glyphs
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The glyph of the future
Variations on the glyph system are a subject I think about all the time. I have ever since Path of the Titans was announced and then scrapped. I understand why it was scrapped, but it did disappoint me. It sounded cool, and I wanted to play around with the options it would provide. Recently, forum poster Madcapmcgee has asked all of us what kind of glyphs we might want to see introduced to the current system. Do we want cosmetic glyphs? If so, what would we want? Vanity glyphs? Quality of life glyphs with no direct effect on combat? And what do we want for our prime and major glyphs? For myself, I want a glyph that lets me dual wield polearms with Titan's Grip. I have a Hellreaver, and dang it, I want to swing two of those beasts around. (Well, technically, I have a Kiril, but transmogrification means I get to have a Hellreaver.) I'd also like to see a glyph that reduces the cooldown on Heroic Leap out of combat so that I could use it like Blink, a glyph that caused me to grow every time I hit an enraged state (which is why I grabbed that Kiril that was on the DE chopping block, frankly), and finally, I'm dying for a glyph that makes Mortal Strike automatically add the Rend effect so that I never have to Rend manually again. What do you, the viewers at home, think? What glyphs do you want to see in... the future!?!? (Imagine this in my best Criswell impression.) World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is the next expansion, raising the level cap to 90, introducing a brand new talent system, and bringing forth the long-lost pandaren race to both Horde and Alliance. Check out the trailer and follow us for all the latest MoP news!
New Secret World ARG puzzle hidden on Funcom website
Have you figured out Funcom's newest brain-teaser for The Secret World? We haven't, and we'd take kindly to whatever tips you have to offer. What's that, you say? You didn't know there was a new TSW puzzle? Well, head to the official Funcom website. Once you're there, single-click on something that isn't a link (the red title text that says The Secret World should work), and then type in the number 33. If you do it correctly, you should eventually see a bunch of glyphs, and we're assuming they're written in some sort of Runic script. That's about where our knowledge stops, though, so check out the forum thread and let us know what you find out!
TERA website updates with glyph descriptions
Well, it's not a release date announcement, but it's not another big-ass monster reveal either, so we'll call that a win. What the heck are we talking about? The official TERA website has updated with a news blurb about the fantasy title's glyph system. The glyph mechanics become available at level 25, and they basically buff your various class skills. Influence and brilliance glyphs lower the MP cost of skill usage; energy and persistence glyphs give you shorter cooldowns; and glyphs of lingering increase skill durations. There are hundreds of glyphs to choose from, and each skill has four different glyphs available. Head to the official site for more info, including specifics on Lancer and Sorcerer glyphs. TERA is currently scheduled for a spring 2012 release in the West.
How to make money playing the glyph market
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. Glyphs are probably the most common way scribes try make money. Really, it's no secret why -- every new character needs to buy three glyphs at level 25, another three at level 50, and yet three more at level 75. Demand for glyphs is almost always there -- or at least, demand for useful glyphs is almost always there. On most servers, the glyph market on the Auction House is absolutely cutthroat. Players who are leveling inscription always have a boatload of glyphs to unload, and many are content to sell these at fire-sale prices just to be rid of them. On the other end of the market, you often have glyph salesmen constantly undercutting each other by one or two copper on a 50 gold item. How do you compete against these people?
Gold Capped: How to flip Books of Glyph Mastery
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Books of Glyph Mastery are currently needed by scribes in order to learn all the glyphs in the game. While they will eventually no longer be needed, they will always be useful. Even when Blizzard gets around to letting you research all the glyphs without them, those research recipes are both on a one-day cooldown, and the books can be used to continue learning. These books are an excellent candidate for "flipping" for a few reasons. Let's look into why and how to flip them. Bad for the market? Speculative flipping is not bad for the market. First, when people say "bad for the market," they mean "bad for people who need to buy glyph books." While flippers seem to be making money from nothing, they're actually making money from risk. They buy up excess stock in times of plenty and sell it in times of scarcity, and this protects book buyers from having to deal with a nearly empty auction house as often. All flippers do is make it so that when a couple of new scribes start buying books by the wheelbarrow and completely empty the AH, they won't have to wait for more stock to trickle in from people leveling through Northrend.
