WoW: inscription question

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ranalin's picture
Location: Knoxville, TN

Fiance's best friend is playing WoW and she asked me about inscription and i had no idea...

The Northrend Research inscription process she says she gets something called Assorted Writings when she does it. Is that all she needs to do to learn a new inscription? Or is there something else that needs to be done?

Gamer Tag: Rantyr

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buffcorephil's picture
Location: United Kingdom

She's doing it right. [Assorted Writings] is just a placeholder item for the actual vellums and scrolls you get when you perform the research -- you don't actually receieve an item in your inventory called [Assorted Writings]. If she's learnt all the glyphs possible through research (there's a list in the comments on this WowHead entry) then she'll get scrolls or vellums instead of learning new glyphs.

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ranalin's picture
Location: Knoxville, TN

so she can delete the Assorted Writings when they show up? She says she's still missing a few glyphs and is getting frustrated at how long it's taking.

Gamer Tag: Rantyr

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AnimeJ's picture
Location: The skies of Norkia

ranalin wrote:
so she can delete the Assorted Writings when they show up? She says she's still missing a few glyphs and is getting frustrated at how long it's taking.

You won't get assorted writings. You'll learn a major glyph(if you have any left to learn, and the RNG doesn't give you one you have) and you'll also get random scrolls of some sort. Alchemy has the same deal, except it spits out Elixirs and Flasks.

Coldstream wrote:

Sands, S. & Murdoch, J.; New England Journal of Medicine. Why Guys Dig Chicks Who Violently Kill Stuff Nov, 2008; pp 65-68.

XBL

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Enix's picture
Location: N.C.

buffcorephil wrote:
... If she's learnt all the glyphs possible through research ... then she'll get scrolls or vellums instead of learning new glyphs.

It appears that the RNG can also give you a crummy scroll.

I picked up Inscription on a semi-retired toon (mostly so I have a cheap source of Armor and Weapon vellum for my enchanting business) and got him up to 150. His first two pops of Minor Inscription Research gave him Slow Fall and Mend Pet -- not too shabby. Last night I was all fired up to add another lottery ticket to my AH business ...

... and got a Scroll of Stamina II. Gah.

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Location: Sneaking off to play WoW

Enix wrote:
buffcorephil wrote:
... If she's learnt all the glyphs possible through research ... then she'll get scrolls or vellums instead of learning new glyphs.

It appears that the RNG can also give you a crummy scroll.

I picked up Inscription on a semi-retired toon (mostly so I have a cheap source of Armor and Weapon vellum for my enchanting business) and got him up to 150. His first two pops of Minor Inscription Research gave him Slow Fall and Mend Pet -- not too shabby. Last night I was all fired up to add another lottery ticket to my AH business ...

... and got a Scroll of Stamina II. Gah.

Minor research always gives you low level scrolls along with the researched glyph, at least in my experience. For several weeks I was constantly vendoring level 1-3 scrolls and lesser recalls and what not while I was learning my glyphs. Just became part of the routine.

Anyone know for certain if you just stop researching when you're done, or if you're depending on the RNG to not give you a glyph you already have? I got a new glyph every single time doing minor research for several weeks, then didn't get one two days in a row. Although it's an extremely low sample size for doing true statistical analysis, it would seem odd to have such a long streak followed by successive failures unless Blizzard was being kind and ensuring you got something new every day. Would be sort of rough if you in theory had to keep researching over and over to no avail just to get that last glyph.

Just too lazy to sit and cross-check my glyph list against wowhead though...

BHA: Kamyndra - 80 Prot Warrior, Tyraan - 80 Enhance(Resto) Shaman, Selian - 80 Warlock

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I went on the assumption that when I stopped getting new glyphs that I was done. Mostly.
I did 2-3 more days to be sure(what a waste of mats).
I also tried 2-3 more times at a span of 2 or 3 weeks out. I'm pretty sure I'm done. Not going to crosscheck.

I have to assume the same will happen with the Book of Glyph Mastery discoveries, and will just chalk that last book up to a lost 100-150 gold. No worries.

Steam: duckilama
It's not a game anymore, it's an umbrella. - Certis

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There's a mod with a listing of all the items in the game, along with the method of obtainment. It's called ARL, and I highly endorse it

Coldstream wrote:

Sands, S. & Murdoch, J.; New England Journal of Medicine. Why Guys Dig Chicks Who Violently Kill Stuff Nov, 2008; pp 65-68.

