A blue poster has confirmed today that ink traders will be added to both Stormwind and Orgrimmar in patch 4.0.6:

Source

“Ink Traders are being added to Stormwind and Orgrimmar in 4.0.6.”

People have been requesting an ink trader be added to major cities since the start of Cataclysm, given that there are no longer portals available in Dalaran and since most people have their hearthstones set to either Stormwind or Orgimmar you’d have to find a mage to teleport you each time you need to craft glyphs and waste your hearth cooldown to get back.

I would be more excited about the news but for me it was never a big hinderance, I have engineering and with the Wormhole Generator: Northrend it was very easy for me to teleport over, I was even considering spending the 8,000g on the ring that teleports you directly to dalaran to save me from flying from storm peaks (since the wormhole generator doesn’t go directly to dalaran), good thing I didn’t now.

For me this is bad news as it may entice more people to get back into the inscription market since this reduces the effort or barriers to craft glyphs but I do see it as a positive change to the game as a whole.

The new ink traders can be found beside the Inscription Supplies vendors in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, you can also find them on the PTR right now.

Inscription is my main source of gold so far in Cataclysm. It only requires about an hour a day to pull in my profits but I wouldn’t get near this efficiency with my time without the proper addons to not only focus my efforts on the most profitable glyphs but to keep fully stocked on the AH at all times.

In this article I will go through the routine I use to craft glyphs and the addons I utilize in each of the steps. I learned a lot after reading WoW Schools guide and combined his methods there with these addons to make 4-5,000g profit a day.

1) Inventory Count – Altoholic

The first thing I do each day is log onto my 3 banking alts to empty the mailbox of any glyphs that have sold/expired and repost glyphs. This gives the addon Altoholic a chance to see what is in each of those characters bags/auction house so that it knows my inventory count of each glyph.

Download Altoholic

2) Scan the Auction House – Auctioneer

After your inventory has been accounted for you need to scan the whole auction house to know the current price of all glyphs. Using Auctioneer you can type in “/auc getall” and scan the AH within 3 minutes. This will update the price of every glyph so that you are only crafting glyphs above your acceptable profit margins.

Download Auctioneer

3) Queue Glyphs – KTQ, Skillet and LSWS

Now it’s time to craft, since our addons know our current inventory count and the price of all glyphs we can use Kev Tool Queue (KTQ) to only queue glyphs above a certain price. In order for KTQ to know the price it uses Lil’Sparkys Workshop’s database.

Right before you queue up your glyphs ensure that you have enabled KTQ’s price threshold:

/KTQ enable threshold

/ktq set threshold 60g    (This will only craft glyphs that are going for more than 60g each)

After you’ve enabled this, we are now ready to queue up all the glyphs in skillet with the command: /ktq queue 4 glyphs   (or however many you’d like to craft)

Download KTQ, Skillet, LSWS

4) Buy Materials – Auctionator + Skillet

Right after you type in the /ktq queue command you’ll see in your text window “Total added: 208″ or whatever amount of glyphs have been added. You’ll know that you need 3x that amount in inks to craft those glyphs, for 208 glyphs I’ll need to craft 624 inks which will take roughly 124 stacks of herbs or 2480 herbs.

Another great feature of skillet is that you can click on the Shopping List button and see exactly how much you need of every glyph, this is a great way to save lots of gold on your materials since a lot of the lower level herbs you can get much cheaper than Cataclysm herbs.

At this point I open the auction house and click on the Auctionator Buy tab and also have the shopping list open as well. I proceed to buy up low priced lower end herbs and cataclysm herbs, I know how many I need to buy by dividing the number of inks I need by 5 and then that is the amount of stacks of that specific herb I need (ex. if I need 30 ethereal inks = 30/5 = 6 stacks of herbs that can be crafted into ethereal inks- ancient lichen, dreaming glory, felweed, manathistle etc… all of these I have on shopping lists within auctionator)

Download Auctionator

5) Mill Herbs – Enchantrix

With all the herbs we bought from the auction house we’ll have to find a fast way to convert them into inks. The fastest way I found is to use the Enchantrix addon (which comes bundled with auctioneer).