Gold Capped: Cataclysm glyph addons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The glyph market has spawned quite a few of the important modern auction house addons. It's a uniquely challenging market, as there are hundreds of different products, each with their own balance of suppliers, buyers, and materials. The challenges faced by early glyph producers were met by a hodgepodge of fairly complex addons and macros, and only recently have unified solutions began to appear. I remember that at one point, I had addons to: Keep track of how many glyphs I had on the AH, in various characters' banks and in their inventories. Allow me to queue a list of glyphs and build a materials list (that allowed me to buy the vendor mats with one click). Automatically queue enough glyphs in the second addon to assure that I kept stock levels at my desired level. Automatically post every glyph I made onto the AH. The tasks needed for this market are not unique, and so the most important tool that can trace its origin to the glyph market is certainly TradeSkillMaster. TSM is an addon that I've covered before, and it's built from the ground up to be perfect for glyphs. It's also perfect for a lot of other markets, but mostly those you can treat like glyphs.
Gold Capped: How to price Cataclysm glyphs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Glyph pricing has ignited more internet arguments than any other topic in the WoW blogosphere. Everyone has their own method, and there's always someone who gets offended by it. There is no actual right answer, just basic economics. The goal of any glyph strategy is to make gold, and the only sensible way to measure gold making is by calculating your profits per hour. The glyph lifecycle is herb > pigment > ink > glyph. There can be a lot of hours in that, so let's look at the best way to squeeze some gold from them.
En Masse confirms TERA for E3, hints at crafting systems [Updated]
En Masse has officially confirmed TERA's presence at this year's E3, and the company has also just released a gaggle of screenshots and a new dungeon-crawl video designed to tease fans in the lead up to various convention reveals scheduled for June 7th through June 9th. TERA's crafting game gets a brief mention in today's press release as well, with En Masse trumpeting the fact that the tradeskill system features "more than a thousand items to create, use, and sell." Crafting is also presented as "more than clicking a button," with the collection of blueprints and mythic elements -- as well as the use of forges -- highlighted in today's news blast. En Masse also hints at TERA's equipment customization, enchanting, and glyph systems. Read all about it via the full press release after the cut. Don't forget to check out the new screens in the gallery below while you're at it. [Updated with a video of the Pirate Grotto dungeon, after the break!] %Gallery-88481%
Gold Capped: Selling glyphs in Cataclysm, part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! When Cataclysm launched, it came with a design change for the glyph system. Whereas players who wanted to change glyphs previously had to buy a new one to overwrite an existing one, they could now use Dust of Disappearance to overwrite their glyphs with any of their learned glyphs. I split markets in WoW into two segments: Items that players will only buy once per character Items that are bought multiple times per character While glyphs are now firmly in the first category, honestly, they seemed as if they were there anyway. The vast majority of glyph demand, throughout Wrath of the Lich King, was not generated by elite raiders or PvPers keeping stacks of commonly used glyphs in their bags so they could micro-optimize, but rather from people leveling new characters. The demand for glyphs remains strong, and that means someone is making money.
Arcane Brilliance: Professions for Cataclysm mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take. So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces." Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.
