to actively switch between two glyph templates, I'd still be unable to address my varied needs.

I will certainly not complain about having the option to fulfill multiple roles, but at least the tax of talent respecs can be accounted for through a variety of options. If glyphs fundamentally change gameplay, then I would need to rotate between glyph selections depending on my role at the time. As a financial burden, that's undesirable. As a logistical burden that's a nightmare. If I need to track down an inscriber every time I switch content/roles, I will be very very frustrated. In that case I would almost prefer that the glyph mechanic is like an elixir mechanic with a limited duration, so that they could be stockpiled and be readily accessible for any occasion and everyone would be in the same boat.

I think the Blizzcast answered it. Its only worth one or two talent points. As such its just a tweak and not a rewrite of the characters ability. It really will come down to how much it costs. If its on the order of elixirs or even flasks then I don't have a problem here, now if its on the order of some of the higher end enchants then yes I can support your view. Using flasks as an example, I have no qualms about the 50 to 60 gold I will shell out in one way or another for the measly two hours of benefit and if I switch roles its more than likely I will need to switch which flask stack I use; especially coming from a hybrid class and in some cases a dps class.