Friday, September 3, 2010

Cataclysm Glyph Changes

Thanks to Keeva for making the first post I saw about this.

I've lamented before about the role of hybrids in WoW, and the fact that despite playing the single most versatile class in the game, I am not any more versatile than any other player during a raid - I am locked into my spec, gear, and glpyhs, and even with the most closely related pair - dual feral - I cannot effectively switch between the two during a fight, because even if I make the spec changes to have the minimum required talents for each, I can't change the glyphs or gear that push each into the realm of competitive with other classes.

The blue post announced that glpyhs will no longer be consumable - once learned, they will  be interchangeable and available in the glyphs interface.  While it doesn't address some of my issues with hybrid-ness, I do see great possibilities from it.

With this announcement... well, we still can't change things mid-fight, *but* we will, I think, be able to share one spec and carry only gear (not stacks and stacks of glyphs) to switch back and forth, and have a sliding bar of how far we can go from one spec to the other that is easy (relatively) to manage, rather than requiring multiple addons and piles of glyphs to keep up with.

In my personal case, it *might* allow me to revert to a feral/resto spec setup.  If it's not too hard to get required talents for both from the talent tree, I can change glyphs when needed, and I'm already carrying 3 gear sets around at all times.

Maybe I'm being a little optimistic, and maybe I'm reading a little too much into this announcement, but this has me even more excited than I already was for Cataclysm.  I just hope EA has had the time to work out killing the Lich King by then.

2 comments:

  1. I'm looking for the opportunity to go back to the BC era feral where I can play off-tank / dps. I think it may be possible with the new system.

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  2. Finwe, after playing with it a bit, I think it really depends more on the design of the encounters than it does the talents - the new system does make it more manageable/palatable, BUT the encounter design in Wrath involved a lot of tank-swapping and such on the boss. As such, there were very few fights where there was a distinct MT and OT. All the tanks had to be capable of standing in front of the boss, instead of one tank being a little more squishy but only needing to handle adds. In this environment, you can't take enough points from bear-strict talents to put in to cat talents to make kitty worthwhile, and vice versa - you need too much survivability.

    I hope I'm wrong, as I would love to find the spec space to heal again, but it doesn't look like it can really happen again.

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