To enable the addon type “/enchantrix config”, click on “automation” and click the check box “watch bags for disenchantable items”. This will automatically show a pop-up to confirm milling any herbs in your bags once they are higher than a stack of 5.

All you need to do then is click on confirm or to really speed things along make a macro with the command “/click AutoDEPromptYes” I bind this to my number 1 key and click away as I’m watching TV.

6) Craft the Glyphs – Skillet

It’s time to go through your entire crafting queue that you have set up. After you finished milling and crafting the inks you’ll want to convert the remainder of inks you require at jessica sellers. Another reason I really like skillet over the other crafting addons is the “buy reagents” tab that comes up if that vendor sells things that are currently on your shopping list, it will buy the correct quantity you need. Do the same for any parchments you need from the vendor right beside jessica.

With all the materials now in your bag you’re ready to start crafting glyphs. I have another macro I use to craft each item in my skillet queue “/click SkilletStartQueueButton”. Proceed to watch another TV show as the queue dwindles down.

7) Mail Glyphs to Posting Alts – Auction Profit Master

At certain times while you’re crafting glyphs you’ll notice that you’re inventory is getting full. You can either move items to your bank or you can automatically mail off items to your posting alts. If you are familiar with Quick Auctions 3, Zeroauctions or Auction Profit Master you’ll notice that you can type in a player name then set which item “groups” you want to automatically be mailed to those players.

For example, I have all my glyphs sorted out into 3 different groups, Glyph 1, Glyph 2, Glyph 3. I have Group 1 set to Alt 1, Group 2 to Alt 2 and so on, so when my inventory starts to get full on glyphs I just run to the mailbox and click the “Auction Profit Master: Auto Mail” and it sends off everything in a flash.

Download Auction Profit Master

Post Glyphs – Auction Profit Master

The best addon for posting glyphs is either Zeroauctions or Auction Profit Master. I personally use APM since the developer of ZA has stated there wouldn’t be on-going support for the addon in future patches, both are pretty much the exact same addon.

APM allows you to create groups where you set how much quantity to post at a time, the lowest and highest prices you’re willing to sell at. When you press the post button it’ll check what’s currently on the AH then post everything that meets your configs criteria.

For a video guide on most of these addons you should check out the gold addon guide I posted last year. If you have specific questions and want me to personally help you set up your addons you can reach me at our private gold forum, I’m always hanging around there answering questions.

Be sure to subscribe to WoW Confidential for free and get updates when a new article is posted.

Between WOTLK and Cataclysm the whole glyph market changed completely, we went from a commodity market where glyphs were constantly being bought up as players glyphed for different pvp/pve situations to a market where the sales are now much lower as each character needs to buy glyphs only once but prices are higher.

On this blog I share all my gold making strategies and which ones are generating the most income. This used to be an easy task as I was able to export my beancounter data into excel then use my excel mastery to sort it out in pivot tables/filters to make some pretty graphs and go about disecting the numbers in a post.

Unfortunately my previous method of exporting to excel doesn’t work anymore this has become more difficult, however I recently stumbled on an addon called My Sales which has been collecting data on my glyph sales in the past 2 weeks or so.

I hope that by seeing a list of my best selling glyphs you can ensure you are crafting these as well and pulling in profits, another method of figuring out which glyphs to craft is to use www.wowpopular.com and only crafting the most popular glyphs (although they could be the ones with the most undercutting and competition too)

Highest Profit Glyphs in Cataclysm

The first figure I’d like to share is which glyphs have given me the most profit per glyph, or the glyphs that sell the highest per unit on average. It would be safe to assume that these glyphs are the ones with the most demand and not much competition, or the current supply isn’t enough to cover the demand.

