I can't imagine blizzard adding 6 game changing glyphs for each class/spec for both pve & pvp; There will be a few awesome, some average, a few bad and others that are purely cosmetic (e.g. polar bear). Given these hypothetical ones:

PvE Glyphs: +5% dps, +3% dps, +2% dps, +1% dps.....
PvP Glyphs: game changing ability, very nice ability, nice ability, average ability...

I think I'll be fine with the top 3 PvP and top 3 PvE glyphs or some such combo.

Here's the problem as I see it.

Flip back a few pages, to the old 'Potion Sickness' discussion. (Bear with me, I'm not rehashing old news here.) What were the two combined arguments against the current system of Potion use?

A) It's a boring mechanic.
B) The time and expense of farming materials.

Now we're looking at another profession that will require herbs, and one has to factor in the min/max crowd. If a raid is already willing to have their raiders portal out, spend the gold to respec, and come back between different bosses, it logically follows that those same raiders, if allowed, will swap between glyphs depending on the role they play in the next fight. Once again, after the first time of seeing a fight and knowing what's needed, it won't be a tactical decision...it'll simply be a 'Oh, I'm going Holy for this fight...time to slap in Glyph Set A....there's another 240g down the drain.' (Price is completely random and should not be any notion of what I expect price per Glyph to be in WotLK...just used for illustrative purposes.)

This is not taking into account the rumored swap-between-specs that still has yet to be implemented. With that in play, even more people will be willing and able to switch roles in a fight (if it's at all possible to do while in a raid, i.e., any cooldown shorter than 4 hours). And, since Blizz has to plan around the maximum raiders can do to optimalize themselves (because they WILL do it if possible), Blizz will most likely tune different fights to different different raid comps. Once spec-swap is in place, what's the only other variable to optimization? Glyphs. Each and every swap of a spec will see those who have the capability to replace their glyphs do so. Content gets tuned around that fact, and at that point Glyph swapping becomes mandatory...at least, for the same level of raiding where chain potting is currently mandatory.

Now, the impact on the raider in question is much less, I'll grant that. If we go with an average of 5 Spec/Glyph swaps per night, and 6 glyphs all get changed out (which is possible, since the Glyphs haven't been finished up yet), that's 30 Glyphs per night of raiding. Even at just a stack of herbs per Glyph as was discussed earlier, that's a lot of herbs per night of raiding. Throw in soloing, throw in Arena/BG's for those who like to maximize their fun, and that's a fair amount to gather up for each night.

Of course, if the cooldown for either spec or glyph swapping is large (12/24 hrs, say), then this won't be an issue nearly so much. This does affect those who do like to do both PvE AND PvP, though. Imagine two druids going head to head, both identically specced Feral, both wearing identical gear...but one has all Feral Glyphs, the other has Resto Glyphs in place, because he's healing Naxx in 2 hours. Who is more likely to win here?

Oh, and what about the difficulty of finding someone to craft your Glyph? Looking at how specialized each one is, it may be very hard to find someone that can craft your specific Glyphs...especially in the early stages of the expac when everyone and their brother is pushing for first kills, or for the low pop servers regardless of stage of expac.

I'd much rather see Glyphs be very expensive to craft, but NOT be destroyed if you're pulling out of your spellbook (perhaps the page has some sort of magic velcro that allows it to be easily melded back in or something, for the lore peoples out there.)

Also, while this will hit hybrids the hardest, for the pure DPS classes, it will still hurt. I know there are times on my lock that I really wish I was Affliction for some fights, and Destro for the others - while in the same raid, depending on the requirements of the fight. Can the pure DPS'rs get by with only a single set? Sure...but I would expect that spec-swapping for those classes will still be prevalent as one spec of a class is determined to be optimal for specific fights...in which case they're feeling the same pinch as the hybrids.

TL/DR version - this has the capacity to be as much of or WORSE of a headache for people as the current iteration of potion usage, and is going to be dependent on cooldowns of spec-swaps, cooldown of Glyph-swap, and expense of the Glyphs to craft.

Honestly at this stage we don't have any real indication that they are going to manage to get the swappable specs into the game by launch. Given all the other things they have on their agenda I would expect them to have the basic mechanics being put into the game at this stage and I have seen no official commentary about this for months. Until we do it's safer to work under the assumption that respecs will still exist for everyone. This will even out the cost of full PvE spec/glyphs --> PvP spec glyphs amongst the classes and roles.

