The first thing I want to look at¹ is look at what glyphs we’re picking up, what ones we’re losing, and which ones we’re picking up.

Since WoWHead is especially confused on a lot of these, I’m not going to include links in this post, because otherwise you might find yourself looking at the Glyph of Arcane Power with a tooltip of Glyph of Cone of Cold.  Blizz appears to be re-tasking all of the Prime glyph slots for new uses, which makes me wonder what sort of bugs we might encounter down the road.  Something to follow up on.

In this discussion, as in those to follow, the master worksheet for all this is on Google Docs. If you have to ask what something means, don’t look at it – this isn’t a tutorial on my spreadsheet peccadillos.

New Additions

Some notes:

• Glyph of Fingers of Frost probably goes a ways to compensate us for the loss of the damage component of Deep Freeze.
• Glyph of the Penguin and Glyph of the Monkey were removed to remove the “the”, no doubt to help with sorting, but then they added “of the Bear Cub”.  I suspect that’ll get renamed for consistency.
• Speaking of which, the Bear Cub ink is not yet official – best guess is Midnight.

Removals

Notes:

• Most of there were former Prime glyphs, but not all.
• A lot of minor and major glyphs – new or old – show Prime glyph tool tips still.  In many cases the effects don’t even make sense. I’m guessing they have a lot of work to do still.

Carried Over

Notes:

• Some of these were former Prime glyphs that were deemed valuable enough to retain, even if the type of glyph was changed.
• Many of these have different effects than before – in some cases, far different.
• While some changed ink type (no doubt to reflect the level changes for some of these), there was no significant drift towards more of one tier over another, and no new inks at all.

Overall

It’s obvious from the tooltips and the profession UI that serious work on integrating the new glyphs into the game has not really taken off yet.

1. Because that’s about all I can right now, given that crafting isn’t up and running yet. [↩]

In “Live” news, Alleria saw a violent crash in the Glyph market over the last couple of weeks. Marginal glyphs were selling at trash prices. I’m thinking a new scribe is working his/her way through the ranks and that things will stabilize at a better level.

I’m starting to see signs of recovery, but just in case, I lowered my threshold from 50 to 40 gold per glyph – below which I take it off the market for a while. This really didn’t seem to have that much of an effect, which points to volume issues as well. Can you guess which demonic influence might have caused this? Sure  you can.

=*=*=*=

In this installment, we’re looking at Druid glyphs. There’s been a few builds over which things have firmed up a bit, and we’re starting to see more solid information when we data-mine. However, there are still a few that don’t yet have inks, and we have yet to see the new inks for MoP make a showing, so (hopefully) that change is yet to come (at which point I will likely be busy updating).

Druids have seen a lot of changes.  It seems like more glyphs have been discontinued compared to others, for example, while also seeing an influx of new ones to choose from.

This time the table itself is consolidated. Presenting new versus carried over versus discontinued in separate tables doesn’t serve much purpose if you yourself can sort it any way you want, after all.

As always, the master spreadsheet is up on Google Docs.