As the list shows above, my highest profitable glyphs are Glyph of Shockwave, Glyph of Hammer of Righteous, and Glyph of Ice Barrier. These glyphs are selling for 166-179g each, and given my costs are 55g each, I’m pulling in a profit of 111 – 123g each sale.

Best Selling Glyphs in Cataclysm

In this next list I’ll sort my glyph sales by quantity sold, keep in mind that I don’t sell any glyphs below 58g. When I look at the glyphs on this list I have to pay certain attention to the ones that sell in very high quantities and a high price, these are glyphs that are at risk of going out of stock and I may not be posting enough at a time to reap in the maximum profit.

Glyph of Word of Glory and Glyph of Berserk are glyphs that seem to sell consistently high and I sell a lot of them so I’ll take a look and make sure I’m not selling out of them before having the chance to post up more stock in my next cycle.

Glyphs that Earn Me The Most Gold

The last list we are going to look at are the glyphs that I’ve earned the most revenue from, so this is a combination of the quantity sold and the money per sale.

This list shows an example of  something like Glyph of Explosive Shot – in 6th/7th place on the other charts (neither near my highest profit per sale nor highest quantity sold) you can see that it ranks 2nd at the glyph that’s earned me the most revenue.

Are these lists consistent with the sales you’re experiencing on your servers?

The Darkmoon Faire is in town for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm and I took the opportunity to level from 485 inscription to max and have my hand at making gold with Cataclysm Darkmoon Cards.

Back in WOTLK I made a lot of gold by crafting darkmoon cards; the old Greatness, Illusion and Berserker cards and even then I was late to the party, I started crafting them after they were available for a year but I pulled in about 6,000g profit in one day crafting them. I found that crafting darkmoon cards were highly profitable after reading Markco’s 20k gold guide, he’s updated it with Cataclysm gold strategies I highly recommend it.

Last night after I dinged 525 inscription I put together a darkmoon card profitability spreadsheet and got to buying up materials and crafting cards, here’s how it turned out.

Figuring Out Profitability and Costs of Darkmoon Cards

Step one was to figure out my costs to craft each card and the value of the finished decks. You can check out my darkmoon card spreadsheet to see all the values but here’s the summary of my costs:

10x Inferno Ink

After leveling inscription I only had 6 inferno inks left over and I value my inferno inks at 200g per.

Out of a stack of a lower end Cata herb you can expect 5 blackfallow ink and 0.5 inferno inks, I sell my glyphs for a minimum of 65g each which gives me a value of 21.66g per blackfallow ink, if I get half an inferno ink also from that stack of herbs I would divide by 2 the value of inferno inks (200g) and add that to the value of the inks giving me = 21.66g x 5 inks from a stack + 100g for the 0.5 inferno ink = 208.3g. This means that I can pay up to 208g for a stack of lower end herb and be at cost, luckily I sell a lot of glyphs above my 65g threshold and you’ll see from my calculations later that I make a profit from the 200g value on the inferno inks.

30x Volatile Life

Paid on average 10g per Volatile life, costing me 300g per card. It would of been much cheaper if I had stocked up the previous week before the faire.

1x Resilient Parchment

Total cost to craft a card = 200g x 10 + 300g + 0.5g = 2300.50g

The next step is to find out the value of all the Darkmoon Cards to see what our average profit will be per card.

In Cataclysm there are 4 new decks

Hurricane Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of the Winds – turn in for Darkmoon Card Hurricane (AGI or STR)

Tsunami Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Waves – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Tsunami

Volcanic Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Embers – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Volcano

Earthquake Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Stones – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Earthquake

The way I designed my spreadsheet is to take the value of the completed deck and then divide that number by 8 (since you need 8 cards to make a deck and you have equal chance to get each card)

Since each deck has its own value you must average out the value across each card since you have an equal chance to get a card in any of the decks.

