This guide is much bigger than the one I wrote yesterday, I might add a few things if I realize that I forgot to mention something important.
Important: Make sure you read Auction House Guide - Introduction and Enchanting or you won't understand some of the things mentioned here.
Auction House Guide - Inscription
Welcome to the second part of the wonderful Auction House guide, this time I will explain why a few people can make tons of money out of Inscription. If you thought that the Enchanting part was fun, you're going to have a good laugh with this one.
Leveling Inscription
I'll start with the basics, most people didn't bother checking Inscription when it was released and I think a huge part of the playerbase just doesn't know exactly how it works. (Note: DO NOT sell any of the glyph you will craft during your leveling, just keep them for later)
You buy herbs from the Auction House (or gather them, obviously) and mill them to get pigments. Then you use these pigments to craft inks, then you need one (or two in a few cases) ink and a parchment bought from the NPC to craft a glyph. Most people just buy the herbs from the AH, craft all the inks themselves, and level like that ... Bad idea.
A few patches ago, Blizzard introduced an "Ink Trader" named Jessica Sellers to the game, this NPC will let you trade the Ink of the Sea you get by milling any Northrend Herbs for ANY lower level ink. If you want to compare it to other professions, just imagine it as a NPC that will give you Iron and Mithril in echange for Saronite.
The easiest way to level Inscription is to buy the first tier of low level herbs (because stuff like Peacebloom or Silverleaf is usually really cheap) and then buy Adder's Tongue, Lichbloom, Icethorn.
These 3 herbs yields the highest amount of pigments to create the Ink of the Sea you will need to buy the lower level inks. You can always check the AH every now and then for the lower level herbs if you think it's a cheaper alternative but on most servers, it won't.
Note that if you are really evil and don't want to level Inscription, you can usually buy Ink of the Sea from the AH and trade it for lower level inks to relist them at the AH with a 100 or 200% margin. People who don't have inscription and need their glyphs often buy the mats from the AH and ask a guildmate to craft them for free, this is where you cash the easy money.
Learning new Glyphs
That's the small problem with Inscription, just like Jewelcrafting you won't start with all the recipes and you can't just buy them from the AH or farm them. There are two ways to discover new glyphs :
- Run Minor Inscription Research and Northrend Inscription Research daily. (24 Hours Cooldown)
- Buy Book of Glyph Master to instantly learn a new Glyph recipe. (But this is actually a bad idea)
Run your research every day as soon as you can, BOTH of them, minor glyphs sell as much as major glyphs. Buying a lot of Book of Glyph Master sounds tempting but you shouldn't do it for two reasons :
- You cannot discover ALL glyphs with these books, and the inscription research will give you the most used Glyphs most of the time.
- A lot of people will start buying and reselling them with a 300% margin as soon as this guide hits the front page.
Being able to sell more glyphs is always good, in the end you should just decide if Inscription brings enough money to be worth the investment when you start. But keep in mind that some glyphs can only be learned from this book and you will NEED them anyway, so don't hesitate to buy one if something cheap appears at the AH.
The Real Price of Glyphs
Why is it so profitable to sell Glyphs? It's easy, on most servers it won't cost you anything to craft them ... Let's say that you buy a stack of Adder's Tongue / Lichbloom / Icethorn for 15 gold, you will get an average of 12 Azure Pigment and 4 Icy Pigment out of each stack. That's 2 x Snowfall Ink and 6 x Ink of the Sea ...
Snowfall Ink is used to craft a few high level items, the Runescroll of Fortitude added with Patch 3.2.2, and Northrend's Darkmoon Card (I'll talk about that later) .... and usually sells for something like 10G at the AH. Yes, you just got 20G worth of Snowfall Ink out of a 15G stack of herbs, and the 6 x Ink of the Sea are a "free" bonus.
Crafting glyphs costs pretty much nothing and most of your sale will be 100% pure profit.
Let's make some Glyphs!
