Gold Capped: How to calculate inscription costs and prices
by Steve Zamboni 
Jul 26th 2010 at 2:00PM
With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who's trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he's made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it's left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they're paying for their supplies.
Glyphs and Ink of the Sea
Everything that inscription makes can be traced back to a stack of herbs, so all item prices can be calculated from the price of the herb. Each stack of the "good" Northrend herbs -- Adder's Tongue, Icethorn and Lichbloom -- will produce one bottle of Snowfall Ink and six Ink of the Sea (IotS). Each stack of the lower-quality herbs -- Goldclover, Deadnettle and Tiger Lily -- will produce five Ink of the Sea and half of a Snowfall. While seeming the inferior choice, these lesser herbs will often sell at a substantial discount and may be more efficient if found in large quantities; two stacks of Tiger Lily will produce 10 IotS and a Snowfall, a much higher yield than a single stack of the more expensive varieties. Lichbloom and Goldclover will usually sell for higher prices to flask makers, so they are seldom milled for ink. Given the large number of Adder's Tongue nodes in Sholazar Basin (256), it is the most common herb used for milling.
The price of a stack of herbs will vary widely from server to server based on the number of herb farmers (both human and bot), along with how aggressive scribes and alchemists are when buying them. If there are a lot of bots, herb prices may be below 9g. (I've seen them at 2g, below vendor price.) During ban waves, bot activity will drop and herb production will rely on the small number of remaining human farmers, causing prices to return their regular 18g price and often higher, even doubling again to 35g for a single stack. For many professions, a rise of this scale would have a drastic effect on the market, eliminating profits and making many items too expensive to craft or sell. Inscription, on the other hand, takes these changes in stride. Even a massive increase in the cost of materials has a minor effect on the final prices. With herbs at 9g a stack and each stack producing six bottles of ink, each Ink of the Sea costs 1g50s. At 18g, the ink will cost 3g. At 30g, it rises to 5g. Even doubling the materials cost only takes away a gold piece or two in profit, a minor amount when the glyphs are selling for 10g or 20g (or higher). Now that the double-ink glyphs have been eliminated, the cost of each glyph is simply the price of the ink and a piece of parchment.
Vellum mispricing
A stack of herbs makes 12 armor vellums, two from each bottle of ink. With 9g herbs, your cost is 1g15s (including parchment). With 18g herbs, the price rises to 1g90s. Again, we see that doubling the price of the raw materials has only a small effect on the price of the finished product.
Weapon vellums use three times the ink as armor vellums, however, causing the materials costs to rise sharply to 4g90s each. It's quite common to find these at a discount on the auction house from undercutters who have forgotten this and priced them the same as their armor vellums.
In addition to the regular Ink of the Sea, milling also produces Snowfall Ink, which is used to make many of the inscription items. Many scribes who focus only on glyphs will sell their Snowfall Ink to make back some of what they paid for their herbs. Instead of paying 18g for herbs (which makes 3g ink), they will sell the Snowfall Ink for 8g and effectively reduce the cost of their herbs to 10g. This drops the price of their ink from 3g to 1g67s for each bottle.
While this looks as if it should lead to an extra 8g profit from each set of six glyphs, many scribes instead use this gold to lower their thresholds and allow for even deeper undercuts. By selling their glyphs for 1g33s less than they did before, they end up giving back the gold they made from selling the ink, losing both that profit and the potential gold they could have made from using the ink to craft other items.
Few scribes pause to think about who they are selling their ink to: other scribes. Alarm bells would be going off in other professions if a competitor suddenly started buying up your products, but many scribes base their entire business plans around it. If your competitor is buying your goods, it's often a sign that he's reselling it for a profit (or at least thinks he can). Many scribes who concentrate on low-priced glyphs will sell off hundreds or thousands of stacks of Snowfall Ink in their careers with little to show for it, and certainly with little idea of the potential fortune they've handed over to their competitors. (We saw the same thing when jewelcrafters started selling Dragon's Eyes, not stopping to consider why other jewelcrafters were willing to pay so much for them.)
Snowfall Ink
Snowfall Ink, the joker in the deck for determining costs, is used for crafting three items: off-hand frills, Runescrolls of Fortitude and Darkmoon cards.
