Inscription ReviewFollow

Inscription sucks! The end.

Just kidding. (or am I?)

So I've done lots of tradeskills. My guildmaster asked me what's wrong when I hadn't switched tradeskills in over a whole month on any of my characters. Honestly what happened is for my main character, I took up jewelcrafting and enchanting. It's glorious. I don't think I'll ever change them.

However, my rogue is a different story. He was an engineer and miner. Now, mining is ok. It does what it does. You don't have to play the auction house, it's a time to money tradeskill. You go gather, you gain wealth, good deal. Feeds into my JC and enchanting like woah. Engineering on the other hand, well it's engineering. No money really but it's got some fun quirky utilities.

However, there's one tradeskill I hadn't tried. inscription! It's been a matter of debate around a lot of forums. People going 'it sucks! its useless!' and people saying 'its the best tradeskill ever, you're just doing it wrong!' So I decided to ignore all these people and try it for myself. What really hooked me was visiting the inscription shop in Dalaran. They have books! TONS of books. They have a spiral library above them full of books. being the lore junkie I am, it sounded really cool to be part of this organization involved in knowledge. Also, I could do fun stuff like make glyphs for my guildmates, roll the dice on Darkmoon cards, maybe make some books to try to sell, etc.

Well first of all, it is the easiest to level tradeskill _evar_. It takes less time than a gathering tradeskill, however it's cheap to just grind up (Thanks Jessica!). One evening and about 1000 gold I had 430 inscription. Of course as anyone who has done inscription knows, you're going to be missing a lot of glyph recipes at that point, but honestly, meh on glyphs.

They're a case of 'why make hundreds of gold a day when you can make tens of gold a day!!!' Yes, you can make money selling glyphs. You need addons to manage your auctions or you'll go crazy, and you have to move a lot, but honestly lots of professions have better income than that. ahem JC and enchanting. Also, meh on making glyphs for guildmates. Somehow they'd rather just pay the 1g50s off the AH then stand around waiting for me to port to Dalaran and make it for them, and honestly, I'd rather them too. meh on glyphs, meh. Plus, as I said before, even after leveling its a big time investment getting glyphs that sell. You either need to buy a bunch of books or keep doing the research patterns each day.

As for the cards, well most of the time, you're losing money. Once in a while you get a good one, but they take forever to sell, especially now since the decks are falling behind. People who are looking for that best gear are often getting their trinkets from ToC raids now instead.

One other thing about inscription is that like enchanting, it has its own built in gathering skill. Well, not quite, because you need another gathering skill to feed that skill. Enchanting takes materials that are drops from killing stuff. So it's more like JC's prospecting. You can make a little money doing this. Herbs are cheap now, really cheap. These materials sell kind of slow, but you can make 10s of gold a day!

Basically, I feel like inscription is jewelcrafting JR. It's a decent skill for new 80's, if you don't have a lot of resources, like if it's your first level 80 character. You can get it leveled up pretty fast, and the material investment to produce things is not large. For anyone who has some wealth built up though, there's much better, more exciting, better money making, tradeskills.

Honestly I'm missing my engineering doodads. Rocket boots and Dalaran auction house ftw ; ;

I honestly don't understand why you'd level up a profession and go "meh" about its core feature. No offense, but the review doesn't really seem accurate at all if you haven't investigated it. Glyphs, on my server, sell very well. And fast. Of course, they need to be desirable ones. But this profession is different in that many low-level glyphs are still used at 80.

Plus, you didn't really include any of the personal bonuses it offers. You kinda just said "Glpyhs seem meh. Cards may or may not make money. Milling makes some money."

Shoulder inscriptions are highly relevant. The cost of getting the Greatness card vs. buying it is highly relevant. Runescrolls of Fortitude are great for Heroics. Scrolls are always an okay bonus if you don't have a better buff (60 AP for mellee classes). The offhand books are good when first gearing a magic class. Vellums sell okay. You get an extra Hearth.

If none of those additional things interest you, I seriously don't understand why you'd level the craft in the first place. Your review is severely lacking.

