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Blizzard announces patch 4.0.1 releases tomorrow
The stars and planets have aligned. Some celestial body out there is in some sort of retrograde. Ancient civilizations have predicted something akin to the events tomorrow. Patch 4.0.1 is coming, and you need to be ready for it. Here's the official announcement: Bashiok -- Extended Maintenance 4.0.1 Release - 10/12 Extended maintenance will begin tonight at midnight, Tuesday, October 12 for the release of patch 4.0.1. Maintenance will begin at 12:01 AM PDT and conclude at approximately 12:01 PM PDT. During this time all realms and many web services will be unavailable. Due to the size of the patch we highly recommend you enable your background downloader. If you need assistance doing so please visit http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=35274 source There are some pretty major changes coming to World of Warcraft tomorrow, so it's time to learn to play all over again. Read about your new class features here. Read about the new glyph system here. Read about the new reforging system here. Don't forget to turn on your background downloader if you want to be able to log in sooner tomorrow. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.
Upcoming changes to glyphs in patch 4.0.1
Blizzard has just released key information on the upcoming changes to the glyph system in patch 4.0.1, which we are expecting to drop tomorrow. This is more or less what we've been hearing all along throughout the Cataclysm beta. The big points from Blizzard's release are: Glyphs are separated into three tiers: minor, major and prime. Prime glyphs typically provide direct increases to damage or healing throughput. Major glyphs typically augment spells and abilities to offer additional utility. Minor glyphs typically provide players with additional convenience or cosmetic changes. Glyphs are now single-use; once you learn them, you know them forever. In order to switch glyphs, you need a reagent called a Dust of Disappearance. Get those from an inscription vendor or crafted by scribes. The full statement after the break.
The Queue: Pop
Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today. Speaking of pop, Bejeweled 2 is free on PopCap.com today until 10 p.m. PST! Go get it! Liam asked: What is the difference between major and prime glyphs? I thought a tier of glyphs was supposed to be more fun and cosmetic now, but they seem the same to me, just changes to our spells. Prime glyphs are no-brainer DPS/effectiveness increases. Major glyphs offer new utility or changes in your rotation that are hard to "math out." Minor glyphs give fun or cosmetic changes.
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest glyph shopping for 4.0.1 and Cataclysm
Welcome to the Wednesday edition of Spiritual Guidance, your one-stop source for all the information on shadow priesting you want and need for your on-the-go lifestyle. Your host Fox Van Allen brings information on your spec of choice on a silver platter, helping you stretch your World of Warcraft knowledge to infinity and beyond. Sit back, relax and prepare to be "wowed"! I have a confession to make: I've never really found glyphs to be that sexy. I don't know why. Maybe part of it was the hassle of having to travel halfway across Stormwind to find a Lexicon of Power just to add a glyph to my character. Maybe it was the frustration of learning later that I didn't need to find a Lexicon of Power to add a glyph, and the shame that came with knowing I had wasted about 30 or 40 trips along the canals over the last year and a half. Still, sexy or not, glyphs are powerful as all hell. They provide useful benefits by increasing our DPS, eliminating the need for reagents or reducing cooldowns. There's no reason not to like these damn things. And if you already like them on the live Wrath servers, you're going to love what's coming for glyphs in Cataclysm. We're about to have even more choices to make than ever before. That may seem a bit daunting, at least at first, but don't fear -- we're going to be better shadow priests for the experience. More slots, better choices and added convenience: It's all coming in patch 4.0.1, and it's all here in today's Spiritual Guidance, just after the break.
Insider Trader: Inscription and glyphs in Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific trade skills. Glyphs and inscription are getting a serious overhaul in Cataclysm. I read an excellent write-up of the new system on my friend Kraklin's blog and realized that I haven't yet posted an Insider Trader on the new system! This will have an impact on people who make their money with inscription, as well as be a nice quality-of-life change for people who find themselves changing their spec and glyphs a lot. As soon as the pre-expansion patch 4.0.1 launches, we're no longer going to have to buy glyphs more than once per character. Once you learn a glyph, you will always see it in your spellbook and will be able to switch between your known glyphs with a Dust of Disappearance, made by scribes from the same ink used to craft glyphs. While this won't mean much if you tend to stick with a single set of glyphs, if you change them around a lot, you will find it easier to manage and less expensive. On the live servers, every time you make the change, you often end up paying enormous markups on glyphs -- there can be sporadic supply due to the massive number of auctions that need watching if someone is selling glyphs. After 4.0.1, assuming we know the glyph already, we'll just have to buy a single dust, and every scribe in the auction house will be competing for that business.