There are two epic off-hand frills made from Snowfall Ink, both for casters: Faces of Doom and the Iron-Bound Tome. Each requires five Snowfall Ink. If you make your own ink, your cost is about 30g for the basic materials for each one. These books routinely sell for over 200g each, making far more profit than selling the ink would have made. A scribe who buys Snowfall Ink will pay 70g to make each book, which is still an excellent source of income.
Each bottle of ink can also make five Runescrolls of Fortitude, which are extremely useful when there's no priest in the party. Made from regular parchments, these cost you 40s each, and you come out ahead if they sell for more than 2g each. It's quite common for these to sell for multiple times that amount.
Using your own Snowfalls, Darkmoon cards cost 69g to make (three eternals and some ink). If you're buying someone else's, the price rises to 117g for each card. While seemingly expensive to make, each card has an average selling price close to 200g when produced in large numbers and assembled into completed decks and trinkets. In this case, each bottle of Snowfall generates more than 20g in profits, far more than its regular price and often more than what the glyphs from the same stack of herbs sell for.
When focusing on making ink for cards, there are a couple of different ways to look at the numbers. For card makers, it requires six stacks of herbs (plus three eternals) to get the Snowfalls for make each card, so producing a standard 32-card set of decks will require 192 stacks of herbs and produce 1,056 "extra" IotS for glyphs. A high-volume glyph maker crafting thousands of glyphs will essentially receive a full set of Darkmoon decks for every 1,056 glyphs he makes, which will make him far more than the 1,536g he would have made from selling off his inks (and probably more than he made from the glyph themselves).
If you really, really, really don't like selling glyphs, it is possible to skip them entirely and trade your unwanted Ink of the Sea to Jessica for more Snowfall Ink. With this method, each card now only requires four stacks of herbs instead of six -- the four stacks mill into four Snowfalls and 24 Ink of the Sea, 20 of which are traded to make the two missing Snowfalls. While this method is a bit more expensive than buying the ink from another scribe, it does have the advantage of not giving your competition a couple of thousand gold pieces every time you make a set of cards.
Read more in this special Gold Capped series on glyphs:
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, and watch for more articles to come in this special mini-series on inscription. Regular Gold Capped author Basil "Euripides" Berntsen is now taking questions for a special series, "Ask an auctioneer" at basil@wow.com. Filed under: Guest Posts, Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
lownwolf Jul 26th 2010 2:17PM
why do you cover inscription every other week! Your increasing my competition ><
Go cover JC, they make more gold anyway
Tim {the other Tim} Jul 26th 2010 3:31PM
This isn't Basil.
Or is it?
Pyromelter Jul 26th 2010 4:50PM
He did one post on glyphs back on June 16th, and had barely mentioned them in terms of the undermine journal. Before that I hardly recall him diving into the glyph market.
Your competition will not increase with this (or any other) glyph article. People know about inscription making money. The thing of it is is that inscription is a very high-volume profession. Anyone who wants to take the time and effort to set up auctioneer, panda, and lil sparky's, can do that, but that right there creates the barrier to entry. Most of us non scribes would rather toss up 10-20 auctions on higher profit/higher margin items and earn G that way. The vast quantity of my gold I've made over the past 6 months has actually come from tailoring... selling spellweave and brilliant spellthread for 100%+ profits over and over. Yesterday I sold 3 brilliant spellthreads for over 200g. It was a helluva lot easier buying Iceweb Spider Silk, Eternal Life, and frozen orbs and taking 20 seconds to make them than it would be to go through the PITA of milling, crafting ink, then crafting whatever glyphs and then selling bazillions of them, then having to cancel them all and relisting b/c I was undercut by 50 people all doing the same thing.
TL;DR: Everyone knows that glyphs make money if you are willing to put the time in, so no secrets are being revealed here. Just the fact that the Author has SEVEN 32 slot bags filled with Ink of the Sea is enough to know that I don't wanna deal with that headache.
Mizzle Aug 12th 2010 1:39AM
Inscription has a *much* higher profit than JC.