And JC takes a much larger investment than inscription. And your profit from buying AH goods is going to be much lower than Inscription, percentage-wise. With dailies offering so much gold, more and more people are just buying the best gems. Which generally have nothing more than a 30G profit if you manage to get a really cheap gem (which will still cost over 100G).

And I don't understand why you would use AH addons as a negative for the craft. You want to use them just as much for any other class. And, the only reason you would need one is if you don't want to type in the price yourself (which I do even though I have Auctioneer). You shouldn't be placing more than 2-4 glyphs of a type at once, or else supply will force the price down. So, you don't need an auction addon to place large quantities, like you would with Alchemy.

If you are going to bother reviewing a craft, actually investigate everything. And consider how your own economy might be changing things. I wouldn't critique JC without mentioning trinkets and epic gems, and then complain because some idiots managed to drive the price of the +30 gems to have the price of an uncut gem.

He's a little too focused on just profit it seems, and he seems like a jerk too. It seems like he's more about how much smarter he is than stupid people than good advice about business practices (especially the social aspect of business practices, jeez!) Also he's wrong about his demand curves. Curves look like a parabola (translated over the XY line), and if you're way down the front side, you're going to not significantly increase demand by slashing prices since they're already affordable by most people. It only significantly increases demand if the item's price is expensive for people to afford. Selling a glyph for 50s instead of 1g isn't going to increase demand by 50%.

Yeah, but I'm selling 20 gems in a day. 30g profit on 20 gems is a good chunk of change. Besides, Cardinal rubies aren't where it's at because everyone does them and there's only a few recipes that you can choose from. Orange and Purple, if you get the right recipes are more profit. Nightmare Tears are good too. The key is to not sell all scarlet rubies just because they sell for a lot but to diversify. I may only sell two of a certain gem in a day, but if I have my range diversified I'm still selling quite a few gems overall. Besides, a certain purple gem is selling for 100g profit today (240-140), a certain orange for about 60g(199-140).




Percentage profit is inconsequential. If you're looking for the best money maker, profit per hour is the only thing that matters. In your example, you have to sell 3 glyphs of penance for each bold scarlet ruby I sell to make the same rate of profit.





Ya did, that's one of the things I like about inscription~ Like JC it paces out the discoveries of the recipes so even if you get it maxed, you still have stuff to try for. Since it's so easy to level (I spent more today on JC mats to sell than I did raising Inscription from 0 - 340), thats very important for this sort of tradeskill too.



Well, I didn't cover *everything* but I also feel that you read a few things and then assumed that I was totally against it.

Edited, Dec 3rd 2009 11:16am by digitalcraft

Edited, Dec 3rd 2009 11:24am by digitalcraft

Im selling 500+ glyphs a day with maybe 30 min at the ah. Now, dont get me wrong because i also sell gems ;) Why do only one?

Sure you dont make as much per sale, but you will sell a hell of a lot more glyphs then gems, and the percentage profit is higher as someone said.

Hands down glyphs are the easiest way to make lots of gold. Its no secret, just look at the thousands of blogs dedicated to it. Someone linked greedy goblin already, scroll down to the bottom and look at the other blogs too. Justmytwocopper is another great site. These are guys that have hit the gold cap multiple times, in fact one guy who has a blog is a wow millionaire from doing this.

Step one: make lots of glyphs(ie 5-10 of everyone that sells for more then the cost of ink)
Step two: Post all for 3g(price per glph is usually around 1.5g to make)
step three: double your investment.
Step four: log on whenever you can and repost(one click with addons).
Step five: Buy herbs, rinse repeat.

Dont forget about making vellums too ;)

Thats just a basic rundown, obviously there are addons that help make you more efficient, but you will have to look those up if your interested. Once you get your foot in the door, its very easy to branch into other markets as well. Such as darkmoon cards/flask market.

Edited, Dec 8th 2009 2:21pm by montaghar

Actually I have a new problem with inscription: I don't need a scribe anymore :( Ever since the mmo-champion article on money making, some guy or another, like clockwork, has tried to push everyone out of the market at least once a week by pricing tons of every glyph at around 1g.

So I just stock up and sell those for the rest of the week. I've been selling glyphs pretty constantly and haven't made a single on with my enchanter in weeks :(