Tuesday, April 28, 2009

[General]Glyphs are the new flask

Yesterday we had a couple posters in the comments section getting into a minor kerfluffle (addendum: must use kerfluffle in real life speech 3 times today) about which glyphs to use. Before Ulduar, I was rocking the glyph of Maul, Frenzied Regeneration and Rip. Yeah, Rip - it meant I could do decent DPS while in tank spec and tank gear. Then a guildie got Survival Instincts, and after that I decided that I was tired of breaking CC or even worrying about it much, so I got Growl.

And this caused much consternation.

Except...I don't see why. In 3.1, glyphs can be used without a lexicon of power - meaning that any time you want to replace a glyph outside of combat, you can. There's no need to decide on 3 glyphs at any given moment; they're totally mutable. They're also really cheap to make. The Growl and Survival Instinct glyphs comes quickly from northrend herbs. Maul glyphs come from STV herbs. Frenzied Regen comes from easy Outland herbs. Rip comes from Feralas/EPL herbs.

Most of the time, one stack of herbs will give anywhere from 5-10 inks, which will make 2-4 glyphs. So for a full stack of 20 glyphs of SI, you're looking at 10 stacks of northrend herbs, or around 200g. And that's the worst of the lot; you should be able to get a ton of Maul glyphs for far cheaper.

So instead of looking at it by which are the best, perhaps the better way to look at it is by cost. In that case, you should keep SI and Growl around for a while, and swap Regen and Maul as your third glyph. That'd be optimal, but chances are that won't work most of the time; most of the time you'd want both SI and FR as your regular ones.

So it's down to growl and maul as your hot-swappable glyphs (at least most of the time).

For me, I was able to buy a stack of growl glyphs for 15g. Why? Because they're typically used to level up. So they're pretty cheap anyway. Furthermore, you're not looking at more than about 5g per glyph if you buy the mats, which means practically that you're going to swap them out what, every fight at most? Which means if you're having a good raiding night you'll spend about 40g in mats if you swap every fight.

And unlike food, they last for as long as you want.

That's pretty cheap to me, honestly, and adds a lot of versatility. Are you going to tank and DPS in the same fight? Go swap out that FR glyph for rip. Have a manglebot for a given fight? Swap that mangle glyph for SR (this one is huge for me, honestly - it's like a 2% DPS boost) Need to make those taunts count on Kologarn or Auriaya? Get growl. Need maul on one target because of CC on the hallway of Thorim? Swap out Maul. Going to do the arena? Swap it back.

This honestly is really applicable to all sorts of specs. I've been getting more familiar with priest healing thanks to my wife, and she's fighting between Flash Heal, Renew, Guardian Spirit, Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing and Power Word : Shield. But why fight? Why not pick one or two that are going to be regulars (Flash heal and CoH, most like) and then swap out as needed for fights? Guardian spirit's glyph is useless if you're not healing on a single target all that often in a fight, but if there's a lot of raid damage PoH may be a life saver. Etc, etc.

Honestly, this is kind of a revolutionary thought for me. I'd never thought of glyphs as consumables before this.

The disadvantage is that you'll be carrying a few stacks of glyphs, which means more inventory. Such is the life for a druid. And it won't always be worth that much to change; a lot of times which glyph you have won't really matter for a given fight, and you won't have to change a thing.

So glyphs aren't the new talents. They're the new flasks. Get friendly with your local inscriptionist and give yourself some versatility.

13 comments:

Bulamis said...

Truly not even expensive as flasks and more like a potion or an elixir. (Assuming someone has the recipe)

There has been talk on other forums for DPS to swap glyphs per fight depending on roles.
I.e. Glyph of Polymorph can be used by the mage in the gauntlet if needed.

Dorgol said...

I think Blizzard is intentionally moving things this way to help with Inscription bringing in money. The removal of the Lexicon requirement seems part of that process.

The problem (now) is to convince the Scribes to start making glyphs available at reduced prices.