Selling Glyphs is really hard and will require you to do a lot of research to find the most valua.... No, just kidding, you just sell all of them. Trying to figure out what glyph is worth crafting or not is just a waste of time because the glyph market is always moving and ALL glyphs will sell, no matter how bad they are.
If you just started with inscription you shouldn't be able to craft a lot of glyphs, just start with a short supply of all of them like ... 3 units of each.
- Go to the AH, open the Auctions Tab and click Summary.
- Now click Glyphs and Get Data, Quick Auctions will scan the AH for a while
- You will end up with a list of glyphs and their price. (Do not pay attention to them, the price of Glyphs move really fast)
- Glyphs with a red X next to their name are all the glyphs you cannot create yet
To craft a glyph, double click its name in the list, type the amount of glyphs you want, and hit enter. Do that for all the glyphs, it shouldn't take more than a minute or two.
Now open your Inscription tradeskill window and click the small "QA" button at the top right, a new window will appear with the list of all the glyphs you want to craft.
- The bottom of the list will list all the materials you need to craft these glyphs
- You can craft a Glyph by clicking its name once.
At this point you will need to buy parchments from the inscription supplies vendor and all your inks from our good friend Jessica Sellers. Just stockpile enough Ink of the Sea to be able to buy everything you need.
I'll have to admit that I never found an "easy" way to do it (and I'm sure someone will be nice enough to point me to a decent addon to help with that), buying 500 inks at once require you to click 500 times and is just not possible. Personally, I just use FreeRefills, for example if you need to buy 137 Lion's Ink just type :
/freerefills add [Lion's ink] 137
Please note that you need to use the ITEM LINK and you can't just type the name of the item in the command line. The mod will automatically buy 137 Lion's Ink from the vendor next time you visit it, once you're done make sure you type :
/freerefills del [Lion's ink]
You need to delete it once you're done because Free Refills will ALWAYS try to make sure that you have 137 Lion's Ink in your inventory, this is a problem when you use that to buy your parchments, forget about it, and end up with 400 parchments the next time you visit the NPC.
When all the supplies are in your inventory just sit in front of your screen and click each glyph one by one ... Yes, this is the boring part, no, there is no way to craft all the glyphs at once. Just use that time to start rumors about your raid leader in the guild chat.
(Finally) Selling Glyphs
Now that you understand how Glyphs work, and that all your Glyphs are in your inventory we can finally move to the easy part. Selling!
Type /qa config and create a new item group called "Glyphs are cool", the settings are really straightforward:
- Undercut by: 10s
- Threshold price: 6g (It depends on your server, really, but 5g or 6g is usually a good threshold)
- Fallback price: 59g99S99C (Because it's much cheaper than 60G, really. You can lower or increase it depending on how guilty you feel to sell for that much money)
- Fallback after: 100%
- Bid percent: 100%
- Post cap: 3
- Per auction: 1
- Post time: 24 hours (or even 12 hours if you spend a lot of time hugging the AH, keep in mind that even if the deposit fees for Glyphs aren't really high you might end up selling 1000 of them at once, that's why 48 hours is usually a bad idea.
Go to "Add items" and just type "Glyph" in the text field and hit enter. All the items with "Glyph" in their name will be added to this rule. (Make sure you don't have a bunch of Books of Glyph Mastery in your inventory before you do that)
Now just head back to the Auction House and ... Click post!
That's it, you now have 20 to ... 300 Glyphs at the AH depending on how many of them you sell and how strong the competition is on your server. Just wait a few minutes/hours and loot all the gold flowing in your Mailbox.
Now let's see if we can increase your productivity.
Posting, Looting, and Relisting
If you plan to sell Glyphs regularly: never, ever, ever, ever do that on your main character, on any character you play. Just create an alt. You will craft Glyphs with your main character and sell Glyphs on alts with 4 x Pack of Endless Pockets.
You need to do that because as you learn to create more glyphs, you will really start to need a LOT of space in your inventory to sell everything at once. Ultimately you will end up with 3 alts (Selling all the glyphs for 4 or 3 classes on each alt).
