Inscription is the newest profession in World of Warcraft, made available in the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion with patch 3.0.2.
This guide will walk you through the basics of inscription and then to the advanced steps I took over my 3 month journey making 200,000g with inscription. Skip to the “Making Gold With Inscription” section below.
Players who decide to pick up inscription (known as scribes) can create a variety of items that are useful to players:
Glyphs
There are major and minor glyphs that players can inscribe into slots under the talent window tab – Glyphs. These provide benefits to a characters abilities.
Each player has 3 Major Glyph slots and 3 Minor Glyph slots. You start off at level 1 with zero glyph slots and progress as follows:
Level 15: +1 Major Glyph, +1 Minor Glyph
Level 30: +1 Major Glyph
Level 50: + 1 Minor Glyph
Level 70: +1 Minor Glyph
Level 80: + 1 Major Glyph
Vellums – Armor Vellums and Weapon Vellums
Vellums are used by enchanters to place enchantments on so that they can create scrolls.
These scrolls allow enchanters to place their enchants for sale on the auction house.
There are 3 different levels of Vellums for Armor and Weapon:
Weapon Vellum
Weapon Vellum II
Weapon Vellum III
Armor Vellum
Armor Vellum II
Armor Vellum III
Off-Hands
Various offhands can be created by scribes that are BoE and thus can be sold on the auction house. Click here if you want to see the full list but the two max level off-hands have a lvl 77 requirement and are:
Darkmoon Cards
Darkmoon cards can be crafted to turn into very powerful trinkets used by level 80’s, some of these have remained BiS trinkets throughout all of WOTLK and are also picked up by new level 80’s as a great head start in gearing up.
There are 4 different types of cards that can be created and each need 8 cards from Ace – Eight of each type to complete into a deck. This deck then starts a quest that is turned into an NPC at the Darkmoon Faire which only occurs once a month for 7 days.
Players also buy up these cards to gain up to Exalted reputation with the Darkmoon Faire, which is a requirement in the achievement Insane in the Membrane.
Darkmoon Card: Greatness (Comes in +90 STR, AGI, INT and SPR versions, you can choose when turning in quest) – Requires Ace – Eight of Nobles
Darkmoon Card: Illusion – Requires Ace – Eight of Prisms
Darkmoon Card: Death – Requires Ace – Eight of Undeath
Darkmoon Card: Berzerker! – Requires Ace – Eight of Chaos
Powerleveling Inscription
If you want to get an idea of how much it’s going to cost you to powerlevel inscription, check out this post:
- Cost of Powerleveling Inscription and Other Professions
This is a post I made while I was leveling inscription, I found the cheapest way to go about it and how to make a profit at the same time. Keep in mind that it is usually cheaper to have a higher level friend turn Inks of the Sea to Jessica Sellers in Dalaran to the lower level inks you need but I didn’t have someone to do this:
- Cheapest Way to Level Inscription
WoW-Professions.com has a great inscription leveling guide that I used to hit 450 inscription:
Making Gold With Inscription
Inscription can be a very lucrative profession to make gold with as glyphs are constantly in demand from players who swap out glyphs to test out new builds or when patches buff/nerf certain glyphs. Although your glyph set-up will remain when you change dual specs, many players will continue to swap out glyphs for specific boss encounters to min/max.
Over the course of 3 months I started at 0 inscription skill and 5,000g and gained 200,000g with inscription alone. I have written a lot of articles during that time on how to successfully start and operate your own inscription business.
Here are those posts in an organized fashion and everything I learned during my months of utilizing inscription.
Inscription Addons
You will need to get addons to compete properly to manage crafting, posting and other ways to streamline your inscription business.
- 7 Essential Inscription Addons
You’ll definitely need a way to get mail quickly as you’ll eventually be posting hundreds and eventually around 1500 glyphs at a time. When you need to do a cancel/repost cycle that will be around 700 glyphs you need to collect from your mail box:
- Fast way to Automatically Collect Mail from Mailbox
Also you’ll need a macro to mill as you’ll be doing a lot of that as a scribe. If you have Auctioneer there is already an option in the “Enchantrix” configuration that will automatically mill any herbs in your bag.
Crafting and Items to Make for Profit
In order to increase your profits you’ll need to source your herbs at the lowest price possible:
- How to get Cheap Herbs and Hiring Farmers
I found that milling and crafting was about 20% faster in lower populated zones
- Craft 20% Faster in Lower Populated Zones
During Patch 3.3 Inscription was my highest gold earner out of all my gold making methods. In this post I outline all my best selling inscription items and the highest profits/sales breakdown. This is exactly what I crafted to make gold with inscription.
- How I Make Gold in WoW 3.3.2
Darkmoon Cards and Snowfall Inks
As you mill you’ll end up with a lot of extra snowfall inks that you will be trying to get rid of, the 2 main ways to do this is invest them into Runescrolls of Fortitude of Darkmoon Cards, here’s some information on that:
- 6,000g Profit in One Day Selling Darkmoon Cards
- How to Calculate Darkmoon Card Profit
- Results of Crafting 163 Darkmoon Cards
Dealing With Competitors and Undercutters
One of the hardest parts of inscription is dealing with competitors and players constantly undercutting your auctions right when you list them (known as Auction House Campers). Here’s how I dealt with them:
- Dealing With Undercutters and Competition on the Auction House
That is the end of the guide. Markets constantly shift and the way to earn gold from inscription today could change in a future patch update so I’ll be constantly posting new articles on those shifts as I still make gold with this profession.
You can always find the latest inscription articles here in reverse chronological order. I will be adding key information to this guide as well as things change. Please forward any questions/comments you have about this guide to this post.
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