Spiritual Guidance: Early Cataclysm for shadow priests
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. The cataclysm is now, and Fox Van Allen demands you take sides! Do you stand with Team Fox in rejecting gnome shadow priest alts for now and all eternity, or do you, like, have a stupid little tea party with gnomes, sparkles, and fairies vomiting rainbows all over the damn place? Cataclysm is here! Cataclysm is here! That's not exactly anything new, though -- it's been here for at least 36 hours now. Which means, of course, that I've been awake for well over 36 hours, playing World of Warcraft the whole time. Here are some fun facts about my current state that I've been able to glean from the internet: After 17 hours without sleep, people behave similarly on tests as those with blood alcohol levels of 0.05. After 21 hours, people test similarly to those with blood alcohol levels of 0.08. Minor halluncinations typically begin after 36 hours, with visual hallucinations appearing at around hour 60. But hey, I know you're not here to listen to me babble about what appliances in my house keep talking to me and what they keep saying. You're here because you're doing the same thing I am -- feverishly leveling that shadow priest of yours from 80 to 85, and quite possibly, starting a new goblin or worgen. And you want information. How exactly do these shadow priests work in Cataclysm? That's what this column is all about: all the basic information you'll want to know for that epic grind to level 85.
Gold Capped: Why deep undercutting on the auction house works
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities. In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit. I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.
Insider Trader: Inscription heads into Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. Inscription is going to be going through some changes in Cataclysm. We've already had a pretty massive overhaul in patch 4.0 with the changes to glyphs, but we're in for some more after the expansion ships. Obviously, the mats we use will change: the new common pigment from milling is Ashen Pigment (for BlackFallow Ink), and the uncommon one is Burning Embers (for Inferno Ink). Kaliope, who I've come to rely on for beta profession information, informs us that the best herb to get the Burning Embers from is Twilight Jasmine, found in the Twilight Highlands. As in Wrath of the Lich King, we will be able to trade the common inks for the uncommon ones; Jessica Sellers has updated her price list to accept Blackfallow Ink. It's going to be a single Blackfallow for a single older ink, as well as 10 for an Inferno Ink or Snowfall Ink.
Gold Capped: Bait and tackle
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! I'm going to start trying to include a link to something I've enjoyed reading in the gold-making blogosphere every week. Our first installment is JMTC's blogging carnival about lessons learned while preparing for Cataclysm. There are 18 submissions, which should keep you busy for a while. We've talked about auction house PvP before, but today we're talking about a glyph PvP method I like to call bait and tackle. Here's the problem: In order to sell glyphs, you need to spend a fair amount of time crafting them, as well as milling. In addition, on most sizable realms, there are a few hard-nosed competitors who are willing to play for longer than reasonable players. There have been times when, day or night, if I posted a batch of glyphs, every single one would get undercut exactly every 10 minutes.
The Light and How to Swing It: Paladin Protection glyphs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. We've recently looked at builds for protection and retribution, so let's continue that trend and take a look at glyphs. I'm going to review all of them, as we're getting pretty close to Cataclysm, and I'm going to also review them in a more global context instead of talking about what is going to help you on hard-mode Lich King. The way I've set it up is that everything that you're likely going to want without question has an asterisk next to it; those are pretty much things you'll want to take. If you look through the major and minor glyphs, you'll notice that there aren't very many marked as such. There's a reason for that. We just don't have that many spectacular glyphs that are useful in all situations for those types. That's not to say the other glyphs are bad (well, some are, but we'll get to that), but they're more situational and require some choice on your part.
TERA Korean beta news rolls in, Knox talks translation and marketing
Yes, TERA news is coming in from overseas, lots of it in fact. That said, En Masse Entertainment's Brian Knox cautions us to take the translations and suppositions with a grain of salt. First up is TERAfans checking in with another translation of an article by Bluehole Studio's community manager Mr. Blue. This time around, Blue details TERA's advanced skill system and discusses item stats, the newly added glyph system, racial abilities, and PvP skills. There's a ton of info to sort through, including nifty screenshots direct from the Korean client. The only problem is that some of this stuff might not make it into the western client (or might look very different) according to Knox. In a blog post on the official TERA website, he warns against taking all of the translation news from the recent G-Star gaming convention at face value. "Our fans do a great job of translating articles very quickly but the fact is there will be differences -- in terminology, game play mechanics, and services provided by the publisher -- between the western release and NHN's release of TERA. With these translations there will certainly be some misinterpretation, and we will do our best to react and clarify to the community," he writes. Why all the secrecy? Knox chalks it up to the challenges of releasing a global product, and the need for local distributors to get their share of timed exclusive marketing information.