XBL

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ranalin's picture
Location: Knoxville, TN

AnimeJ wrote:
There's a mod with a listing of all the items in the game, along with the method of obtainment. It's called ARL, and I highly endorse it

I'll pass that along.

Gamer Tag: Rantyr

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Is that the same as Ackis Recipe List?
Does it make it easy to spot undiscovered glyphs without 30 minutes of tooltip checking?

Steam: duckilama
It's not a game anymore, it's an umbrella. - Certis

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Enix's picture
Location: N.C.

robkid wrote:
Minor research always gives you low level scrolls along with the researched glyph ...

You're right. The new glyph was getting buried in my frenzy to make ink, and I was distracted by the WTF?! scroll.

Inscription is starting to remind me of engineering -- (a) you have to make the mats before you can make what you want to make in the first place, and (b) there's not as much utility in the profession as I would have hoped.

I think (a) stems from my inability to remember the exact herb --> pigment --> ink sequence ("OK, so I have a stack of Goldthorn, and that mills to ... oh, right, Emerald Pigment ... and I use that to make ... Midnight Ink? Lion's Ink? Oh, hell, I don't know. Let's go kill sh1t!!").

As for (b), well, I'm not sold on it yet, mostly because I haven't run the numbers. I think there's good money to be made in Armor and Weapon Vellums as well as selected minor glyphs (a few Slow Fall and Mend Pet have covered my initial costs). Then again, my druid put some Scrolls of Intellect III to good use last night (he could be using IV, but I can't make those yet), so maybe I'm just being impatient about the whole thing.

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Enix wrote:
Inscription is starting to remind me of engineering -- (a) you have to make the mats before you can make what you want to make in the first place, and (b) there's not as much utility in the profession as I would have hoped.

I think (a) stems from my inability to remember the exact herb --> pigment --> ink sequence ("OK, so I have a stack of Goldthorn, and that mills to ... oh, right, Emerald Pigment ... and I use that to make ... Midnight Ink? Lion's Ink? Oh, hell, I don't know. Let's go kill sh1t!!").

As for (b), well, I'm not sold on it yet, mostly because I haven't run the numbers. I think there's good money to be made in Armor and Weapon Vellums as well as selected minor glyphs (a few Slow Fall and Mend Pet have covered my initial costs). Then again, my druid put some Scrolls of Intellect III to good use last night (he could be using IV, but I can't make those yet), so maybe I'm just being impatient about the whole thing.

There's a decent amount of money to be made. Duc and I have been exchanging details back and forth on our processes (okay, I'm primarily crudely copying him). I've settled down to just buying Adder's Tongue on the AH (try to buy for no more than 23 or 24 gold per stack) to make glyphs with. The costs per glyph wind up being 5g-ish, but you can find many glyphs that sell for 10-25g each, at least on our server. There's also a vendor in Dalaran that will sell you one of any ink (except Snowfall) for one Ink of the Sea, so it's easy to get the lower level inks without worrying about what particular kinds of herbs mill into the right pigment. I just have my bank alt mail my inscriber 8-12 stacks of Adder's Tongue at a time, turn it all into Ink of the Sea and stand between the two vendors in the Inscription shack in Dalaran making whatever glyphs Auctioneer is telling me are selling decently well right now. Making 5 at a time of any given glyph right now, then mail it all back and bulk post.

In other words, once you get to higher levels of skill, have Northrend Inscription Research to do as well, have a wider variety of glyphs and have access to the vendors in Dalaran, it becomes much smoother.

BHA: Kamyndra - 80 Prot Warrior, Tyraan - 80 Enhance(Resto) Shaman, Selian - 80 Warlock

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I'm making anywhere between 200 and 1200g per overnight listing on glyphs (and dividing by 10 and 3).

For Adder's Tongue, the yield is 6 Ink of the Sea and 1 Snowfall Ink per stack on average.
If you're not making Darkmoon Cards, the Snowfalls were selling for about the price of a stack of Adder's Tongue a week ago. Either stockpile those or sell them to further lower your per-glyph cost to close to zero.

Ignoring Snowfall Ink sales, your cost per glyph is:
(CostPerAddersTongueStack / 6) + 50silver.

