I’m disappointed. If you haven’t seen this announcement, here’s a link to worldofraids and their summary of the information. I need to shut my mouth. Every time I say that a feature is good, it gets axed.

So Long Guild Talents

One of the two banner features of the expansion was the new Guild Progression and talent system. The feature will still exist in some form, but the feature won’t be as pro as they originally planned. We’ll still get guild experience for doing raids, however the perks will be mandatory and there won’t be any choice involved.

If you’ve been playing for a while, you’ve no doubt noticed the current glut of guilds. Everybody has a raiding guild and thinks they can manage raids, qualified or not. Since Burning Crusade, there are so many guilds that recruitment is impossible and 10-man raiding guilds are becoming a norm. I was hoping that the guild talent system would separate the good guilds from the mismanaged ones and give players incentive to stick in one place and not switch guilds at the drop of a hate. If the guild could provide players with some other innate value other than managing raids, people would be less apt to gquit for silly reasons.

Path of the Titans GONE

Secondly, Path of the Titans has been axed. This was one of the big banner features in the original expansion teaser trailers. Path of the Titans was supposed to be a new alternate advancement system and character customization opportunity; their redesigned take on the original hero class ideas. With Path of the Titans gone, Archeology is going to be a useless afterthought; relegated to crappy visual items which are probably going to be similar to the useless trivialities given out for holidays. It took me less than 5 seconds to decide hat Archeology is going to be useless and not worth the time and cost to level. Less than 5 seconds to go from a banner features to an annoyance; GG.

Since Path of the Titans is gone, they felt they needed to throw us all at least a small bone for taking away such a talked-about feature. So, they’re going to enhance the Glyph system. But wait, shouldn’t they have already been doing this as a part of the general profession upgrade for Cataclysm; like every other profession is getting. The answer is, yes, you know that this was probably in the works anyways. They’re only mentioning it as a fallback because they eliminated PotT.

OMG Fix Inscription

I’ve mentioned several times that I think Inscription is a broken profession, and I have zero confidence that this will improve it or fix the problems associated with it. Inscription has little money-making value. To make money off Glyphs and such, you have to literally sit in front of the AH all freaking day, making a few gold here and there off the glyphs your auction spamming. I hear they have a little new app that can help you, all Scribe should go out and purchase mobile auction house service! Ca-ching Ca-ching, $15\month in Activision’s pockets.

Here’s what I think they should do; first off, remove Minor Glyphs, they’re irrelevant and useless. Most minor glyphs suck. For Death Knights, we have 3 useful minor glyphs; most sites quite all three no matter what your spec is. There’s no possible variation that’s provides and different value to us. According to these announcements, they have no plans to change them.

Secondly, Inscription provides some value in the form of Shoulder Enchants, however it has little money-making value. Everyone can make glyphs, I’m betting most players have Scribes, everyone has the potential to spam the auction house with low-priced glyphs and try to make money. Inscription needs some value that it can provide to others; such as epic craftable recipes that require whatever the current equivalent is of Frozen Orbs or Runed Orbs. Make a few droppable recipes like Enchanting. Another option would be to make some of the popular Major Glyphs require these crafting materials.

Blizzard Doesn't Like Bloggers

Blizzard isn’t doing me any favors as a blogger, so I feel no reason to hold back my opinions. I don’t really think they like criticism. Just look at how they screwed over my man Skeleton Jack. I don’t really mention him here. I don’t think he knows or cares that there are other Death Knight blogs besides his; He doesn’t link to me; so I’m in no hurry to link or mention him. But, I’ll make an exception this one time.

He recounts a story about how he was all set to get into the Cataclysm Alpha, but was blocked in the final hour because they told him “they don’t allow bloggers or media types to participate in NDA-related activities” like alphas and betas and such.

It’s pretty inflammatory to me that Blizzard intentionally excludes us, the people that help to spark interest in their products. They want you as the consumer, but don’t care about the community that assists the players in understanding the game. Doesn’t that seem counter-productive to you. Oh, and this policy seems to make a huge exception for BRK; whose blog is read by gazillions more than mine or the Skelinator.

As a fellow blogger, I feel for people when I hear how Blizzard treats bloggers. I know they don’t care about me, and would probably be happy if I canceled this domain name; all the more reason to give my accurate analysis and opinions on the game.

$$ is the Bottom Line

This has been one huge side-track. I think that this recent announcement has everything to do with the bottom line. Somebody somewhere is forcing the developers to put a date on the shipping of the expansion; which is HIGHLY un-blizzard-like. Blizzard is known for slipping release dates when they can’t get stuff done in time. In this case, a shall we say, outside source is forcing their hand to commit to a release date. Consequently, some of their announced and looked after features won’t make the cut.

Inscription isn’t necessarily a Death Knight topic, but since it came out as part of Wrath of the Lich King, many people who created Death Knights made them scribes to take advantage of the new profession. We’ve had almost an entire expansion to see what Blizzard would do with the profession and I have to say that I’m not impressed.

My hope was that they’d continue to develop the profession as we went along, and I hope they continue to do so in Cataclysm.

I’ve been playing my Death Knight as my main since the beginning of Lich King. I’ve been faithfully doing my daily Inscription quest for about 50% of my playing time. Right now, my Inscription is sitting at 449, and I have to say that I have to desire one way or the other if I hit 450 at the moment.

My main criticism of Inscription is that being a max level scribe gives you zero benefit, no patterns, nothing requires 450. It gives me little incentive to max out. I could easily have ground a few darkmoon cards and gotten the point, but I just don’t care at this point.

I don’t think that Blizzard has correctly positioned Inscription as a major profession. There are many many useless glyphs and while they’ve added new glyphs since launch, they added them using the hockey book mechanic which I hate. Right now, a Book of Glyph Mastery is about 70g on the AH. I’m not sure if I want to pay that for a glyph that will either be useless, or will sell for a max of 3 or 4g a pop.

My second problem is that unlike other professions, there isn’t much prospect for making money using Inscription. Most inscriptions are junk, some will sell for 3-4g. The problem is, for a few gold profit, you have to make a significant time investment to manage multiple auctions. The time spent, versus the little profit, makes Inscription a loser.

If I were to try to make suggestions to fix Inscription, I would consider several things. First, Inscription doesn’t really have anything that can be sold. Yes, the tomes are there, but they’re bad; really bad. Only a fresh 80 alt would want them, and prolly not even them. Add some craftable recipes that use premium components and can be sold for a decent amount per unit. I would even like to see some Glyphs that would have used Frozen Orbs and been a slightly larger investment. I would have been a fan of making some of the more important glyphs a larger investment, on the 50-75 gold range.

Finally, I think that Inscription could have used some BoP or BoE boss-dropped recipes; like enchanting, or one of the armor professions. Raid-dropped recipes would have been a plus.

I’ll eventually hit 450, but I’m not going out of my way to do it. I’ve been 449 for months. I would like to see this profession evolve a bit more in Cataclysm. If Blizzard wants to keep it worth leveling, they need to make some changes.