The Art of War(craft): Must-have PvP talents for death knights in 4.0.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Art of War(craft), covering battlegrounds and world PvP, and Blood Sport for arena enthusiasts. Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? Battlemaster Zach Yonzon, old-world PvP grinder and casual battleground habitué, rambles on about anything and everything PvP. So the bomb finally dropped. As expected, Patch 4.0.1 finally made it to live realms and players are scrambling to get used to everything new. For most players, that first free respec is used for PvE to enable them to join the latest PUG looking to down the week's raid boss. This is when reality bites -- that spec you've been fiddling around with over at Wowhead or wowtal.com isn't delivering the way you thought it would. That's OK. If you're doing some PvP, understand that there are a number of bugs out there, so things aren't behaving exactly as they should. Add to that the fact that the game is balanced around being level 85, that stamina is low, and resilience has taken a hit ... things are going to be somewhat wonky. So don't write off that spec you've theorycrafting on for weeks just yet. Since specs are pretty complex and fluid at this point, we'll take a look at vital PvP talents instead. The fun thing is that at this point in the game, all specs are good to go for PvP -- although your mileage may vary. There isn't much room for variation, unlike before, when players could reach deep into two trees, especially for PvP. But inevitably, there are talents that are extremely useful in a PvP environment. Today we'll take a look at core PvP talents for each spec for death knights, just in case you were wondering what to do with those last few talent points. For this exercise, we won't bother discussing any 31-point talents because, well, you're supposed to pick those up, anyway.
Gold Capped: Patch 4.0.1 fallout for cooldowns, addons and glyphs
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons. I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.
Spiritual Guidance: Raid-ready 4.0.1 shadow priesting in 10 easy steps
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, your shadow-specced host Fox Van Allen copies Dawn Moore's latest column word for word and pastes it into Auto-Tune. After all those sour, holy-flavored notes are removed, what comes out is better than anything Jason Derulo could ever hope to achieve: priesting, perfected. If you're a regular reader of Spiritual Guidance -- and I hope you are, because it's your page views that give me my special, magical powers -- then you know how excited I've been for patch 4.0.1. I've been beating it over your head for weeks. Well, I can't tease you with it anymore, because that fabled new frontier of shadow priesting is finally here. It plays an awful lot like a new season of your favorite sitcom: entirely recognizable as that which you love, but with a few new twists. In patch 4.0.1, you create massive numbers of copies of yourself simply by moving around, your shadowfiend is on a variable timer and Betty White is your new anthropology teacher. (Change is confusing sometimes. Roll with it.) With the way everything just changed overnight, it's all too easy for a shadow priest to feel in over his head. Worry not, though -- the magnificent (though self-aggrandizing) Fox Van Allen has you covered with a comprehensive, ten-step checklist to get yourself raid re-ready for 4.0.1. New stat values, new gemming guidelines and even new enchanting info -- it's all here, and it's all after the break.
World of Warcraft gets patch 4.0.1 tomorrow
Blizzard has made the official announcement that it's releasing patch 4.0.1 for World of Warcraft during the game's maintenance tomorrow morning. This is basically the expansion patch for the biggest MMO in the world -- even though World of Warcraft: Cataclysm doesn't arrive in stores until December 7, this patch will bring many of the mechanics and system changes to the game that players have been awaiting, including a huge amount of class changes and updates, a revamp to the glyph system and a new system of reforging items to change their stats. This patch will also include the recently announced guild changes and lots of other updates and tweaks to ready the world for the game's third expansion. You may not actually be one of World of Warcraft's 12 million players any more, but even if you're not, we thought we'd give you a heads up. Patch 4.0.1 is the reason all your friends will be back playing the game later on this week.