Glyph	Ink	Notes	Disposition
Aquatic Form	Lion's		Carried Over
Barkskin	Celestial		Carried Over
Berserk		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Bloodletting		Former Prime	Discontinued
Blooming	Lion's		New
Cat Form	Lion's		New
Challenging Roar		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Cyclone	Shimmering		New
Dash	Jadefire		Carried Over
Entangling Roots	Lion's		Carried Over
Fae Silence	Ethereal		New
Faerie Fire	Lion's		Carried Over
Feral Charge		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Ferocious Bite	Midnight		Carried Over
Focus		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Frenzied Regeneration	Ethereal		Carried Over
Grace	Midnight		New
Healing Touch	Lion's		Carried Over
Hurricane	Sea		Carried Over
Infected Wounds	Lion's		New
Innervate	Sea		Carried Over
Insect Swarm		Former Prime	Discontinued
Lacerate		Former Prime	Discontinued
Lifebloom	Sea	Former Prime	Carried Over
Mangle		Former Prime	Discontinued
Mark of the Wild	Midnight		Carried Over
Master Shapeshifter	Sea		New
Maul	Midnight		Carried Over
Might of Ursoc	Sea		New
Monsoon		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Moonfire		Former Prime	Discontinued
Nature's Grasp	Midnight		New
Pounce	Ethereal		Carried Over
Prowl	Celestial		New
Rebirth	Jadefire		Carried Over
Regrowth	Sea	Former Prime	Carried Over
Rejuvenation	Midnight	Former Prime	Carried Over
Rip		Former Prime	Discontinued
Savage Roar		Former Prime	Discontinued
Shred	Shimmering		New
Skull Bash	Sea		New
Solar Beam	Sea		Carried Over
Stampede	Sea		New
Stampeding Roar	Sea		New
Starfall		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Starfire		Former Prime	Discontinued
Stars	Sea		New
Starsurge		Former Prime	Discontinued
Survival Instincts	Ethereal		New
Swiftmend		Former Prime	Discontinued
the Chameleon	Jadefire		New
the Moonbeast	Celestial		New
the Orca	Jadefire		New
the Predator	Jadefire		New
the Stag	Sea		New
the Treant	Jadefire		Carried Over
Thorns		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Tiger's Fury		Former Prime	Discontinued
Typhoon		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Unburdened Rebirth		Not a Former Prime	Discontinued
Wild Endurance			New
Wild Growth	Ethereal		Carried Over
Wrath		Former Prime	Discontinued

Anyone even vaguely interested has probably noticed that the MoP Inscription series has kind of ground to a halt.

The problem is that I only did part of my research at first, and as I went on I realized that the game was woefully unprepared for this level of analysis.  Glyphs were changing on a daily basis, new ones added, old ones removed, and so forth.  Many of the glyphs mentioned in the first article were already altered by the time of the most recent one.

After watching that go in a million different directions, I kind of froze up (iknorite?) I began to formulate a recovery plan.  So here it is.

I’m going to drop the by-the-class glyph analysis, and, once the changes appear to be stable, I’ll put together one big list of glyphs that won’t be making it past the patch.  That was the long-term main reason for doing this, was to try to suss out what glyphs that we should get rid of before they became gray items in the bank.

That leaves open the question of when that date will be. Right now, our little collective is reckoning that September or early October is a likely release window for MoP, based on the fact that new MoP-level loot has been implemented for the Hallow’s Eve holiday. If they weren’t planning for release until after that, they wouldn’t bother with a holiday that was almost a year away, not right now. On the other hand, late October isn’t a good candidate, either, because releasing software in the middle of a holiday event sounds remarkably fraught with danger.

We’re therefore looking at a possible early September rollout for the pre-expansion patch, and early to mid September for the expansion.

We want to drop our junk well before then.

With all that in mind, this is the plan.

• Last week of July, I’ll gather all the data I have at that point and create a list of items that won’t be making the cut.
• First week of August, I’ll publish.

And that’ll be it for this series.

I’m not really happy with the direction this all took, and I hope nobody was really disappointed¹².

1. Although of course that has angsty connotations of its own! [↩]
2. True story: Angst was named after Ang Lee. – Grimm [↩]

Note: due to the somewhat volatile nature of the subject matter, it is entirely possible that I will update the info therein after it posts to the RSS feed. If you are reading via RSS (and who isn’t?) then for once I suggest that you go to the actual article on the blog, because the RSS feed will not update content once FeedBurner caches it.  I promise, I won’t try to sell you gold services if you do.

Although the overall Inscription series was a bust¹, there is still a real need for one bit of information that was coming from it. Namely, what glyphs are sticking around? Or, more to the point, which ones are going away?