Unknown said...

It's not an inscriptionist...

It's a _scribe_ for the love of all that's fluffy! A Scribe!

Please do not lower yourself to the level of a /trade spammer : <

Tenac said...

I go by many names... Inscriptionist... Inscriber... Scribe...

My personal two favorites are "The Inscriptionator" and "The Inscribbler"

Marino said...

I myself raided tonight with 10 glyphs on shred and 10 of mangle on me. It was Yogg-saron. You seldom get to shred there and we had no arms warrior nor other druid. But being new to this I had glyph of shred glyphed instead of mangle.

One thing I would like to add, if you can buy cheap herbs from ah sure, but otherwise don't bother with buying outland or vanilla herbs. You can trade the oil you get from northrend herbs for any other oil out there. For me as a herbalist (alt) that is where i stick to.

Willowbear said...

All the wow econ talk about dual specs was how great the first few weeks selling glyphs was going to be and then the market would crash. The moment I found out that you could swap glyphs any time I knew that was wrong. Glyphs, as you said, would become equivalent to a scroll or buff food, but much better.

I posted as much in comments on one of Gevlon's posts. As more people realize this glyph sales of the useful glyphs will stabilize with steady purchasers.

I haven't settled on what I'm going to carry yet because I'm still debating what dual spec to go with. Currently I'm feral tank-dps and pure dps specced because because that is what I know best. But I have been thinking about going boomkin for a while.

Anonymous said...

Very nice post, and quite an original idea.

I must admit, the content is currently too easy to warrant glyph swapping per encounter. Once we work on hard modes, I may try it. The only trouble we're having clearing the content (apart from buggy bosses) is that people take time to learn strats. Hell, I'm not perfect either. I've died in the fire a few more times than I'd like to admit the last 2 weeks.

Anonymous said...

If we are going to swap glyphs on the run then it would be nice to know when to equip which glyph!

If I off-tank/dps and equip 1 dps glyph which would it be or if I equip 2 dps glyphs which ones do I choose?
Also, you post that glyph of savage roar is woth 2% dps increase for you which is huge (to you). How big a dps increase can we expect from the other glyphs? 1%? If a glyph only gives me 1% dps increase then I would strongly consider using 2 tanking glyphs while off-tankin!

It would be nice with some (napkin) math on this subject.

Anonymous said...

slightly offtopic: Oops! my OP glyph of maul broke a CC tonight! How embarassing, and how I tried to cover it up, by pretending I meant to do that.

Still, we're geaering up quick, trash is getting easier by the week too (either its nerfed, or we get better gear, or more experience). I have a feeling cc wont be around too much longer!

Shamad said...

To your wife, I've been writing a bit about priest healing in my blog now, trying out how that feels, and I'm moving ever more away from flash heals lately. I'll try and get around to expanding on that subject soon, but needless to say, the only real conflict atm for holy spec is GS glyph which might be useful for some fights where cooldown rotations are needed. Anyway, I'll expand on it later.

Duclama said...

"to help with Inscription bringing in money. "

Any scribe that's not already making plenty of money isn't trying very hard.

Jheusse said...

Slight hijack.

Your article and the antitank articles were in the front of my head last night as I tinkered with all that healing gear I'd saved from being DE'ed and started learning to be a tree.

So now I'm debating how to configure a Antitank/Tree dual spec rather than the previous pure cat/pure bear I had before, figured I'd ask you since you've done some of the best work on the hybrid spec.

Until some of the glyphs come down in price on my server I can't see carrying stacks of them.

What sort of specs and glyphs would you use if you were trying to cover bear/cat/tree with dual spec without constant respecs or re-glyphs?

Sylvanwing said...

I'm a Bearcatree as well and I was wondering the same for glyphing the bearcat spec?

Any suggestions? Right now I have Maul, Rip, and Shred, so I know I need to change something.

Also your 0/60/11 spec suggestion is almost the same as mine... and I think I am going to copy it exactly when I log back in :)