Gold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you
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 Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page: This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it. In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.
Officers' Quarters: Patch 4.0.1 -- An officer's perspective
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. Most major game patches have a significant impact on guild officers, and in the past I've tried to give an officers' perspective on how the changes to the game will affect the decisions and plans that we make moving forward. Unlike previous patch-perspective columns, however, a reader actually requested this one. Hey Scott, I'm a guild leader for a rather small 10-man raiding guild, and I got to thinking today about the upcoming pre-Cata patch that's going to change everything. See, Wrath was the first expansion of WoW that I, and many members of my guild, were ever really active in (a lot of us swapped over from another MMO, together), so I was wondering -- once the pre-Cata patch hits, should we continue raiding? From the grumblings I've been hearing on the PTR, numbers are all out of whack, and with some of the class changes coming, I was wondering if it'd even be a good idea to keep raiding once 4.0.1 hits. I've never experienced the "conversion" from one expansion to another on the raiding front, so I really have no idea what to expect as far as people's attitudes (not just guildies, but possible PUGs, too). In the other games I'd played, an expansion just meant new zones, storyline, etc., but WoW's expansion features a level cap increase, and in this case, a major overhaul in how we play.
Spiritual Guidance: Cataclysm beta roundup for priests, pt. 1
Everyone knows that each Sunday they can expect the healing priest edition of Spiritual Guidance from Dawn Moore. What you probably don't know is that on Mondays, Dawn and her shadowy nemesis, Fox Van Allen, put aside their differences and hog-pool to the Orgrimmar Shadowfiend Shelter, a home for displaced shadowfiends. Each year, thousands of shadowfiends are orphaned, but some survive because of players like you. These shadowfiends need you today; reroll now! Information about what's going on in the Cataclysm beta has been a little bit dodgy for priests here at Spiritual Guidance the past couple of months. That's largely in part to the fact that I haven't had access to the beta. Now, thanks to my new favorite people at NowGamer, I have a beta key. This means no more guesses and speculations on how things work. The timing couldn't have been better either, since as of yesterday evening, the PTR for patch 4.0 became available for players to download. This means before long we'll be seeing the 31-point talent trees on live realms, and that means Cataclysm can't be too far off either. Exciting, don't you think? So now, because discussion of beta has been going on for 6 months and changing every week, now seems like the best time to get everyone up to date and clarify any information that was unclear, mistaken, or just plain forgotten from the past few months. I have compiled a big, two part list of changes for healing priests that look like they're going to go live, so if you've been avoiding reading up on what's going on in the beta, the next two weeks of Spiritual Guidance are going to be articles you want to read. I've also got some video for you guys at the end! Let's go!
Totem Talk: Restoration glyphs
Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration will show you how, brought to you by Joe Perez, otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and the For The Lore podcast . Last week, we went over some blue posts about healing and restoration shaman, as well as a small discussion of the difference in Healing Waves. We also had news of a new beta build last week, and with that build came the news of brand new glyphs for many or the classes like rogues and shaman, as well as the new glyph system. Some of the glyphs we use regularly have been updated, as well as some people may not have really given much thought to using. There has even been a return of some that were scrapped in the Wrath of the Lich King beta phases prior to its release. Some of these may offer game-changing, play-altering effects to our mechanics, while others just add a fun flavor to our classes. So what can we look forward to with restoration shaman glyphs in Cataclysm? That is exactly what I would like to talk about this week.
Cataclysm Beta: Warrior glyphs
Unlike rogue and shaman glyphs, warrior glyphs do not appear to be finalized as of this beta push, but there have definitely been some changes and alterations that are worth discussing. We discussed the change to the philosophy of glyph design already this week but neglected to point out the specific new glyph options. Several glyphs are either entirely new or changed to reflect the "unambiguous increase" design goal.