At 24g per AddersTongue stack, your cost per glyph is 4.5g.

Therefore, any glyph you can sell for more than 5g is profitable. My threshold is a market price(auctioneer stats) of 10g or better. I prefer 15g. But you can't just look at Market Price. Use that as your first filter. Your second filter should be Undercut, which means you need to scan RIGHT BEFORE you craft.

Two already mentioned mods that ROCK for this are Skillet(a fork of Advanced TradeSkill Window/ATSW) combined with Lil Sparky's Workshop.
Skillet lets you queue a buttload of glyphs to craft, as if you are missing mats for something, it will queue those right before. If you don't, it will queue the actual ink you need and add it to a Shopping List.
LSW inserts a two-column stat "block" to your crafting window - Market Price and Mat Cost.
Mat cost is mostly useless for Inscription, but Market Price lets me completely ignore glyphs below 5-6g without even checking the tooltip.

Shopping List: When you have items on your shopping list, Vendor windows will have a "Buy Reagents" button at the top. Say I queue up a glyph that uses Midnight Ink, but all I have is Ink of the Sea - I open the Ink Vendor, click the buy reagents button and it buys as many of whichever inks I need.
Same thing with paper.

This week, I am making a bit of money on Darkmoon cards(loose extras), like a 2 of Nobles for almost 1k.

Herbs needed to make 1 Darkmoon card on average = 4 stacks of Adder's Tongue. Just FYI.

Glyphs are easy money. Inscription is OP.
Oddly, I didn't take Inscription to make money. I took it to avoid the Hodir rep grind. Lucky me!

Steam: duckilama
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Thanks for the tip on Lil' Sparky's Workshop. Curse says it works with ATSW (which I use instead of Skillet, which has been buggy for me), so I'll have to give that a try. I have a pretty good handle on sale prices for raw ore and herbs and various armor kits, but there are way too many freakin' glyphs to track.

@ Ducki -- Are there any particular glyphs or scrolls that you're making, or are you using the Goblin method and making a little bit of everything? Or are you specializing in a particular few things?

My gut feeling is that I'm going to make most of my money from Armor and Weapon vellums, scrolls and minor glyphs. And, yeah, it looks like pretty easy money even if I'm only dabbling in it. You two sound like you're going to be riding around on gold-plated mammoths before too long!

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The profit margin on Vellums isn't as good as Glyphs because they use more ink and more paper. Still, profit is profit.

What do I make?
I buy stacks and stacks of Adder's Tongue. I wish I could find a supplier for 5-10 stacks every day.
I mass mill them with a macro, pressed over and over and over while watching TV.
That done, I Queue All on each of the regular inks, ignoring the "green" inks, starting from the lowest amount to highest.
While those are crafting, I start scanning Skillet/LSW for glyphs with a Market Price above 10, with 20s and up especially catching my eye.

Mouse-over the glyph to check 3 things: Market Price, Undercut Price, and how many my AH guy already has. I'll queue either 5 or 10(depending hotness).
If it's a glyph for an ink I have to buy from the Ink Vendor, I often buy them with Buy Reagents button right then. That way I don't lose track of how many I can actually craft(per Skillet).
Rinse & repeat until Skillet says I have queued up as many glyphs as I have inks for.
Then Click Start, repeatedly until I'm done with the whole queue. Also another "watch something on TiVo while occasionally hittimg my mouse" activity.

I do not (usually) bother with Vellums or Scrolls. I have no idea if they sell or not. It took me a while last time I had 10 or 20 Vellums. Experiment with stack sizes. Some buyers will be skilling up and stocking a guild bank. Others will be flipping Crusader vellums on the AH. Still others are CoDing an enchant to a /trade buyer. Some folks will want 1s, some will want 5s, some will want 20s. Play around. I find 1s to be ideal in most situations because, by default, they list first in an AH search, because 1 of something at 2g will sort before 10 of something at 10g, regardless of the fact that it's priced higher per item.

While my gross revenue sounds astounding, my net isn't as good.
I also do a LOT of relisting. I have a macro specifically to cancel all my Glyph auctions. I typically cancel between 100 and 200 glyph auctions every day. There's a lot of undercutting going on, I am only listing at 24 hours, the listing cost is negligible, and after a relist, I will often see a short burst of "A buyer has been found" spam. Don't be afraid to cancel and relist, just be sure to do a getall scan so you are pricing against the current market, not the one from an hour ago when you started crafting.