For Example: Darkmoon Card: Hurricane goes for 25,000g on my server, dividing that by 8 gives us a value of 3,125g for each card. On the other hand Darkmoon Card: Earthquake sells for 10,000g making each card worth 1,250g.

It is important to know the value of each of the different cards so you can set up snatch lists to buy hurricane cards (of the winds) for under 3,000g  or post them for sale if you see certain ones over that value.

Here are the values of the cards and the average on my server:

So the average of all those cards gives me 3,312g. I can expect over the long term making each card to eventually even out to that amount per card. Since I know my cost is 2,323g that means on average I should pull in a profit of 3,312g – 2,323g = 989g per card.

Making 12,000g In One Night of Darkmoon Card Crafting

I got to work crafting cards, seeing that I could make on average about 1,000g for every card I could craft.

I went ahead and bought up all the herbs I could for under 10g each (or under 14g each of the higher end herbs that give 1 inferno ink per stack), bought up volatile lifes under 12g and any inferno inks that were under 175g.

I made a total of 13 cards and these were the ones I ended up with:

Ace of the Winds – valued at 3,125g

Four of the Winds – 3,125g

Seven of the Winds – 3,125g

Ace of Waves – 5,750g

Four of Waves – 5,750g

Eight of Waves – 5,750g

Three of Embers x 2 – 6,250g total

Four of Embers – 3,125g

Six of Embers – 3,125g

Seven of Stones x 3 – 3,750g total

Total value from cards = 42,875g. Total Cost = 30,199g. Profit = 12,676g

I know the gold isn’t sitting in my mailbox yet, but it is safe to assume that I can get these prices for the cards as when the darkmoon faire leaves so will the supply of these cards as long as I sell them before the next darkmoon faire.

Not bad for 2 hours of work, there is another step to take though if you really want to make a big profit.

Buying and Selling Darkmoon Cards for Profit

Crafting the cards is just one side of the battle, if you know how the whole thing works you can spot which cards are in low supply and ones that are underpriced, this is more of a long term strategy but will pay off nicely as you finish off completed decks.

With the darkmoon card spreadsheet you know how much each card should be worth, if you make shopping lists in auctionator (see image below) or a snatch list for each card you can do a search each time you log on and buy up cards that are going for less than 20% of the value or sell off extra cards you have that are above 20%.

For example, I was only able to craft 13 cards and had 3 “of the waves” cards to make the Tsunami Deck, when I ran my shopping list search on all of the “of the waves” it showed that the Two of Waves and the Three of Waves were selling for 4,499g and 4,199g respectively. Since the value of the cards are 5,750g (since the Tsunami Deck sells for 46,000g on my server) I bought them up and right there made 2,802g profit there. They are cards I need to go towards making the Tsunami deck and I’ll keep my eye open for the Five/Six and Seven that I still need, I’ll even be able to use the profit difference to pay more for the cards I still need if I have to since I’ll still pull in a great profit if I can complete the deck.

It’s all about having the bigger picture in mind and reacting to the market needs, buy the cards that seem to be flooded at the moment in the market that you require and sell off cards that seem to be in really high demand or none are listed, charging a premium so that those who are desperate to finish off decks may be willing to pay 50% or double for a card to just get it now!

Good luck with your darkmoon card profits, I do recommend caution in stocking up on too many cards as the price will tapper off with each darkmoon faire (remember the price of Darkmoon Card: Greatness went down to about 4,000g average near the end of WOTLK) but there are large profits to be made if you keep track of your costs. Also be sure to check out Markco’s 20k gold guide for other tips like the one in this article.

I’ve been really grinding out glyphs the last couple days and I’ve noticed a peculiar pattern.

Given that the cost of cataclysm herbs are still inflated it is cheaper in most cases to buy the lower level herbs and craft them manually than to convert blackfallow inks into them.

However one thing I have noticed is that Ethereal Inks seem to be the most common ink in the glyphs that are selling and the herbs required to craft them are in very low supply and highly priced.