As for the reglyphing cost I can't say that I've seen much for priests that suggests that you would have PvP and PvE spec glyphs, glyph choice is black and white for any given role healing/dps etc. Your mileage may vary based on class but as it currently looks glyphs are a one time character tax that will never change simply because there aren't enough good ones. This is because each glyph is tied to a spell as opposed to how the idea was originally sold as "Glyph of power" that increases throughput on a spell of your choice.

I think that's more because the Priest glyphs seen so far suck IMO. I also have a druid and they have some great glyphs, and I could easily see myself making some hard choices for pvp/pve assuming all the good ones are Major Glyphs (which makes sense).

If they add more, good, glyphs for Priests (which I think is a safe assumption) then we, too, make hard choices and have to 'glyph respec'. I'm firmly of the opinion that Glyphs should be something you can swap out without destroying them, and Inscriptions profits be damned.

Then it would be no different to ask for swappable gems and we keep going down hill from there to suddenly we need swappable enchants - it just doesn't end - the slippery slope someone posted earlier. No, I think the way it should be is that if you want to mini-max that you pay for it. On the edge has always had an associated cost with it. I think we should feel lucky if they actually implement swappable talent builds. As it stands now the cost of changing out your talents is more time related than real cost. Compare it to your true costs for "raid night". Consumables and even repairs on a bad night can exceed respec cost already. The cost incurred to have multiple sets of armor for specific encounters is a given. So, it comes back to this, the net effect is that as with gear, enchants, and consumables, you will need to make a serious decision as to whether or not the +X shift if necessary. If it comes to us with no cost then we fall into a spec/glyph/etc of the day.

I would rather Blizzard tune each instance as a whole, the idea of having to bounce out for each boss seems an undue burden on both the developers trying to balance it and the players experiencing it. At most we have three aspects of play to account for and each has some crossover, we have regular play (leveling/farming), raiding, and PvP (Arena/BG).

Let's say you only need to respec your greater and lesser glyphs, since the minor ones are mostly cosmetic. Someone who arenas every week and does pve would need 2 full respecs per week. Someone who both does arena and helps their guild by respeccing to holy from retribution when they're low on healing might do 4 full respecs per week. I know a lot of people who are already doing this now, and it isn't unheard of to respec on an encounter to encounter basis either.

Someone who only does one aspect of the game will buy their inscriptions once, and never bother with it again. The second person in the above example would go through 16 glyphs per week, while the first one only 8 glyphs per week. In the first year after the expansion comes out, they would need to pay for 832 and 416 glyphs respectively. The guy who only raids or arenas pays for 4 lesser/greater glyphs. The costs of inscription aren't in any way comparable to enchants or gems. If I need to gem or enchant for 2 specs, I'll end up paying about twice as much as the other guy. While I'd agree that it's reasonable to pay more, do you think it's reasonable to have to pay 200 times more? Even the person who only respecs once a week for arena pays over 100 times more, and it'll likely take more than a year for the next expansion to come out.

No. A priest is never going to put healing gems and enchants on their shadow gear. They are not going to put PvP survivability gems on their PvE healing gear. EDIT: whoops, got beaten to it.

This isn't true at all. I have 3 sets of gear. Each gear set has its own enchants and gems. I can use them at any given time( not swapping in combat being my only restriction ).

A more comparable example would be to say that for any average iLevel of gear that you have, you get X number of sockets. Those sockets are independent of gear. So if you want to switch to your healing gear, you need to re-gem those sockets. Back to tanking gear? Time to regem. You can see how this would easily be seen as a ridiculous system.

Much as I dislike them in general...
<Stupid dumb-ass personal suggestion>
Restrict the six Glyphs to 2 per talent tree. Eg, two feral glyphs, two balance, two resto (and the free Inscription glyph is a wild card). Then your glyph setup is relatively constant between respecs of different roles, and sort of defines a meta-identity by defining the roles that you prefer to respec between. The major problem would be if, say, PvE holy and PvP holy required different holy glyphs. The major frequent or semi-frequent glyph changes would be for Glyphologists (inscribers? inscriptors? insciptionists?) themselves respecing the one wild-card slot.
</suggestion>

The possible options for Inscriptions-

1. Inscriptions are reusable. This can either be an item that is kept in the bank or a spell that is learned (like mounts or non-combat pets). There would probably be a cooldown and a lengthy cast time on the item or spell to prevent frequent swapping - but probably not longer than an hour. This allows for expensive and rare inscriptions to be sold and crafted, but puts a limit on the total number that would ever be consumed.

