Monday, April 16, 2012

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part THREE Inscription

Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part THREE Inscription

Personnaly I an not fond of the glyph business, though many players I whose blogs I read do not share my opinion.  Actually, this has in many ways been one of the pinnacle professions for some of the most fiercer theory crafting and business marketing strategies I have ever seen.

Okay, its not that bad, and I am going to tell you first why this is not my favorite.   I will put up the negative points IMO first instead of the positive ones.

Inscription, why not to prioritize it:
  1. HUGE inventory management, lots of herbs, pigments, inks, glyphs, fortune cards, relics and stuff.  It requires massive addon savy and/or on demand crafting and/or huge storage space available to really branch into the full spectrum of the market.
  2. It does not have the staying power in the broad scope like JC and enchanting
  3. MINDLESS HOURS OF MILLING HERBS, followe by extended AFK crafting of pigments into inks
  4. The uncommon inks lose value after the initial rush in current levels and become a waste byproduct of the profession.  Having a any part of the manufacturing that is waste, is just that, it is a waste, or it eats up your time in ways that could be more gold productive.  I am talking about the uncommon inks from pre cata herbs.
  5. Since it is has been such a huge money maker historically, it is well documented and very tough competition with people that hang on to an old broken money maker hoping it will get big again.  (it well get big again, keep reading)
  6. I JUST DONT LIKE IT, compared to other options at least.  In a way it is like JC that it can move massive volumes for minimal profit margins, which is a comparable net gain, however, I prefer medium/medium (medium volume and medium profits)
  7. Massive Barrier to entry on the glyphs... it takes a lot of months to get all the research done to learn all the glyphs, yeah it will be a lot of MONTHS.. you will not likely ever be able to reasonably speed this up with the books from wrath content, there will never be more than a few on any AH and the prices are likely going to be steep.. YMMV
I guess the last point really says all that needs to be said on my take for inscription, however, read on and get some insight to why I put it as #3 and not lower in my priority list.
  1. Darkmoon trinkets!  We are still waiting on more crafting information to be finalized, but I think it is a safe bet that they will be back again and they will be good.
  2. Relics and off-hands, they alone can be a great market if the ILVL of them is above the LFD or LFR
  3. Glyphs always in style, people are always starting a new toon, comming back or something
  4. Glyphmas 5.0 style... time will tell
  5. Micro business oportunities, meaning, you can chose to pursues a more comfortable part of the market rather than the entire thing.  Micor markets below
    • Just glyphs
    • Just pigments (time is money, and it takes a lot of time to mill herbs to pigments, inks can be afk crafted)
    • Just Inks, Sell the base mats to the crafters looking for final product process business, or the casual guys looking to buy the mats to have something crafted for themselves
    • Just off-hands relics (the PVP items will likely stay pretty popular if they follow the current model)
    • Just Darkmoon Cards
    • Just Darkmoon Decks
    • Just Darkmoon Trinkets
    • Just Mysterious Fortune cards
    • Select any range or segment of the glyphs, like go for glyphs, but only inventory and manage sales for say 15 or 25 (any number less than all of them really) glyphs.
    • or any combo of these you wish to play with
  6. Though I have not mentioned it before it could be considered a gathering profession, sort of, like with JC prospecting, Inscription milling could be a gathering profession.  Herbs > Pigments > inks
  7. I MADE MY FIRST BIG MONEY WITH IT (story at the bottom if you dont want to go back and read my early posts
  8. HAVE I SAID KABOOM, yeah, it has a KABOOM power in the early release days, weeks months, then a fizzle.
  9. It will have the power to be a slow and steady staple if you choose to continue in the market past the KABOOM into the fizzle and will still be good, though IMO not so much as JC or enchanting.
  10. Massive barrier to entry.  This one was up there in the other section too, but it makes casuals looking for a quick turn over, turn somewhere else, so the competitions is often going to be less, but it will be fierce
  11. KABOOM POWER
    • Glyph research could teach you glyph of travel form on day one, and you can capitalize on THAT... come on go look it up, and you should be able to tell that this will be a BIG money maker
    • If you put in the time milling, making ink and going for the DMC/D/Ts KABOOM
    • Combine anything with the power or the relics and off hands and PVP items
    • GLYPHS, we are getting a major overhaul to the system, more info is really needed to know how this is going to flesh out, but expect a major surge in sales
Okay, enough... It made #3 on my list, really, in time, I may change my mind and go with the farmer guy since herbing mining will be OP too.

My story:
A 6 month forced break from WOW was over.  I returned from a military deployment... the old guild and old friends were scattered.  All that remained were a few broken pieces of the empty shell of what once was.  I made a couple server transfers, found great guilds that met every expectation as hovels of massive drama and misleading declartations of what they were.  they said raiding guilds, HA... not so IMO.  I am not sure that fit either of those guild were "Raiding Guilds".  More like "CASUAL, and we try to raid, even get lucky sometimes.. after the nerf" would have been more accurate descriptions IMO.

Then one of those shells wiggled and some old friends crawled out from under a couple of those broken pieces and said great things about Cata and raiding and GDKP runs, HM runs and yeah, it sounded good...  Then the Drama KABOOM destroyed that guild and I was pretty mad at guilds, all of them... they all pretty much were going to tell me one thing and do another.  Promise me anything they though I wanted to hear to get me to join their ranks... So, now raiding suck, and guilds suck and players in WOW are all degenerative rejects that hide in a virtual world and can not act like people when they have the layer of anonymity created by the interwebz.

Okay, time to back  up... what does all this have to do with inscription?  Okay, getting to that.  Those friends? yeah, the ones that I connected with after months... well, they were now HORDE, and on another server!!! (I was all alliance at the time.)  I had in the preceding months spent hundreds of real dollars on server transfers that did not pay off.  So I was not about to pay that again to go to a new server and AGAIN still to faction transfer. So I rolled a new toon, Horde, on that new server.  I had previously mastered the spending urge and found the power of multiple toons with multiple professions for farming, crafting and left it all and about 30K or so, on that old server with those completely abandoned toons.  I was starting new and needed a gold making plan, herbalism and inscription was the early cata plan.  And basically converted time into money farming herbs > glyphs when leveling, and later farming the AH for herbs to Darkmoon trinkets a the relics were a good staple too for mainenance income.. It took me 3 months of focused effort on gold making, one toon from level 1 - 85, and 400K in gold and reasonable inventories of mats.  I did not have interest in raiding, I was actually pretty jaded about it all, but later found myself going back to it after failed attempts at trying to PVP more seriously.  I was daily spending 20-40K in the AH on herbs and crushing them all down to inks and eventually DMCs and trinkets, while playing at the relics and other stuff, flipping vendor pets and other toy niche markets.  That is when 2 things happened... I found a lot of amusement in the AH market, I was manipulating it on a daily basis, and I found having that much gold to be amusing too.  the second thing was, I wanted to branch out.. and my new first love was enchanting... Inscription was a great kaboom for me, but when the fizzle came, I got out and found a  new market in enchanting... The 4.3 patch was an enchanting KABOOM, and inscription would have just been meh... so so, if it had still been my primary market...

With the information available now, and historical reference, Inscription is still a top contender, especially for the 5.0 release

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