Steam: duckilama
It's not a game anymore, it's an umbrella. - Certis

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I need to get your macros someday Duc. Still doing all that stuff manually, which is a bit of a pain.

BHA: Kamyndra - 80 Prot Warrior, Tyraan - 80 Enhance(Resto) Shaman, Selian - 80 Warlock

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#showtooltip
/cast Milling 
/use Adder's Tongue 
/use Icethorn 
/use Lichbloom 
/use Felweed 
/use Whateverherbyoubuyoften 

As long as you don't have any stacks that are not divisible by 5, that's a beaut. I often buy odd stacks, but I just don't send the remainders to Duclama. Just the 5s, and I hang onto the remainders until I have more remainders that make a 5. You can list as many /use clauses as you want. If you run out of Adder's, it moves down to Icethorn, etc.

The Mass Cancel one, I had to pull from my macro cache file. I'm sure it could be modified to do Enchant Scrolls or anything else with a consistent naming convention.

/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Glyph of") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

For those selling enchants on vellums, I think
/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Scroll of Enchant") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

should work.
Or for Enix
/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Scroll of") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

They cancel at a rate of about 1 or 2 per second. So I can cancel my typical 180 relists in 3 minutes. Try doing that by hand.

Steam: duckilama
It's not a game anymore, it's an umbrella. - Certis

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AnimeJ's picture
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duckilama wrote:
Is that the same as Ackis Recipe List?
Does it make it easy to spot undiscovered glyphs without 30 minutes of tooltip checking?

Yep, ARL is Ackis. I couldn't remember the name of it off the top of my head. As for 30 minutes, I knew exactly where to go and what to get to round out my 100 cooking recipes in about 10; same with alchemy. Just expand the whole list of stuff you don't have and scroll through.

Coldstream wrote:

Sands, S. & Murdoch, J.; New England Journal of Medicine. Why Guys Dig Chicks Who Violently Kill Stuff Nov, 2008; pp 65-68.

XBL

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Ah, so it differentiates between "have it" and "don't have it". Nice!

Steam: duckilama
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duckilama wrote:
Ah, so it differentiates between "have it" and "don't have it". Nice!

Yep. When you load it up, you'll get a button to scan your listing. The produced window is EVERYTHING you don't have

Coldstream wrote:

Sands, S. & Murdoch, J.; New England Journal of Medicine. Why Guys Dig Chicks Who Violently Kill Stuff Nov, 2008; pp 65-68.

XBL

Executive
Enix's picture
Location: N.C.

duckilama wrote:
I typically cancel between 100 and 200 glyph auctions every day.

And that's why I'm not going to get into the Inscription business.

I logged onto my bank alt for the first time in a few days this morning. Not only did my normal auctions not sell all that well (I was selling crap, to be honest), but most of my Glyphs came roaring back at me. So I re-listed just to give myself some bag space and crossed my fingers that it will sell this time.

I admire your patience and determination, Ducki. Me, I hate the inefficiency of expired auctions. If I'm going to get into the Inscription game, I think I'll stick to picking herbs and making inks and vellums. Someone else can deal with all of those glyphs.

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Quote:
I admire your patience and determination, Ducki. Me, I hate the inefficiency of expired auctions. If I'm going to get into the Inscription game, I think I'll stick to picking herbs and making inks and vellums. Someone else can deal with all of those glyphs.

I have 4 of the 32-slot bags on my AH guy, so cancelling is actually very efficient.
Deposit fee is 60copper for 48 hours, 30copper for 24. So even if I relist 100 times, I'm still making money.
If you configure Auctioneer to undercut by more than the default, you'll likely see more sales.

But it's not for everybody. Another option is making Darkmoon Cards when you get there. Those still seem profitable, though you'll still be needing a couple of 32-slotters. Even the lower level cards can be profitable if there are enough people grinding DMF rep by turning them in. I don't know, but I imagine you could make a pretty penny with the right pitch and timing for when DMF is in town. I saw a guy buying the right to turn in cards for 50g, then giving the trinket reward back to the "seller".

Steam: duckilama
It's not a game anymore, it's an umbrella. - Certis