Very often I’ll run into situations where I need 150 inks of the sea, 110 ethereal inks and under 50 of the rest of the inks. When I go to purchase the herbs to create ethereal inks I always come across this kind of scenario:

At first glance this may not seem so bad, we are looking for a price of under 3g for each herb (which totals 36g cost to make a glyph, 4g would be 48g) this is displaying the lowest priced herb but when you narrow down to each specific herb list the supply is always very low:

2 auctions at 2g, another 7 at 3g 88s then the price jumps to 5g for 18 more…. on average I am needing around 150 ethereal inks a day which comes out to 600 herbs!

To solve this problem I’ve been using Cata herbs to convert to ethereal inks, it is unfortunate though as I’m able to find all the other lower end herbs for under 2g each usually which makes glyphs cost 24g opposed to the 50g that using cata herbs cost.

The reason I’m posting about this that I think it’s an opportunity as I’m sure most other scribes are running into this same problem, here are some ways you could potentially profit from this:

1) Convert cataclysm herbs into Ethereal Inks and sell on AH:

I am usually against supplying your own competitors with the materials needed to compete against you, however if you can make ethereal inks for about 25g per (when you consider the profit you get from the inferno inks you make with the left overs from milling cata herbs) then you can set a price of say 35g and make a nice profit there.

2) Use your herbalist and farm these following herbs:
dreaming glory
felweed
terocone
ragveil
ancient lichen
mana thistle
netherbloom
nightmare vine

since the average price is above 5g each, which is around the price of Cata herbs, you’ll have less competition and should be able to sell most of your stock.

Selling glyphs in WOTLK was highly profitable and was how I made my first 100,000g profit in WoW, however many things have changed since inscription first came out and since we are so early in Cataclysm there are a lot of factors to consider before making gold with glyphs again.

It was easy determining your ink costs back in WOTLK because you could just down convert all your inks of the sea and since adder’s tongue/icethorn could usually be found for cheaper than the lower level herbs it was always best for profit to just mass mill these herbs and convert them, especially since you also got snowfall inks that you could use in off-hands and runescrolls.

Things are different in cataclysm however, glyphs are “learned” so we aren’t experiencing the volume of sales we did in WOTLK but it also means we can charge a higher price. The market is inflated and the new herbs are required for the conversions at Jessica Sellers, obviously the new herbs though are in such high demand that the price has gone up so much. If you are careful though in determining your costs with the new herbs you can still pull in a nice profit with glyphs.

How To Get Cheap Mats To Make Glyphs

A few days ago I released a speadsheet and guide on how to level inscription from 450 – 525, I will be talking about some of the same concepts in this article as it is important to know the new herbs and the milling rates.

The basics of it are as follows:

Out of a stack (20x) the lower end Cataclysm herbs you will get 5 blackfallow inks and 0.5 inferno inks:

Cinderbloom
Stormvine
Azshara’s Veil
Heartblossom

From the higher end herbs, you’ll get 6 blackfallow inks and 1 inferno ink:

Whiptail
Twilight Jasmine
Deathspore Pod

The price of Cinderbloom and Stormvine on my server is around 8g each which is 160g/stack, meaning that it costs about 32g per blackfallow ink if you don’t include the 0.5 inferno inks you also get from the stack of herbs.

I choose to deduct the value of the inferno inks I get from my cost of blackfallow ink, currently inferno ink is selling for 280g each on my server, but I am a little conservative and put this value at 200.

So the new calculation on the price of my blackfallow ink would be =  (Stack of herbs – value of inferno ink) = (160g – (0.5 x 200)) = (160 – 100) = 60g / 5 blackfallow ink = 12g x 3 inks per glyph = 36g cost per glyph.

At a price of 8g each for lower end herbs, I can get blackfallow inks for 12g. Lets look at the higher end herb.