2. Inscriptions are very cheap for each use. The total cost for reinscribing all the spells should be targeted for less than 40 gold (in TBC terms), and would be comparable to the current talent respec costs. A very high-turnover and high-consumable market, would probably be most comparable to the current flask market. People would stock up on their inscriptions for a week or so and keep them stored in the bank. A very high turnover for popular inscriptions with people stocking up for rare ones they use frequently.

3. Inscriptions are expensive and only usable once. Would be awful and against the majority of changes that Blizzard is including for WotLK, where it's easier to change roles due to the free talent respec and the universal spellpower.

---

Blizzard should be aware of the options they have available and will probably make a choice between 1 and 2. But inscriptions and glyphs are constantly in flux right now - the last batch of glyphs removed all mention of Minor/Lesser/Greater glyphs and the glyph interface was changed to have only two levels of glyphs.

This is the relevant difference. Gems and enchants don't need to be hot-swappable because you have different gear for pvp, pve, tanking, healing, dps, etc. However, you have only a single set of spells to use in all your activities, and glyphs apply to them. Now, if you were to propose a number of identical spellbooks so that you could have your pvp spellbook, your healing spellbook, etc., then I'd be completely fine with glyphs being nigh-permanent. Short of that, they need to be swappable if blizzard expects people to participate in more than one area of the game, as they occasionally remind us that they do.

I'd be completely fine with that Tuftears. Don't think it's too likely a solution, but most of the people arguing here probably wouldn't see it as going against what the Talents change is trying to achieve.

Everyone needs different abilities in PvP. How many warriors use Piercing Howl on Boss fights ? How often do you think +20% damage on stunned/incapacitated targets (Druid/Paladin) is going to come into effect on Boss fights ? Yet, I'll expect that to be along the same power of Rip lasting 3seconds longer (which would be awesome in PvE and I couldn't care about in PvP), thus blocking out the other one.

Even if they do only affect one spell/ability, they don't necessarily affect the same one you'll use in multiple parts of the game, much like you don't use your PvP gear when trying to kill Illidan. I am not even sure if they'll add multiple glyphs for one ability. Let's say that they'll give Fireballs one where you'll take 50% less interrupts on casting Fireballs and one which adds +50 damage to Fireballs. Now what do you do ?

I'm not inclined to punish anyone for anything, that's a fairly extreme take on what I actually said. The people you describe will be able to swap roles easily and be good at them all without any glyphs whatsoever. Folks are talking about situations where they would 'have' to re-glyph in order to be 'viable'. But they don't mean viable, they mean optimal.

Look, you can level enchanting every time you get a new ring and then level some other profession back up, if you really want to maximize your stats. But that obviously isn't intended functionality, it's very expensive to do and content won't be balanced around the fact that some people will do it anyway. I have no idea whether the designers intend glyphs to be a semi-permanent feature of your toon, or some hot-swappable affair. I'm simply guessing that they'd like glyph selection to represent a meaningful choice, like picking professions should be, or indeed like racial abilities are, with both upsides and downsides. 'Flavor', if you will.

I guess I just don't see re-speccing and re-glyphing as necessarily going hand-in-hand.

Of course hybrids should be able to fill different roles effectively. That's the point of being a hybrid. I am one. But we're talking about tweaks rather than core functionality, and I just think it's more interesting if that tweaking involves making some small choices rather than simply switching between generic ret pvp glyph set 'A' and generic holy pve glyph set 'B'. Seems like that isn't a popular view, however, so I'll just leave it at that.

Here's the difference between frequent (current) respeccing and the (potential) re-glyphing.

Currently, respeccing only requires gold and a bit of time to switch over. Well, that and appropriate gear. Gear is accessible through simply playing the game; it might not be your A#1 gear, but it's still pretty good for what you're expecting to do. You can purchase enchants and gems that get stored in the gear, and lo! You now have swappable gems, enchants, and it's all tied into your intended spec.