To manage that without too much effort you will need :
- BulkMail2 to send the glyphs to your alts.
- BulkMail2 Inbox to loot them.
BulkMail2 is very interesting because it lets you send automatically items to an alt. For example let's say that you always want to send all the Glyph of Dark Command you craft to your alt named Munin, type :
/bulkmail autosend add Munin Glyph of Dark Command
Do that for all the glyphs you want to sell from this alt, go back to your main char and craft them. Next time you will visit the mailbox, click the "Send" tab and all the glyphs will be listed on the right with the name of your alt next to it! Press "send" at the bottom of the list and all your glyphs will be mailed in no time. Of course it works with multiple alts at the same time and you should always craft on your main, mail to alts.
Looting on your alts should be quite fast because of BulkMail2 Inbox but depending on your server/connection quality, there are a few occasions where looting mails will be very slow. The only workaround I found is to use Postal instead and try again with Bulkmail later. You shouldn't rely on Postal because for most people, it will bug the send feature of Bulkmail (You can't just run 2 mail mods at the same time and expect everything to work as intended)
Important: You can only loot 50 items from the Mailbox at a time, then you have to wait a minute or two before you can loot the next 50 items.
Refilling Glyphs
After a few hours/days of sales, you will need to recraft all the glyphs you sold. Over time you should try to increase your stock of glyphs to always have 20 units of all the glyphs you can create. You could argue that having 20 [insert worthless glyph here] is a waste of money but a 60G sale would be enough to pay for the whole stack, and if it doesnt sell you will never have to craft one again.
The best way to do that is to cancel all the auctions on your alts (the fees aren't that expensive), loot your mailbox, and go to the Auction House. Then go to the Auctions Tab and click Summary to do a Glyph scan again. The list will look like this :
- Glyph of Sprint (7) 19 3G 75S
The (7) is the amount of Glyph in your inventory, just double click the name and add 3 glyphs to the queue if you want to refill to 10, and do that for all the glyphs. If you can count up to 20 without too much problem it won't take more than 5 minutes to do it on all your alts, the craft queue is independant from the character and you will just have to move back to your main character to craft all the glyphs for your alts. (And mail them automatically, thanks to Bulkmail)
Getting rid of your Snowfall Inks
Yes, I lied to you, even if your Snowfall Ink will be enough to pay for your stack of herbs, it might be a problem to get rid of all of them if you start crafting a lot of Glyphs.
If you really need to sell a lot of them there are a few things to do :
- Create an item group for Snowfall Inks in Quick Auctions and always try to sell them
- Craft Runescrolls of Fortitude and sell them, you might get a few more gold out of them
- Craft one or two unit of Faces of Doom and Iron-Bound Tome and always try to sell them at the AH with a Quick Auction item group again
.... and that's it. No, I didn't forget the Darkmoon Cards, I just don't think the market is worth it anymore. You can do it if Eternal Life are really cheap on your server but everything you get that doesn't have "Noble" in its name is pretty much worthless and you will end up wasting a lot of time trying to sell your cards.
Even the Nobles cards aren't as good as they used to be, people can easily find something better in raids and Icecrown Dungeons in 3.3 will probably kill the Darkmoon Cards market, just don't do it.
"Carpet Bombing"
If you want to get rid of competitors in a very very aggressive way, you can always try the "carpet bombing" technique. Basically, the goal here is to scare competitors away by selling a lot of glyphs for a very low price (4 or 5 gold, maybe even 3 if you feel confident about your margin).
You will need to change your Quick Auctions settings slightly to do that, just set your threshold and fallback price to 4G and make sure the Fallback % is set to 100%. You will now post all your glyphs at a flat 4G price, except if there is someone selling them for cheaper.
Most of the time, competitors will just back off for a few days and wait until you run out of materials but if you have 10 000 inks of the sea in your bank it can be an interesting strategy.