As I said earlier, a stack gives 6 blackfallow inks and 1 inferno ink, if we take the cost of the blackfallow ink from our lower end herbs, multiply it by how many blackfallow inks we get from higher end herbs and add the 200g cost of the inferno ink we’ll see the price at which we could buy higher end herbs and get the same cost per blackfallow as the lower end ones:

(12×6)+200 = 272g

For higher end herb, we can pay 272g for a stack of herbs and get our blackfallow ink for 12g each.. meaning that if prices of the higher end herbs are below that cost then it would be more profitable to buy them.

Buying Lower Level Herbs

It has been forever since I’ve actually bought lower level herbs to make inks but given the current situation with the inflated new herb costs it is more profitable in some cases.

We can totally ignore the rare pigments we get from the lower end herbs as they have no value and focus solely on the ink cost.

The average price on my server for a lower level herb is around 2g, there are different yields you get from milling just like the lower/higher end tier of each herb but the difference in price isn’t as dramatic.

Lets assume we get 5 inks from each stack of lower level herbs, at 40g/stack that’d mean our ink would cost 40/5 = 8g each x 3 inks per glyph = 24g cost per glyph. That is 12g cheaper than converting blackfallow ink to the lower level inks!

Fast Way To Find Cheap Lower Level Herbs

The only problem with this kind of bargain hunting with lower level herbs is the amount of time it takes to find what kind of herb you need for which inks and which herb is cheaper within that category.

I found two addons that are very useful to quickly find the cheapest lower level herbs:

1) The Summary Feature in Auction Profit Master:

If you click on the “summary” button when you are at the “Auctions” tab at the auction house, you’ll be able to run a scan on all herbs and it will list in order from highest lvl herb to lowest each price so you can clearly see which herbs are cheapest

These will list the lowest current herb price per herb.

2) Auctionator Shopping Lists

The current method I use is to make a seperate shopping list for each Ink level, lets take for example all the herbs that can be milled to make Ethereal Ink.

I clicked on “New Shopping List” then did a search for each herb that can be milled for ethereal ink and added it to the list using the + button beside the search button.

Now when you are on that list you can click “Search for All Items” and it’ll show you what the cheapest herbs are thus giving you a list of the cheapest way to get herbs to mill for that particular ink, make a shopping list for each ink that you regularly need to mill for.

I use this method to find the cheapest herbs, right now I set my KTQ (kevtool Queue) to not craft any glyphs lower than 60g and set my fallback price on APM to sell glyphs for 250g. I buy lower end cata herbs for around 8g and lower level herbs for 2g each or lower.

I also have an older article I wrote a year ago on this same topic, but as it applied to WOTLK and had some other neats tips in it too.

How have your profits been with glyphs so far in cataclysm?

Cataclysm is here, and while everyone is still making the mad dash to hit level 85 and gear up for heroics there are others with professions on their minds, particularly the high gold making profession inscription.

Inscription was my highest gold earner in Wrath of the Lich King, I earned my first 100,000g with it and it definitely provided me with a large profit for the remainder of the gold I needed to hit the cap.

There are pros and cons to leveling inscription this early in the expansion, prices of raw materials are super inflated and you’ll be paying 3-5x the cost for mats but the rewards are also high.. top level scribes can craft gear that many will be seeking when gearing up for heroics and since you’ll be one of few max level scribes you’ll have a chance to corner the market for a couple weeks until everyone else catches up.

In this guide I’ll be outlining some information first that you should be familiar with to help with your inscription business then I’ll provide my Inscription leveling spreadsheet so you can determine what the cheapest route is for you to level inscription in cataclysm.

Cataclysm Herbs

In order to get blackfallow inks and Inferno Inks to level up and craft items, we’ll need mill herbs. Here’s some key information of the cata herbs:

Each herb requires a minimum inscription skill to mill:

Just like in WoTLK, there are higher end herbs and lower level herbs that give different amounts of Ashen Pigments (Blackfallow Ink) and Burning Embers (Inferno Ink):

So Cinderbloom, Stormvine, Azshara’s Veil and Heartblossom are the lower end herbs while Whiptail, Twilight Jasmine and Deathspore Pod are the higher end.