In typical Blizzard fashion, I imagine that a bank full of Prime glyphs will become a bank full of gray items. Blizz may also, in typical fashion, grant them a sell-off value that far above what you can get for it on the live servers, but don’t count on it. Unfortunately, they’re playing that one cagey, and I have no good data on what the “complementary” value of a grayed-out Prime may be. The upshot is that they may only offer vendor pricing, which, as you probably know, is pretty miserable. ²

The “smart” money, therefore, is on getting rid of what you have that will NOT be viable when the pre-expansion hits³.  This consists of, for example and not surprisingly, almost every Prime – though some are being “demoted” and retained in the constellation of available glyphs. Another group of glyphs that are going away are those that removed a material cost for some skill or another, such as the one that removed the Light Feather material component from Slow Fall.

There are also a ton of glyphs that defy classification – but the ability or the need for the glyph is going away, so, therefore, is the glyph.

With no hard and fast rules, then, a brute-force approach has been required to sort it all out.  But I think I have a handle on it.

When to Dump

A huge chunk of this list consists of glyphs that never sold very well – or for a decent price. Therefore, getting them onto the market and sold for whatever you can get for them is the priority. I wouldn’t fuss over mat costs or anything at this point. If you can get a whole GP for each glyph, take it. I doubt that you’ll get that much for a grayed one in the 5.0.4 world.

Others, however, continue to sell well, despite the fact that they’re going to be useless when the patch drops. If you’re making 150-300 gp per glyph, when do you give up the gravy train and stop sinking ink into them?  “Smart money” says right until they stop selling, but that will leave you with a pocket full of grayed glyphs if you don’t time it exactly right.

“Safe money” says, don’t take chances. Once you start dumping, dump it all.  Use that ink on glyphs that will be available after the patch drops.

It’s been said before, and I am still thinking that the time of release for the pre-expansion patch (5.0.4) will probably be around mid-September, and probably two or so weeks later, the expansion.  With that in mind, my sell-off is going to start at the end of July.  This gives approximately six weeks to unload everything and get the house in order.

If 3.0.2 and 4.0.3 were any indication, we will lose the ability to use Blackfallow Ink to purchase lower level inks when the patch drops, and we won’t have the ability to make the new ink⁴  until we get to explore the new zones. If that’s the case, conversion of your Blackfallow into lesser inks (especially of the Sea) might be wise – either to sell off for a handsome profit, or to continue making glyphs – especially new ones, if we’re permitted to do so⁵.

What to Dump

Following is the list that I have managed to extract. If a glyph isn’t on this list, it is either being retained, or I mistaked.

You should be aware that mistakes are probably common, considering, and also the list may be changed by Blizz.  The change lists from them or WoWHead are rarely accurate or complete, WoWHead offers no API for independent data mining⁶, and brute-forcing it would mean the list never got published. I choose to publish now rather than hold out for perfection and not be timely.  For the record, that makes this list current as of July 19, 2012, and no later.

As before, I am not providing WoWHead links to everything in this list, because, like, that’s actual work.

1. I blame Garrosh. [↩]
2. If anyone knows for sure, drop a note in the comments, please. [↩]
3. 5.0.4 is on the PTR now, by the way. [↩]
4. Ink of Dreams. [↩]
5. Do note, however, that many of the new inks require Ink of Dreams directly – something I approve of, from a game design perspective, but which is damned inconvenient for those trying to get out of the gate early! [↩]
6. In fact, they’ve made it harder to programmatically extract data from the site, despite making soothing noises on their forums. I have a bad feeling about this. [↩]

It’s probable that there will be some changes between now and the 28th, but we’re close enough that we can consider the numbers we have now to be fairly stable. So let’s consider the stats and what they mean for you.

Note: I am not linking to any of the items on WoWHead because after a very short time, those links will be invalid when the MoP database becomes the real database.  Obviously I can’t link to the real database for items are going to change. Sorry.

First and foremost: Blackfallow Ink is not your friend. On the 28th, it will not be usable to buy other inks. It will only be good to make glyphs. And there is only one glyph that you can make with it.  So, before the turn of 5.0.4, you need to convert Blackfallow Ink into anything that’s useful.

Topic the First: what’s useful.

First of all, at the end of this article will be a chart showing all glyphs that are active in MoP. In case you want to skip the brilliant analysis.

