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WoW Archivist: A Glyphmas story
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Professions in Warlords of Draenor feel completely different than at any other era in WoW. Creating powerful items is no longer a matter of farming, luck, or gold. Instead, we have to produce their key ingredients via garrison work orders. Leveling crafting professions is no longer about creating a bunch of useless items that we instantly vendor or disenchant, and reaching max level is now a slow burn instead of a quick grind. This is the first expansion where I haven't hit max level on all my professions within the first week or two. The profession that has changed the most is the most recent: Wrath of the Lich King's inscription, added in 2008. Even the interface changed: the glyph window was originally part of the spellbook UI, not the talent pane. Because of those changes, for a few very special weeks, inscription transformed the financial futures of countless WoW players. I was one of them. We called it Glyphmas, and it was magical.
Numerous Inscription hotfixes now live
The latest round of Warlords of Draenor hotfixes is directed at solving a number of issues with Inscription. The following glyphs were unable to be crafted and have now been added to vendors: Glyph of the Solstice (Druid) Glyph of Purification (Priest) Glyph of Purify Spirit (Shaman) Glyph of Flying Fists (Monk) Glyph of Cleanse (Paladin) The glyphs are currently unique and soulbound -- you cannot buy them en masse to list on the auction house. Glyph of Frostbrand Weapon does not currently have an associated item and could not be added to vendors. For now, shaman will learn the spell automatically instead. If you're a shaman and have not automatically learned the spell, relogging should fix it. Glyph of Blackout Kick, a glyph monks have been digging to find, is not currently in the game at all -- monks will need to wait until the next minor patch to acquire it. In addition, ink traders -- which were briefly nonfunctional -- should now be fixed.
WoW Archivist: Patch 3.0 -- Echoes of Doom
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Patch 6.0 is finally upon us. Like all pre-expansion patches, it has been both invigorating and chaotic. Almost exactly six years ago, a similar patch went live to begin a new era in WoW. Blizzard called Wrath of the Lich King's pre-expansion patch "Echoes of Doom." On October 14, 2008, this third version of the game gave us the brand-new achievement system, inscription and glyphs, 51-point talent trees, the zombie plague event, and TO THE GROUND, BABY. Read on to see what WoW was like for those turbulent few weeks before Wrath of the Lich King's launch. Dalaran, where art thou? Through all of classic and The Burning Crusade, Dalaran sat in northern Hillsbrad, but players couldn't see it. An opaque purple dome walled off the Kirin Tor from the world at large. At the time, the enormous structure was one of the most striking landmarks in Azeroth. Although a few quests hinted at what lay beneath it, players new to the WoW universe had no idea what was there. And then it was gone. All that remained was a city-sized crater. I remember making a pilgrimage to this site during the 3.0 prepatch just to see it for myself. We couldn't go to Northrend yet to see the city first-hand. We had to wait for the launch of Wrath to do that. But looking at that crater certainly fired the imagination. I couldn't wait to find out what had been lurking under that dome for the first four years of the game. I have to say, the city lived up to my high expectations.
Warlords of Draenor: New glyphs
The Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes revealed that some glyphs will be learned automatically, the recipe for those glyphs to be removed from the game. Many scribes were thrown into a panic, questioning to value of their profession -- not a surprise, really. So early in an expansion's reveal, it's normal to be concerned. However, the dataminers have been hard at work digging into the Warlords client and have found an array of brand new glyphs to be learned. Some of the more interesting glyphs: Glyph of Cleave to eliminate the warrior's baseline Cleave ability Glyph of Energy Flows turns an Evading rogue into a deadly blender Glyph of Play Dead gives all hunter pets possum training Glyph of the Floating Butterfly changes the dynamic of a monk's Fists of Fury altogether Follow along below for all of the new glyphs.
Warlords of Draenor: Automatically learned glyphs
The first release of the Warlords of Draenor patch notes revealed that certain glyphs will be learned automatically during the leveling process. These glyphs, as stated by developer Celeston, are chosen largely based on their usefulness during the leveling process. They will also serve as a reminder that you even have the ability to use another glyph -- often, leveling characters aren't aware when they're able to use a glyph, or what a glyph is at all. Currently, as mentioned in the patch notes, glyphs are usually acquired on the auction house. Since every player needs these glyphs, the glyph market is a cutthroat place where a player leveling fresh can run themselves broke even if they only buy the ones they need. This change isn't one that's friendly to scribes making a killing on the auction house, but it certainly is friendly to new characters. Keep in mind that not all glyphs will be learned automatically -- only the leveling essentials. You can refer to the patch notes to see which ones will be learned and when or follow along below.