The next step we’ll need to take is to figure out how much it costs to make blackfallow and inferno inks.

Material Costs to Craft Blackfallow Ink and Inferno Ink

This topic can be pretty controversial. Since most times you mill a stack of herbs you receive both ashen pigments and burning embers they both have different costs and it’s tough to put an exact value on each.

There are two ways you can go about valuating them:

1) Pricing Blackfallow Ink costs at herb price without considering Burning Ember’s

- With this method you totally disregard the burning embers you mill and assume that the cost of your blackfallow inks are by itself, for example:

On my server these are the current prices of herbs

Knowing the prices we can combine this table with the one above, if a stack of Cinderbloom costs 140g and out of that you get 4 mills, that means on average you’ll get 4 x 2.5 = 10 Ashen Pigments and 4 x 0.25 = 1 Burning Embers. Each Ink requires 2 of each pigment/ember so we’ll end up with 5 Blackfallow Inks and 0.5 Burning Embers.

So out of a 140 stack of Cinderblooms we’ll get 5 Blackfallow Inks which makes it cost 28g per Blackfallow Ink.

2) Deducting the value of Inferno Inks from out total cost to make Blackfallow Inks

The other method in finding out your blackfallow ink costs is to deduct the value of the burning embers (or inferno inks) from the cost of the stack of herbs.

If Inferno Inks sell for say 150g on our server, and you get 0.5 of them per lower end stack of herbs, that means you can deduct 150 x 0.5 = 75g from the cost of our herbs since that’ll be recuperated when we either sell the Inferno Inks or use it as a raw material in an item and sell it that way.

I use this method #2.

Now that we know the cost of our materials we can go about finding the cheapest way to level inscription.

Cheapest Way To Level Inscription in Cataclysm

I don’t believe in providing a step by step, craft this and craft that type of leveling guide as prices for materials will vary by server.. and I believe that you learn a lot more when  you put a bit of thinking into the process and where all the materials come from.

The approach I like to take is to put everything that is craftable into a spreadsheet, link the materials to values in another area and it will populate how much it costs to level each skill point up depending on the recipe.

Here are the prices from my server and the skill points they award, I took a portion of this chart from el’s professions:

The first column after recipe name is the cost per skill point in gold, this considers items that give multiple skill points per craft. The next columns are what level is becomes craftable (orange) then yellow, green and the last column is grey where it no longer gives you points. Keep in mind that multiple skill points per craft are only awarded on recipes that are still Orange difficulty to you.

You’ll notice that after 500 skill points things start to get very expensive, about 550g per skill point! I plan on leveling inscription to 500, enchanting my shoulders 5 times (or how many are required to get to 505 skill) then making forged documents daily (since it’s on a cooldown) until the prices of materials drop down.

If you aren’t level 84 yet and haven’t done the twilight zone quest, you’ll be unable to buy the vendor items Scavenged Dragon Horn, Deathwing Scale Fragment, Bleached Jawbone , Silver Charm Bracelet and Preserved Ogre Eye. You can either get a friend who is lvl 84 to go buy it from the vendor in the twilight zone or buy it from the auction house as it isn’t BoP.

Inscription Leveling Spreadsheet

You can download the inscription leveling spreadsheet I’m using here, there you can input your own servers prices and see which recipes are the cheapest to craft per skill point. I released this spreadsheet a few days ago to my private forum members so be sure to sign up there if you’re interested in asking me directly for any advice or want first access to any future tools or information before it comes on the blog.

This is a draft version of the spreadsheet and I’ll be updating it as time goes on. Good luck with your leveling!

