Locked and Loaded: Legion Hunter glyphs and tomes

The glyph system is changing quite a bit in Legion. For starters, there is no longer any distinction between major or minor glyphs because they are 100% cosmetic. Second, glyphs are now consumable, meaning you’ll have to keep stacks of them if you plan on changing them frequently. Lastly, they are now applied directly to the ability in question rather than in a separate glyph interface.

Today, there are several glyphs that aren’t strictly cosmetic but also don’t add any real power to your character (such as the Glyph of Fireworks). To accommodate these, Blizzard is adding class tomes or manuals to permanently teach you abilities such as this. Most major glyphs are gone for good, and Hunters definitely lost a few critical ones.

Hunter glyphs

Even though there is no longer a limit on how many glyphs you can use at once (other than one per ability), there aren’t very many of them available to take advantage of this change. I hope what we have so far is just the beginning and that Blizzard will expand the selection of glyphs in future patches.

Beast Mastery glyphs

• Glyph of the Dire Stable is definitely my favorite glyph of the lot. It came as a direct result of early alpha feedback from Hunters (including myself) who weren’t happy with the focus on random beasts for Beast Mastery. This glyph causes your Dire Beast ability to summon pets from your stable instead of random beasts. It still summons random beasts occasionally (I don’t know the exact number, but I’d guess around 20% of the time), but usually it’s your own pets. It will summon from both your active pet list or from your stable. Dire Beast is now a rotational ability, so you’ll be seeing your stabled pets constantly. It’s like a new surprise every time you use it. Hunters with full stables are going to love this glyph and never take it off. The one thing I would change is to make it summon your stabled pets 100% of the time, but I guess I can live with occasional random beasts from the current zone popping in from time to time.
• Glyph of Nesingwary’s Nemeses causes your Dire Beast to sometimes summon beasts featured in past Nesingwary quests. This includes quests from all of the expansions, from classic WoW to Legion. There is a great variety of beasts to be seen and I find myself summoning new ones all the time. You still summon standard Dire Beasts most of the time, the Nesingwary beasts are just there to break it up and add some flavor.
• Glyph of Arachnophobia, also known as the Glyph of Nope, causes your Dire Beast to sometimes summon spiders instead of regular Dire Beasts. There’s a good variety of creepy crawlers here, and as someone who has no spiders in his stable at all, I can tell you this glyph is never going in my bags.

Marksmanship glyphs

• Glyph of the Bullseye changes your Hunter’s Mark visual from the standard arrow graphic to the bullseye graphic. It’s nice being able to customize this, but since Marksmanship only got Hunter’s Mark glyphs I have to say it’s kind of underwhelming. Hunter’s Mark does not usually stay on the target very long because the whole point of marking is so you can cast Marked Shot (which removes the mark). In an earlier alpha build, there was a glyph that changed Arcane Shot from purple to blue, but it was removed for some reason.
• Glyph of the Skullseye changes the Hunter’s Mark visual to an arrow with a skull on it. This is a new graphic I haven’t seen previously and I think it’s the one I will be using.

Survival glyphs

• Glyph of the Headhunter changes your Hatchet Toss graphic from axes to little javelins. Hatchet Toss is a ranged ability for Survival that does hardly any damage, but can be helpful for pulling or tagging.
• Glyph of the Hook changes your Harpoon ability to look like a grappling hook instead of your currently equipped weapon. I can only hope that this one is still a work in progress as the graphic is so brief that taking a screenshot is difficult, and it just doesn’t look nearly as nice as using your weapon for the job.
• Glyph of the Trident changes your Harpoon to a trident instead of your currently equipped weapon. The only way I could see this one was to record some video and play it back in slow motion! Assuming the graphics improve (and there’s no reason to think they won’t), these Harpoon glyphs could be pretty neat. There’s just not much to show right now.

General glyphs

• Glyph of Stellar Flare essentially changes the color of your Flare graphic from red to blue. Flare has been changed slightly in Legion. Instead of just lighting up the ground, the Flare itself can be seen falling to the ground over the 20-second duration so that you can visually see when it’s about to burn out. This glyph simply changes the color of the falling part of the Flare.
• Glyph of the Goblin Anti-Grav Flare changes your flare graphic to a goblin rocket that slowly falls to the ground. This one looks really cool.
• Glyph of Lesser Proportion reduces the size of your pet by 15%. This is applied on a per-pet basis instead of to all your pets globally (and remember, glyphs are now consumable).

The big stand outs for me are the Dire Beast glyphs and Glyph of the Goblin Anti-Grav Flare. Some of the others are comparatively underwhelming, if you ask me. However, I feel like there is enormous potential with this new glyph system, and I hope Blizzard doesn’t just leave it at this. I hope one day we can customize the majority of our abilities and talents in some way. Even something simple like changing the color of projectiles adds a lot to the character customization experience in my opinion.

Tomes and Pet Training Manuals

There were a handful of old glyphs that actually added new abilities, and tomes are how Blizzard is bringing some of these back. These are currently purchased from vendors for a small amount of gold.

• Pet Training Manual: Fetch brings back the Fetch ability for your pet. A handy little ability that lets your pet do all the looting for you. This can be purchased in Trueshot Lodge for 50 gold.
• Pet Training Manual: Play Dead puts a new twist on the old glyph. This time, instead of your pet feigning death when you do, you get separate control with the Play Dead ability. This button transforms to Wake Up when your pet is playing dead. I’m sure there will be a few situations where it will come in handy to not have it tied to the Hunter’s own Feign Death ability. This can be purchased in Trueshot Lodge for 50 gold.
• Fireworks Instruction Manual teaches you the Fireworks ability. This is sold by the engineering trainer in Dalaran for 50 gold (you do not need to be an engineer to learn it).
• The Art of Concealment teaches you the Aspect of the Chameleon ability. This is similar to the old Aspect of the Beast, making you untrackable for 1 minute on a 3-minute cooldown. I haven’t been able to locate where this tome is purchased or found yet.

What was lost

As for what we lost via the transition to this new system, I have to say that I won’t miss the majority of it. There are, however, 3 glyphs that I am really feeling the sting of missing.

• Glyph of Disengage made one of my favorite Hunter things even better. I know it was only about 10 extra yards, but I notice it every time I Disengage on the beta. I would pay a ridiculous sum of gold to get a tome that made my Disengage like this again.
• Glyph of Misdirection was a must for any sort of soloing. I was really hoping Blizzard would just make the functionality of this glyph a baseline, at least for Beast Mastery.
• Glyph of Mending not being available is only exacerbating an ongoing problem on the beta, which is pet survivability. Currently, pets are fragile (especially as Ferocity spec) and this glyph used to make Mend Pet more than twice as powerful, which would be helpful right about now. Again, it seems like another one of those things Beast Mastery should just have. This glyph always felt like a borderline requirement to me outside of raiding.

A lot of things are being purged in Legion, so I suppose it could’ve been worse. I’m more excited for the potential of this new glyph system than what’s there so far, but that is dependent on Blizzard expanding on it in the future.