The puzzling problem of professions in endgame
I have a confession to make: There are five jewelcrafting mounts and one engineering mount that were introduced with Mists of Pandaria, and I have yet to make any of them. I have a tailor at max level tailoring, but she hasn't made a single Royal Satchel. I have a leatherworker who hasn't even touched any of the patterns introduced this expansion. In fact, the only things I seem to be making with any kind of regularity are cut gems, and glyphs for my alts. Why? Because the return on investment for any one of the mounts introduced is too low. I don't have the gold to randomly fling at things like mounts that will be used once or twice and then forgotten about. As for the tailor, the pattern for the Royal Satchel is locked behind the absolute, hands down, worst reputation grind in the new expansion -- and there's no way to get around that. I either have to log on every single day to grind out dailies that give an absolute pittance of reputation, or try to solo Warbringers, which is next-to-impossible for several classes. In short, none of these things are worth my time or gold. As a result, the majority of my professions have been completely unused for the majority of the expansion. And I have a sneaking suspicion I am far from the only one, here.
WTB generic glyphs
Glyphs have undergone some interesting evolutions since they were introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. From major and minor, to major, minor, and prime, and now back to minor and major, glyphs are, in my opinion, a good way to add both some functionality to your toons as well as give them some flavor. Minor glyphs can do a lot to make your character feel like its yours. And while minor glyphs are rarely necessary for performance, they can sometimes help in certain situations, at least a little bit. One thing that's always been true of glyphs, no matter what their incarnation, is the fact that they're class-specific. I think it would be interesting to see that change, if not for major glyphs, then at least for minor ones. There are certain aspects of the game I would love to have the option to modify, just a little, for quality-of-life reasons. There are also abilities that were once available that no longer are, which could be reintroduced via classless glyphs, useable by all. Here are some generic glyphs I would love to see.
A beginner's guide to WoW's crafting professions
We've talked about WoW's gathering professions, but now that you know gathering, it's time to talk about what to do with the materials you've gathered: craft. World of Warcraft has eight different crafting professions -- alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, leatherworking, tailoring, jewelcrafting, and inscription -- which means that a wannabe crafter has plenty of options. So follow along as we walk you through your WoW crafting choices. Alchemy What does it do? Allows you to create a variety of potions, elixirs, and flasks, as well as transmuting certain items into other items. Most of an alchemist's skills involve providing buffs for anyone using their brews: potions provide an immediate benefit (like restoring your health), elixirs provide buffs for an extended period of time, and flasks provide buffs that last through death. Do I need any gear? Crafting potions will require herbs and different types of vials. Do I get any extras? Alchemists have access to the passive ability Mixology, which doubles the duration and increases the effect of flasks and elixirs they use. High level alchemists have access to a number of useful trinkets and, if they also study Archaeology, can learn to transform into a Sandstone Drake. Why take alchemy? It's definitely useful to be able to make your own potions: you'll find you're never lacking for them. And paired with herbalism to gather herbs, you'll be entirely self-sufficient. However, you might also take alchemy purely out of interest in high-level trinkets or the Sandstone Drake.
Gold Capped: Inscription gold-making guide
"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Have a scribe? Need gold? Look no farther. Inscription is one of the best gold-making professions in the game. You can make glyphs, Darkmoon cards, and all kinds of other odds and ends. Each of these markets has a characteristic time investment requirement and potential profit. Each realm is going to be different, but in general: Darkmoon cards: Scalable time investment, massive profits Glyphs: Massive time investment, low profit Odds and ends: Minimal time investment, medium profit Darkmoon cards start off simply enough: if you do your daily research, you can make a card a day. Different cards have different values, but on average, you'll make back way more than the value of the inks. You can trade cards, and the more cards you make, the better efficiency you'll have making decks. Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it'll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool's Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool's Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that's 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.
Gold Capped: How to get a MoP Darkmoon trinket
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The Darkmoon Faire comes to town once a month, and if you want to get one of those amazingly good darkmoon trinkets, you're going to need a fairly large pile of gold. There are a couple of ways of going about it with varying levels of cost and effort. Interestingly, our own Fox Van Allen became a "Darkmoon Mogul" last expansion when he made his first million gold. At the time, you could simply make as many cards as you were willing to mill the ink for, and people willing to make those cards could profit in spades. There's still money to be made in this, however don't walk in with your eyes closed -- the system has changed, and there's more risk now than ever. Getting one the hard way Getting a deck for yourself can be expensive and simple, or cheap and complicated. You basically have two choices: hustle for cards to make your own deck, or buy a finished deck or trinket.
