Build 12857 brings in the glyphs

I know my beta reportage lately has been nothing short of abysmal, and I apologize for that. I finally got my lazy self back on there last night to check out the changes applied in the latest build that dropped earlier this week, as well as poke around with all the glyphs.

First things first, let’s talent about talent and spell changes. Here’s what’s pertinent to Prot:

The Vindication change isn’t that shocking, since they mentioned earlier their intention was we were not going to let us aoe-attack power debuff. The Grand Crusader change makes sense as well, since HotR was basically giving multi-fold chances to proc the effect over just Crusader Strike.

Sanctuary’s new damage reduction effect brings us in-line with the baked in damage reduction that other tanking specs currently enjoy with their respective tanking stances/forms. The wages of our tanking “stance” being usable by Holy or Ret.

And lastly, Consecrate is just getting slapped around a bit more as part of the tanking aoe nerf. Hurrah.

Oh, and apparently the Guardian of Ancient Kings animation is now in beta!

As for glyphs, I was excited to check out the new interface and all the new (not yet finalized) glyphs available for the class.

So, I logged onto my Draenei pally and attempted to fly to the nearest flight master (at the World Tree) to make my way to Dalaran in the most round-about way possible.

After three crashes while trying to enter the part of Hyjal where the world tree is, and a bug report later, I then just hearthed to the Exodar and fumbled around for some way to get to Stormwind. I then got hopelessly lost, huffed, puffed, and logged over to my Belf pally who was in Orgrimmar.

One zep later and I was up in Northrend. I flew my way over to Dalaran and found the various Glyph vendors outside of the Inscription building. I loaded up on all the Paladin ones and started learning them, one by one.

Many minutes later, I then happily opened my glyph window and found …

And nothing had changed. This begs the question: where are my glyphs, exactly?

I’m sure I missed some little trick to make them appear in beta, so playing musical chairs with them will have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, let’s look at the list of glyphs pertinent to our spec. Some of them are pretty cool.

Prime Glyphs

• Crusader Strike – Increases Crusader Strike’s crit chance by 5%
• Hammer of the Righteous – Increases the physical and Holy damage dealt by HOTR by 10%
• Judgement – Increases Judgement’s damage by 10%
• Shield of the Righteous – Increases ShoR’s damage by 10%
• Word of Glory – Increases Word of Glory’s healing by 10%

Major Glyphs

• Consecration – Increases Consecration’s cooldown and duration by 20%
• Dazzling Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now also dazes
• Divine Protection – Removes the physical damage reduction of your Divine Protection, but increase the magical damage reduction by 20%
• Focused Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now hits 2 fewer targets, but deals 30% more damage
• Holy Wrath – Your Holy Wrath now also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin
• Salvation – No longer reduces threat over time, but completely removes threat as long as the Glyph is active
• Seal of Truth – Increases expertise skill by 10 while Seal of Truth is active

Minor Glyphs

• Blessing of Kings – Reduces mana cost by 50%
• Blessing of Might – Increases duration by 20 minutes
• Lay on Hands – Reduces cooldown by 2 minutes
• Truth – Reduces Seal of Truth’s mana cost by 50%

In case you’ve missed the explanation given by Ghostcrawler, Prime Glyphs are meant to be obvious, useful glyphs that directly affect threat or damage taken (in our case), Major Glyphs are situational, and Minor Glyphs are more for quality of life or cosmetic changes.

I’ve already said in the past that in Cata I intend to dual spec a trash/threat spec and a boss/survival spec, and these glyphs (while not final) are totally playing into that.

I can see my threat spec using HotR, ShoR, and Judgement for Primes; Consecration, Seal of Truth, and Holy Wrath for Majors; and, well, Minors don’t matter in this scenario.

Contrawise, a survival spec would possibly use Crusader Strike or Judgement (depending on what does more threat), ShoR, and Word of Glory (assuming us using WoG in our rotation pans out) and then Seal of Truth, Focused Shield, and Consecration for Majors. Then, for say a magic-heavy fight, I could swap in Divine Protection instead of Consecration.

Of course, the glyph design is not anywhere near finalized. Case in point:

That Avenging Wrath glyph no longer exists. It’s far too obvious a dps increase to be a major under the new paradigm.

The Seal of Truth one is on the bubble. It’s still in for now, but it’s pretty much a no-brainer given the stat savings it offers.

Overall, I like the design of situational major glyphs, it makes character customization more interesting and cerebral than running around with the same three glyphs all the time.

Now, how about some minor glyphs that are actually interesting? Too much to ask for?