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:
| Herb | Skill |
| Cinderbloom | 425 |
| Stormvine | 425 |
| Azshara’s Veil | 450 |
| Heartblossom | 450 |
| Whiptail | 475 |
| Twilight Jasmine | 475 |
| Deathspore Pod | 500 |
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):
| Herb | Ashen Pigment Per Mill | Burning Embers per Mill | Blackfallow Inks Per Stack | Inferno Inks Per Stack |
| Cinderbloom | 2.5 | 0.25 | 5 | 0.5 |
| Stormvine | 2.5 | 0.25 | 5 | 0.5 |
| Azshara’s Veil | 2.5 | 0.25 | 5 | 0.5 |
| Heartblossom | 2.5 | 0.25 | 5 | 0.5 |
| Whiptail | 3 | 0.5 | 6 | 1 |
| Twilight Jasmine | 3 | 0.5 | 6 | 1 |
| Deathspore Pod | 3 | 0.5 | 6 | 1 |
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
| Per Herb | Per 20x stack | |
| Cinderbloom | 7 | 140 |
| Stormvine | 6.7 | 134 |
| Azshara’s Veil | 7.75 | 155 |
| Heartblossom | 8.5 | 170 |
| Whiptail | 12.2 | 244 |
| Twilight Jasmine | 13.5 | 270 |
| Deathspore Pod | N/A | N/A |
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!
You left off Darkmoon Card of the North, which doesn’t go grey until 475. This is an excellent way to get rid of those extra snowfall inks, especially since they now only require 1 Eternal Life. So you can level inscription on the cheap for the first 20 points by crafting darkmoon cards of the north and sell the cards for a profit, instead of buying new expansion overly inflated herbs.
my reasoning for leaving this out is the cost of snowfall inks is still around 8g each, which comes out to 48g + 3g for the eternal = 50g+ for each skill up opposed to the 28g for the other recipes.
I agree that it’s a great way to skill up if you have lots of snowfall inks stocked up as is my situation right now as well.
Most scribes should have a ton of snowfall inks just from milling, unless they were able to mass produce cards and runescrolls of fortitude, but those haven’t been selling very well on my server so I had around a full tab of snowfall inks. The darkmoon cards were a great option for skill-ups as the price of eternal life has plummeted and the snowfalls have been non-sellers for a while.
Problem is, if people went for the spead leveling route, they probably blew past 475 by buying expensive herbs (or wasting herbs they could have sold) and are still looking at a boat load of snowfalls with no profitable outlet.
One more thing that struck me as odd: The Adventurer’s Journal is a consumable one use item with a 4 hour cooldown. Not sure why people are paying 50g a pop for these buffs becasue its such a gamble. I seem to always get the +15% damage to undead when I’m questing in non-undead filled zones.
the first night of cata i spent over 500k leveling my inscription to get the realm first achievement… sadly i didnt make it… but making a killing off these destruction cards…. each one insta-selling still for 5k
Once again great post…thanks for this…this allows me to know what to go after in the form of collecting herbs and knowing how to package it on chat. Always appreciate your spreadsheets, and just learning that you have a way to sign up to get this stuff first…
I am starting to convert the spread sheets into my own farming sheets identified by map…very cool stuff and always looking for your new posts…