Lichborne: Level 90 primary professions for death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. This week, we'll cover the personal benefits of the primary professions for death knights at level 90. Many of the perks and benefits are the same as they've been at levels 85 and 90, but there's stronger versions, of course, and a couple other changes that are worth covering. This guide will focus primarily on the self-buffs and bind on pickup rewards, though many professions will, of course, have its own BoE things that all death knights will want to make use of, so consider that when you pick your professions.
Ink traders finally accepting new inks
If you're looking to get a Darkmoon Deck made before the end of the faire, you might be interested to know that despite a false start earlier this week, the Ink Traders and inscription vendors now accept trades of 10 Ink of Dreams for a Starlight Ink. Ink Vendors finally updated. Very sorry for the delay. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 12, 2012 The Darkmoon Faire is only around once a month, and the one on now is ending this Sunday, October 14th. Unless the Faire is going on, you can't trade, for example, a Crane Deck in for a Relic of Chi Ji. This expansion, unlike in others, Darkmoon Cards require an item that can only be made once a day by scribes, the Scroll of Wisdom. Scribes who have been hanging onto their Scrolls should probably look into making them into cards now that the inks can be gotten cheaply, since by the time the next Faire rolls around, there will be 3 more weeks worth of daily cooldowns waiting to be turned into cards. These trinkets range from pretty good to among the best in slot for most classes, so almost everyone can use one, and many people really want one. Additionally, since the Starlight Inks have been so expensive lately, the epic quality shoulder enchants have been quite expensive. Now that you can trade the much less expensive Ink of Dreams in for them, you should see the prices lower on the Greater Ox Horn Inscription, the Greater Crane Wing Inscription, the Greater Tiger Claw Inscription, and the Greater Tiger Fang Inscription. Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Blackfallow ink trade-ins end after Tuesday's maintenance
Many people didn't know that Blackfallow Ink could still be traded after patch 5.0. Well they can ... until tomorrow after maintenance. A hot fix is planned so that ink traders will accept Ink of Dreams and sell Starlight Ink. Nethaera Beginning after the maintenance on Tuesday, October 9, ink traders will be converting from accepting Blackfallow Ink to accepting Ink of Dreams and Starlight Ink will become available for purchase. If you're still holding on to your Blackfallow Ink, your time to trade it in is running short. source To reiterate, this change will not be in a patch: Nethaera Posted by Baillan Is there an answer for my question on whether it is a hotfix or a client patch? This is planned to go in as a hotfix. source So go forth and trade before maintenance begins!
The Queue: Is Fox leaving forever?
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Fox Van Allen (@foxvanallen) will be your host today. Hey everyone! Gather the kids, because it's one of those "special event" things. Fox Van Allen is doing The Queue today and that's pretty darn exciting. OK, sure, it's not "hit the jackpot" exciting. It's a more gentle kind of exciting. Like the kind where if for a day Pat Sajak hosted Jeopardy! and Alex Trebek hosted Wheel of Fortune. Anyway. Because I'm an egotistical jerk who has only been made even more insufferable by the blazing Los Angeles sun, I'm going to start this Queue off by answering a question about myself. @thebmatt asked: I just saw on @WoWInsider you [Fox] won't be writing the Shadow priest column anymore. True?
Patch 5.0.4, the new talent system, and you
In a little more than a week, we're all going to be experiencing patch 5.0.4, also known as the pre-expansion patch or Holy heck everything is different now aaaah panic aaah riot in the streets aaah. We here at WoW Insider are dedicated to preventing rioting in the streets when it is related to World of Warcraft, and we can do so without actually leaving our homes -- hence this post, which explains the new talent system to you. Remember, unless you wake up and your pets are wearing clothing you have never seen before, do not panic. The new talent system may seem daunting at first glance. But it's really not as complicated as all that. Let's cover what is and isn't changed. For starters, while you no longer have to train abilities as you level, your class trainers do still provide several services related to talents. For a fee, your class trainers can completely reset your talents, allowing you to pick again from every talent tier you have available. They can also completely reset your glyph selection, allowing you to reselect your glyphs, and they still offer Dual Talent Specialization for 10g. They also allow you to reset each of your class specializations. The various reset services cost you gold up to what appears to be a cap of 59g, although that may change before the game goes live.