So what inks are useful? This chart shows the distribution of ink utilization in MoP.  Obviously, you can’t buy Ink of Dreams, but everything else is fair game.

As you can see, Ink of the Sea is by far the most useful.  Basically, 30% of your ink-exchanging should be for this glyph, followed by Ethereal¹ at roughly half that. Blackfallow is that little sliver.

This chart confirms Blackfallow as officially the most useless ink in the game.  You can make one glyph with it, the market is going to be flooded by people skilling up, and you can’t buy anything else with it. Useless. Unless you directly need to use Blackfallow ink for some sort of skilling up activity, don’t bother grinding Cata herbs. Sell them to alkys.

One thing to take into account: all this chart does is show the utilization of inks. It does not show how well the glyphs that are made will sell.  We won’t know that until we start rolling those glyphs out on the 28th.

Surprisingly, utilization of Ink of the Sea increases in MoP. This is despite moving several glyphs to different inks from what they used in Cata. It bewilders me that they didn’t bring Blackfallow up even with at least Ink of Dreams. This has always been a thing that confuses me. It seems that a glyph’s ink should be on par with the glyph’s level, and the glyph’s level should be on par with the level of the skill that it is modifying. But none of the glyphs learned between 80 and 85 use Blackfallow Ink except for Colossus Smash.

Within a few percentage points, glyph distribution in MoP is pretty even. DK seems to be hurting the most.  Compared to Cataclysm’s distro, it looks like this:

First of all, note that there were close to fifty (50) glyphs added between Cata and MoP. Of those, Monk accounts for around 35.

Big winners were Warrior, Priest, and Paladin.  Hunter did well, while everyone else held even or lost one or two spots.  Which is bad news for mages, as roughly 1/2 of their glyphs are now variations on Polymorph².

Following is a full list (as of today, 8/17/2012) those glyphs³ that will be supported as of 8/28/2012. Enjoy!

Note: this table defaults to 25 entries, but has over 400. Please use the drop-down at the top of the table for navigation.  There are little pagination buttons at the bottom, too.

1. Yes, I realize it’s mis-spelled in the chart. [↩]
2. Just kidding! [↩]
3. Plus Certificate of Ownership [↩]

Let’s start this off on the right foot.

I was wrong.

Not catastrophically, pitchforks-and-flaming-torches wrong, but not 100% right.

Most, if not all, of the “dead” glyphs did not go away, turn into dust, evaporate, or otherwise become worthless.  They were changed into whatever MoP now currently has the same ID that they had in Cata.  So the correct action should have been to just stash those in the bank, at worse, and break them back out when the patch dropped.

So, apologies, if you didn’t make out like a bandit on that particular aspect.

Well, moving on.

Otherwise Glyphmas 2012 has been cracking good.  I’m sure I’m not making out as well as others, but my goal is to get some sleep and keep some of my soul, so that’s the way it shall be.  Two days, around 17000, and not really trying as hard as the server’s resident glyph bandit who seems hellbent on running me off the server.  He’s even gone so far as to roll two level 1 bank alts in Darnassus¹ and he alternates between them.  I’m pretty sure glyph prices on Alleria would be a lot higher if not for his efforts.  Well, everyone wins; I sell in bulk, you get cheaper glyphs².

Even after stockpiling inks before the patch dropped, I went through every one of them before the end of the first day. I’m now out farming for herbs.  I HAVE heard that the ink trader still accepts Blackfallow ink, but that’s clearly not intended behavior, and is sure to go away at some point, and hopefully nobody gets punished for exploiting the bug, if bug it be.

The current bonanza is just a preview of day 1 of MoP. We’ll get access to Ink of Dreams, and have a use for Monk glyphs.  My suggestion – if you’re willing to take it – is to have your Monk glyphs made already, if possible.

Oh – and visit your trainer!  Learn those new glyphs!

1. OH HOW CLEVER. [↩]
2. And I haven’t even made a single “trickle down” joke yet. [↩]