Or at least it used to ;_;
Pyromelter Jul 26th 2010 8:01PM
Inscription profits will vary server by server, but the bottom line is that to make the big cheese with inscription, you need a guild bank, you need to have panda, auctioneer, quickauctions, etc.
To make decent money with any other type of profession, a simple auctionator program is all you really need. Inscription just has that huge barrier of setup and maintenance. It's also very cutthroat (again, server dependent), and while it potentially is the most profitable, it is arguably the toughest to break into.
Basil Berntsen Jul 26th 2010 11:13PM
@Mizzle Inscription was never good :P
Burrr Jul 26th 2010 2:18PM
Excellent guide. Thank you for the detailed calculations of the ins and outs of the producing inscription goods.
Michael Jul 26th 2010 2:22PM
I created this Excel spreadsheet to help me with the management of herbs, milling, inks, etc. I hope it's helpful to someone out there. (P.S. all the drop rates are editable).
http://bit.ly/9c7HsT
ggrooms Jul 26th 2010 2:42PM
Just go set the price of herbs and be ready to stock up on under-priced vellums. React to the fact that people will read this, go try it, get discouraged and stop.
ggrooms Jul 26th 2010 2:43PM
Darn that was to iownwolf
WastedFire Jul 26th 2010 2:37PM
I haven't really sold many glyphs in the last few months, so my experience may be vastly different.
For me the darkmoon cards were always a pure loss, on my server a vast majority of the people with inscription only took it to produce darkmoon cards. The result of which made each card outside of the noble deck sell for
Pyromelter Jul 26th 2010 4:54PM
I bet you put a "less than" sign instead of the words, so let me try to finish that statement for you.
"The result of which made each card outside of the noble deck sell for less than the raw materials of the finished product."
Tim {the other Tim} Jul 26th 2010 3:29PM
I think the bots/ gold farmers are back in. I bought the most stacks of herbs ever the other night. ~10 gold per stack. I think on most servers that is a low low low price!
You are right about the price of herbs not really affecting the price of glyphs. It really caught me off guard. I assume alchemy is more tied with herb price, I have no idea.
Great article. Thank you.
xvkarbear Jul 26th 2010 3:52PM
http://twitpic.com/28xxq4/full
I never really knew what to do with them all. I've been making Runescrolls, with the ones I get from milling now.. but i still have all of that in storage.
Gemini Jul 26th 2010 6:27PM
Just advertise on trade every once in a while, offering bulk rates on them. You'll get buyers who want to grind out darkmoon cards and buy them up hundreds at a time. Not often, but just keep at it, sell them for about 5g a unit, and you'll both walk away happy for it.
Gemini Jul 26th 2010 6:30PM
Also, stick some singles on the AH. I usually keep up 10 single snowfall inks at a time and they sell on a fairly regular basis. Not enough to deplete my stock faster than I fill it but at least it slows down filling up that bank tab.
Jamie Jul 26th 2010 4:28PM
Darkmoon cards don't sell that easily
Tim {the other Tim} Jul 26th 2010 4:43PM
I agree, on my server they do not.
However, they still sell. And when they do! Boy howdy, it is a nice boost to your profits.
I use the cards as an offshoot of my glyph sales. I just relist them over and over again. They always eventually sell, and since you make several different types at random, you don't really have redundancy.
Zamboni Jul 26th 2010 6:48PM
It's true that he individual cards cards sell poorly, and sometimes only if deeply discounted below the cost of materials. It's a crapshoot that you'll have the exact card the other player needs, and marking up the price is difficult against buyers who can always decide to just keep making more more cards themselves.
The trinkets, on the other hand, sell quite well. I usually turn in between 20 and 35 decks every Faire, and they're all sold by the time the next Faire returns. Granted, it does takes a fairly large number of cards to overcome the initial RNG chaos and start producing decks in reliable numbers, but the profits will come eventually. (Insane in the Membrane grinders will also pay handsomely for the privilege of turning them in for the reputation.)
Greg Jul 26th 2010 4:58PM
Isn't there an economic rule, when you were talking about the two types of vellum being the same price, when one costs more to make, that an item can only be sold at its 'percieved value' - the value the customer thinks it is worth, as demand will drop if the price is high, and if it is the same as the other vellum the supply and demands curves intercept.... or something of that nature haha.