Totem Talk: Enhancement beta update
Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance, and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 13 now live!)as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. It's been a few weeks since my last beta post. I feel like I'm back in grammar school at good ol' St. Louise de Marillac, "forgive me readers, it's been four weeks since my last beta post. Since then I've been mean to my guild, and I tried to kill my own priest." In game priest, in game! I can't wait to read the letters to the editor about that slip up. Oh well, at least I didn't use the word "casual." Moving right along to important topics that everyone cares about: beta changes for enhancement shamans! Well, I suppose "everyone" excludes people that are not interested in beta spoilers. Great, two paragraphs in and I've already offended Catholics, priests, and people not interested in beta spoilers. Look on the bright side: at least I didn't use an offensive font this week! If you are interested in the latest beta changes as they relate to enhancement shamans then please read on. Please note that beyond this point, this post will not further offend your good, wholesome middle Azerothian sensibilities.
Cataclysm beta: New glyphs for rogues and shaman
Blizzard's been hard at work adjusting a lot of WoW's game systems for Cataclysm, and one of the biggest changes in the pipeline is the overhaul of the inscription profession. You may remember the Path of the Titans alternate advancement system was axed in favor of making inscription, well, better. On top of other changes and a new UI, part of this task is adding a new tier of glyphs -- called prime glyphs -- on top of the already-existing tiers of major and minor. Ghostcrawler recently had this to say about the new glyph system: Ghostcrawler Prime glyphs aren't going to be exciting in a "change up your rotation" style. We want primes to be unambiguous dps (etc.) increases so we figured they might as well be easy to understand rather than something so convoluted that everyone would just go to a fansite to see which 3 to pick. The majors are more interesting, because they are either not dps increases at all, or dps increases in ways that are tricky to math out. We think players will debate and geek out more about which majors to use, and with the new glyph design, swapping them out once in awhile isn't very painful. Minors are basically convenience or fun. source Several classes have had their glyphs worked on and updated as of this beta patch, but only rogues and shaman glyph passes appear to be "done," so we've listed glyphs for those two after the break.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Stream of Cataclysm consciousness
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy. Having spent the last few weeks more or less avoiding talking about Cataclysm, I'm now going to dive back into the discussion of our "soon" to come expansion. While the most recent beta push didn't do much at all to our talents from previous beta builds, we did see some significant changes as the new glyph system was implemented. We also got actual plate models for a lot of green and blue quest drops so that my warrior now looks like he's wearing a classic Roman-style gladiator helmet and chest in the screenshot above. At this point, there's a lot to talk about in terms of how things are shaking out.
Cataclysm Beta: The new glyph UI
The latest patch to the Cataclysm beta has finally added in the revamped glyph UI, sporting the newly implemented Prime Glyphs, a selection window and awesome new convenience features. The new interface has a search box for quickly finding glyphs, expanding categories of prime, major and minor glyphs, and it even shows you what glyphs you have not yet learned. Personally, I think that the new glyph interface is one of the coolest Cataclysm revamps. The old system of glyphs was an awesome first step, but it has been refined and polished in ways we never could have expected. Check out the gallery of shots below to see what the glyph UI looks like while empty, sporting some glyphs and using the search feature. %Gallery-101308%
Gold Capped: Ask an auctioneer
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 Wednesday. For half-arsed, last-minute mailbag posts, tune in every Thursday after Basil forgot his deadline because he was buying his wife stylish side tables at large Swedish furniture stores. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I have a bunch of questions and comments piled up in my poor neglected inbox, so today we're going to jump right in and address some of the good ones. Bernake (awesome name, by the way) writes: Previously you have established that it is not profitable it to transfer gold frequently across faction. While this is generally true, I play on a server where the Horde population playing at peak hours is no more than 600 people, less than 2,000 active on the server. I was wondering (if that) warrants a change in this policy, as the Alliance have over 9,000 active players with at least 600 on throughout the day and over 2,000 playing at peak hours on any given day. I was considering moving into the Alliance glyph market, as the Horde glyph market is quite small. I was wondering if you would support this move as well as give some insight? I believe you're talking about this post on cross-faction arbitrage. In fact, it can be extremely profitable to move money and products across the neutral AH. I may have sounded a little negative because it is risky; however, unless you're losing a chunk of your stock to snipers or 20 percent of your gold to the neutral AH cut, it's not a bad thing to do. You can just buy to resell, or if you're having trouble finding mats on your home faction, you can use stock from the other side to keep your costs in line.