Some people I regularly talk about the wow economy with have mentioned that the Darkmoon Card of the North now only requires 1 eternal life to craft, down from 3.

Darkmoon cards used to be a profitable way to use up all those left over snowfall inks but as time went on the value of the darkmoon trinket, which has been around since the start of wrath, was losing its status.

News that the insane achievement will still be obtainable in cataclysm is good news to scribes as we will have a way to still sell darkmoon cards for those looking to increase their rep.

Darkmoon Card Profitability

Eternal lifes used to go for around 20g, the price has now dropped to 7g 50s on my server.

With the lower material requirements and the fact that inks of the sea are less valuable as they cannot be converted for all lower inks, heres the current costs and profit levels on my server:

Cost to make each card:

Snowfalls are practically worthless, but sell at an average of 6g on my server.

Snowfalls = 6g x 6 = 36g (old cost 12g x 6 = 72g)

Eternal Life = 7g 50s (old cost 20 x 3 = 60g)

Resilient Parchment = 50s

Total: 44g (old price to craft was 132.50g)

On my server the price for the following decks are as follows:

Darkmoon Card: Greatness = 1,137g (142g per card)

Darkmoon Card: Death = 849g (106g per card)

Darkmoon Card: Illusion= 560g (70g per card)

Darkmoon Card: Berserker= 800g ( 100g per card)

but the main value after Cataclysm will be keeping cards in their basic form such as Nobles, Chaos, Undeath and Prism decks so players can turn them in for rep. However they may remain as a good trinket for new players leveling from 80 – 85 that didn’t raid in WOTLK.

Nobles Deck = 3328g (416g per card)

Unfortunately my auctioneer data hasn’t seen a Prisms/Undeath or Chaos deck since I’ve reset it.

If we average up all the darkmoon card totals we get an average of 104g 50s per deck, with a cost of 44g = 60.5g profit per craft.

See how many decks/cards you can sell and keep in mind that if eternal lifes are above 10g on your server you should cross reference the cost of frozen orbs that you can easily convert to lifes.

After logging on for patch 4.0.3 I spent some time visiting various vendors. We know that Jessica Sellers only converts Blackfallow inks now instead of inks of the sea.

However another surprising vendor change I noticed is that Enchanting Vellums are sold by the Enchanting Supplies vendor Ildine Sorrowspear for 9s 50c.

No More Vellum Profits for Scribes

This change removes an income stream for scribes, vellums used to be my 3rd highest income earner as I would usually sell around 100 vellums a day at 6g each (2g cost to craft) so 400g profit a day.

It is a bummer whenever one of abilities you have exclusive for your profession is made obsolete.

The upside to this is that enchanters will now have lower costs to make scrolls, although it might also increase competition since it lowers the barriers to entry of making scrolls. It was nice having a scribe alt to make all my vellums for my enchanter which I knew other enchanters didn’t have the luxury of.

Flip Enchanting Vellums for Profit on the AH

In the meantime there is no harm in trying to profit from this change. Some players might not figure out this change and still go to the auction house for their vellums, so what I’m trying is flipping the vendor vellums on the AH, buy them for 10s each and sell them for 2g 50s.

I’d also recommend stock piling up on vendor vellums just in case this was a change not meant to go live and might be reverted.

MMO-Champion and WoW Insider are both speculating that 4.0.3 is going to hit servers live tomorrow.

In 4.0.3 according to the PTR Jessica Sellers will no longer allow you to convert inks of the sea into any other ink you want, meaning that if you usually keep a large stockpile of inks of the sea like I do and just convert when you need to, you’re going to be in a tight situation and having to buy the lower end herbs which will skyrocket your costs to make glyphs.

If you have read this before servers have gone down then I strongly suggest that you stock up on equal amounts of other inks with your inks of the sea so you don’t get stuck!

Expect the prices of lower end herbs to rise and Adder’s Tongue/Lichbloom/Icethorn and other northrend herbs to begin to drop.