What to expect from patch 5.0.4
Patch 5.0.4 will be here on Tuesday, Aug. 28. As with other pre-expansion patches, 5.0.4 will include some important changes that will reflect gameplay in Mists of Pandaria. To be perfectly clear, while this is a pre-patch for Mists, it is not Mists itself and shouldn't be confused with the game we'll all be nabbing on Sept. 25. While there are some features from the beta that we'll see go live with this patch, others will not be released until the new expansion goes live in September. This is a confusing time for some players, because they're not quite sure what to expect when it comes to the pre-expansion patch. Will new features be rolled out? Will we see new instances or profession changes or playable pandaren? To avoid confusion, here's a short primer on what you will and will not see in patch 5.0.4.
The Queue: We've got nothing better to do
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Elizabeth Wachowski will be your host today. A point to ponder today: How come the quality of television has improved so dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years? Television in the 1970s and 1980s was widely considered trashy, and being a movie star was so much more sophisticated than being a TV star. Sure, there were a few groundbreaking comedies like All in the Family and M*A*S*H, but the concept of television as an art form didn't really take off until near the turn of the millennium, around the time of The Sopranos and HBO really putting effort into its original programming. When was the last time you saw a movie more riveting than Breaking Bad or funnier than Arrested Development? Just something to think about next time you're complaining about Teen Mom. sergel92 asked: What could Blizzard do to make the other faction cities more appealing for players and force them to actually visit them?
A First Look at Mists of Pandaria Professions: Inscription
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him. I know there's some disagreement between myself and Basil over this, but inscription is hands down my favorite profession. That's not really because I like the process of finding or buying herbs, and I absolutely detest the whole milling procedure. It's because I like money. Inscription made me stupid rich. So, it would only follow then that I have great interest in what scribes will be up to come Mists of Pandaria. After all, Cataclysm brought the advent of the ultra-profitable and high-demand Mysterious Fortune Cards, so Blizzard must have something cool up its sleeves for this next expansion, too, right? Well ... sort of! I mean, let's face it, Mysterious Fortune Cards are a pretty big bar to set. That being said, there's some serious love coming scribes way in terms of new things to sell, new items to equip, and new, fun things to have fun with. But don't take my word for it. See for yourself.
Mists of Pandaria: Glyphmas 2012 for scribes is right around the corner
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him, tweeting him at @foxvanallen, or sacrificing your first-born to him. And be sure to catch the return of Basil and Fox's podcast, Call to Auction! Once upon a time, all was quiet throughout the land. Players had made glyph choices throughout Wrath, and they were good. Scribes made decent money. Then came patch 4.0.1. The opening salvo of Cataclysm, the Shattering, didn't just break the world. It broke players' glyph setups, as well. A slew of new glyph options were added to the game. Players had to choose nine glyphs, up from six. At the very least, everyone had to buy three new glyphs. For glyph sellers, times were good -- so good, in fact, that the magical time post-patch 4.0.1 was dubbed Glyphmas. We've already been told that major changes will be coming to glyphs once more for the pre-Mists of Pandaria patch 5.0.1. Prime glyphs are disappearing. A whole slew of new minor glyphs are being added to the game to promote fun. The opportunity for another Glyphmas is clearly present. But will scribes experience the same kind of gold rush they did at the end of the last expansion? What's different this time around? And what, exactly, is the best way to prepare to cash in?
2 crafting professions that won't make you rich
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! If you're trying to decide which professions to put on your character and you are considering their gold making potential, you'll want to avoid engineering and inscription. While they're not terrible if you consider their stat bonuses, they're not ideal for gold making on many realms. Of course, every realm has its own ecosystem, and as with all advice you'll read from this column, you should check that the assumptions hold for your realm and faction. That said, by far the most common problems I have trouble helping people with are related to these two professions. Inscription I'll start with the one that's going to get me the angry comments first. Inscription has long been touted as a cornerstone of the money making meta game -- heck, it earned my esteemed colleague, Fox, his first million gold on Darkmoon Cards. Before that, we had "glyphsmas" when 4.0 hit and a steady level of demand for glyphs before that. We still have the stupidly profitable fortune card market that lets anyone open a tiny, Blizzard-sanctioned casino. So what's not to like?