Gold Capped: When glyph prices hit the wall
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. Imagine a typical glyph market on a busy realm: dozens of goblins sitting hunched over their steam calculators surrounding the trading pit, each figuring their costs and profits down to the last copper trying to gain an advantage over the others. Thousands of glyphs are posted every hour, most to be canceled and reposted an hour later at even lower prices. Eventually, one of the goblins has a flash of brilliance (or cracks under the strain; the records aren't clear) and posts all of his glyphs at a loss. The calculation engines grind to a stop, leaving the goblins to stare up at the big board in silence, then at each other. "Now what?" We call it the wall. One scribe picks a price and tries to hold the entire market to that price. If it holds, the market stops at the wall, and everyone on the other side watches helplessly as sales drop to zero. Sometimes it's done to drive off competitors; sometimes it's done to dissuade new competitors from entering the market, or just to burn up excess ink supplies ... or even just out of boredom to cause pointless drama, goblin style. Like all good goblin inventions, the wall appears simple on the outside, but remains complicated (and somewhat explosive) when put into practice. One complication is that there is more actually more than one type of wall.
Totem Talk: Enhance me
Axes, maces, lightning, Windfury, and wolves. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 8 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Two weeks ago a fellow enhancement shaman contacted me on Twitter asking how to improve his damage output. He was kind enough to let me use his email as the topic for the weekly enhancement shaman column here on WoW.com. Because he was brave (crazy?) enough to face the public scrutiny that comes from being in the spotlight here, show him the high level of respect our fellow enhancement brother deserves. Here's his email: I just switched to enhance for raiding a couple of weeks ago and I still feel like my DPS is lower than what it could be. I'm using Shock and Awe and still depending more or less on the priority frame, which I hope to ween off of soon. I'm still not 100% sure if I have the priorities set up correctly at this point. They are set at: SR MT LS MW5 LB SS ES if SS FS LL FN I also use Wolves every time they are up and also Fire Elemental when off CD. With just my buffs at the heroic dummy I seem to be maxing out around 6-6.5k. Again, seems a little low to me. If you would like to look at my armory, the name is Alyssian on Durotan. We use WoL, too, and my guild is Chi Cerca Trova. PS - Any tips for helping me get off of the SAA priority window? I'm mainly concerned with keeping the shock rotation going, I think I can handle the rest.
Spiritual Guidance: The top ten shadow priest glyphs, page 2
Let's take a moment to appreciate the value of Inner Fire. The Glyph of Inner Fire is all about survivability. Since the glyph boosts our armor only, though, deciding whether or not to take it requires a little bit of thought.
Spiritual Guidance: The top ten shadow priest glyphs
Welcome to the Wednesday edition of Spiritual Guidance, hosted by Fox Van Allen, consort to the shadows. Don't mind any distracting grunting you hear coming from under the floor boards. Dawn Moore isn't buried alive underneath there, I promise. She just needed to take today off. You know. For ... um ... I dunno, I think she's one of the Hollywood Squares this week. Who cares, whatever, she's gone. Oh, hello shadow priests. Please come in. Shut the door behind you. Have a seat. We need to talk. I've been hearing rumors on wowpopular.com about your top major glyph choices, and frankly, I'm concerned. It's telling me that the Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain is the most popular for shadow priests. Madness! And my god, are you really casting Flash Heal that often that you want to glyph for it? Look, look, it's okay. It's not your fault. You're the victim here. You chose what you thought was a good glyph, and it's been letting you down. I can help. After the break, we're going to run down the list of the top ten most popular shadow priest glyphs and pick them apart, one by one. Hopefully, in the process, we can get rid of your cookie cutter build and find you a great new set of glyphs that matches your play style.
Gold Capped: How to calculate inscription costs and prices
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who's trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he's made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it's left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they're paying for their supplies.
