To make a glyph, at least the lower level ones, you need different types of ink and parchment. A few types of parchment can be purchased at a vendor, but the inks need to be crafted from milled herbs. This makes inscription and herbalism go together quite well, as you can mill the herbs you pick up to fashion the inks required for glyphs.
Milling herbs is easy; you just click the mill icon then click on an herb stack and if you've got enough, the process will kick out a pigment. If you're beginning with inscription you'll mill peacebloom, earthroot, and silverleaf to yield alabaster pigment, used to make the lowest level inks. The next tier up requires mageroyal, briarthorn, swiftthistle, bruiseweed, or stranglekelp to be milled into dusky pigment, and occasionally pumps out a rarely obtained verdant pigment, which are then used to turn into different kinds of ink.
Those who take up inscription get the added advantage of creating vellums, parchments enchanters can target with enchants to store for later use. This makes pairing enchanting with inscription useful as you can dump enchants onto a vellum and put the resulting scroll on the auction. So sure, it'll be expensive to continually buy herbs on the auction house if you pass on an herbalism pairing, but being able to sell enchants as items is a nice alternative for enchanters tired of having to shout out advertisements in crowded city centers.
New System: Achievements
An interesting addition to the game in that they have little to do with the actual gameplay. Like achievements earned through Xbox Live on Microsoft's console, tasks and goals you complete in the game earn you a points that feed into a total score. The notifications you receive for completing an achievement bear a very similar appearance to the Xbox Live or Steam counterparts as, once you complete the appropriate task, they blossom onto the bottom of your screen with an accompanying sound effect. It's a satisfying notification, something designed along the lines of the level up sound and visual effect that adds that extra level of a sense of accomplishment.
It's a pony!So what do the achievement points actually count for, aside a prompt for your guild chat channels to get flooded with %26quot;gratz%26quot; notifications? Well, it's not as significant as Lord of the Rings Online's Deed system or Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning's Tome of Knowledge. All three systems require players to complete similar kinds of goals. Exploration, for instance, is one aspect they all share in common. In Lord of the Rings Online you get statistic bonuses in the form of trait upgrades from exploring the required portions of a zone, and in Warhammer Online you can get experience bonuses. In World of Warcraft, the exploration bonuses occasionally net you titles (like in Lord of the Rings Online), tabards, mounts and a few other things.
With the %26quot;For the Alliance!%26quot; achievement, players must kill the leaders of the Horde; that includes Thrall in Orgrimmar, Cairne Bloodhoof in Thunder Bluff, Lady Sylvanas Windrunner in the Undercity, and Lor'themar Theron in Silvermoon City. Getting all this done, which is no small task, nets you individual achievements for each kill and unlocks the %26quot;For the Alliance!%26quot; achievement, which rewards you with a Black War Bear mount. There are easier achievements as well, such as reaching level 70, getting a haircut, and getting a tabard, but only the more challenging and time-consuming tasks net rewards.
In the game right now are achievements for content in what's termed %26quot;classic%26quot; World of Warcraft, which includes the original release content of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, as well as listings for The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. In anticipation of the expansion's release, it's been interesting to see so many players charge back through old content, like clearing %26quot;classic%26quot; dungeons such as Shadowfang Keep, Deadmines, and Gnomeregan, all in the interest of bolstering achievement point totals and securing bragging rights as they toy with yet another cog in the grinding machine.
This place looks friendly.
Easier pre-Wrath of the Lich King Content
Blizzard took steps with its 2.3 patch to allow new players to level from 20 to 60 much more quickly, and giving out bigger experience bonuses for quests ranging from 30 through 60. The idea was to allow newcomers and longtime players to get to the new 60 to 70 Outland content much faster with new characters. And now, after the Echoes of Doom 3.0.2 patch, Blizzard pulled off something quite similar, making the process of getting from 60 to the 70 cap much faster. The goal, naturally, is to make it as painless as possible for the entirety of the player base to get to the required levels to enjoy the content in Wrath of the Lich King and, ideally, make it less of a pain for Death Knights, who start at level 55, to reach the new continent of Northrend.
If you're one of those who never was able to make it all the way to a level cap, either pre-Burning Crusade or afterwards, Blizzard's made it so there's no better time than now.