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.

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.

Even if the Glyphs would cost 1c it doesn't change the fact that we either need 2 Glyph configurations (1 tied to each of your "saved" respecs) or they should be swappable without being destroyed. Not only would you have to carry loads of glyphs with you if you changed them from boss to boss but you'd also have to restock them after every raid. I mean, respecs cost me 50g and that isn't even the most annoying factor. I really really hate having to redo my talents and specially action bars after every respec. Now add redoing Glyphs to that? No thanks.

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.

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.