Potentially, if glyphs are 1-shot deals, then respeccing not only costs some small amount of gold, a gear switch including the appropriate gems/enchants, and a bit of time, but ALSO something that requires an actual resource. Already, the current issue of herbs (for potions) is leading Blizzard to try and find other ways of reducing the amount of herbs consumed each night of raiding. Now, if Glyphs are able to be swapped over between fights for optimal personal setup, then that raider will be expected to do so. Remember, Blizz has to expect that raiders will do what is most optimal, regardless of cost, simply because people will do it. What follows is how that then affects those on the lower levels of raiding. Do they then become forced to re-Glyph just to be viable in a given raid? And here I don't mean optimal, I mean simply viable, as in if the person doesn't do it, then the raid is gimped. (More so x10 or x25 people.)

Unless they severely (as in, say, quintuple) up the amount of herbs available on any given realm, then there comes a situation where getting ready for a raid isn't simply 'go out and farm for a couple of hours'...it's 'go out and farm for whole days' just to be able to run one week's worth of raids.

And remember, if you made Glyphs easily replaced but one-time-only's, then again, you have to find someone who can craft your specific sets of Glyphs. And how easy will that be? We're not talking about two types of pots or flasks here, we're talking about potentially 18 different Glyph recipes. This is potentially a very broken way to do things.

Yer on the EJ forums. Optimal is to be expected in discussions here.

Currently in WotLK, adding a socket to an item (Wrists or Gloves) adds a Blacksmithing requirement to the item. There's a good chance that all the profession perks will require that profession to continue to use.

I'd prefer making Glyphs really really cheap, say 5 herbs per glyph. Buy every glyph in a stack of 20 (or one glyph with multiple charges), swap them in and out like you want to. Some Glyphs are just too situational and won't really be used (except by min/maxers, as always ) if not easily exchangable even if you don't respec.

Personally I think that the glyph of XYZ spell approach is going to come back to bite blizzard in the ass. Just from the number of recipies that an inscriptor needs to learn.

Currently we have 15+ glyphs per class, 150 recipies minimum. multiple levels of scrolls accross 5 stats, assume 5 levels of craftable scrolls, another 25 recipies, various profession related recipies inks, parchments, enchant scrolls another 25+ recipies. And this doesn't even include the inevitable useful while leveling things they need to add for new characters leveling inscription. Especially if they want class related boosts along the way. As things are currently going it looks like a maxed out inscriptor could easily have more than 300 recipies to learn which is a LOT of recipies compared to say tailoring.

I wouldnt say that that is such an issue. A quick glance at wowhead gives 228 enchanting recipies on live. It is probabily similar (possibly more) for other professions. Sure, most of those are "levelling" professions, but whats to say that, of those 15 glyphs per class, a reasonable portion of them aren't also levelling professions. Certainly, we saw a "polymorph penguine" glyph with Blizzcast, which had required level 10: there is no reason that an inscriptor won't be able to make this with say 100 inscription skill. Sure, the major glyphs we would expect to not really be available till 400+, but all the little ones can be spread out through the levelling process, as well as the levels of scrolls and etc. 300 recipies doesn't seem so odd by 450 skill at current rates.

You are under the assumption that blizzard wants you to reset your glyphs every time you change roles.

Also, there are two ways to fix your "problem". You can make glyph respeccing cheap and easy, so everything will require absolute optimal glyphs, or you can make glyph respeccing so costly that it's prohibitive to respec them more than once a month or so, on the order of 5000g +.

You might not like the second solution, but it is a solution that has been proven to work in the past: enchanting rings, for example. Even the most hardcore raiders are not leveling up enchanting to enchant rings and then dropping it to go back to the optimal profession for their role every time they get a new ring- blizzard has made the cost to do so prohibitive enough that that simply isn't possible. If the cost to change glyphs was similarly prohibitive, then there would be no problem with hybrids spending an extra 200g a day to spec back and forth, instead they would be forced to pick a spec to optimize and just live with the fact that their secondary spec will not be as fully optimized as a dedicated player who only plays that spec.

You would be wrong there.

Examples? I am sure that there are one or two particular weirdos who retrain a profession once or twice, but can you show me even one single raiding guild that has an entire raid with enchanted rings and none of them have enchanting?

edit:
Also, please note my specific wording: "Even the most hardcore raiders are not leveling up enchanting to enchant rings and then dropping it to go back to the optimal profession for their role every time they get a new ring"

A person who does this once near the end of a raiding career and enchants all his rings at once before dropping enchanting is a little crazy but I could see it happening. What I don't see happening is a raider doing this every single time he/she upgrades a ring, starting with the 5 man blue rings, working up to Karazhan gear and through the whole PVE ladder, such that by the end he has retrained enchanting some ten or more times.