Azuarc's Lich King Journal 6
Azuarc's Lich King Journal, entry 6: Inscription
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I'm sure a lot of people have been waiting for this one for a while. The new profession. What's it do? How does it impact the game? There's a lot of info popping up on the web now, but with Blizzard finally adding a large number of glyphs to the inscription system about a week ago, inscription has taken on new life.
Let's start with the basics. Inscription uses herbs in a multi-level system similiar to Engineering where you make A to make B to make C.
"A" is Milling herbs into pigments. Milling is a secondary skill associated with Inscription in the exact same way Disenchant works for Enchanting or Prospecting does for Jewelcrafting. Mill a stack of at least five of the same herb, and you will grind it into some kind of pigment. Each overall tier of herbs create the same type of pigment -- you'll get the same Alabaster Pigment from milling Peacebloom, Silverleaf or Earthroot -- and all the new stuff at each skill level of Inscription will be created from those pigments. More on milling later.
"B" is creating ink. Every pigment can be turned into a particular ink, 1 for 1. Sometimes when you mill, you'll get a special secondary type of pigment as well, which is used (along with the normal kind) to create rare inks. So yes, this in-between step is necessary.
"C" is actually scribing your Glyphs from the ink and (vendor-bought) parchment.
Glyphs are the primary feature of Inscription, but you can't actually make any until a skill level of 75. There are some odds and ends you can create before that point, such as attribute scrolls (Scroll of Stamina), "vellum" for enchanters to apply their enchantments onto so they can sell them, and random cards from the Rogues Deck. The last of those is a bizarre repeatable quest for the Darkmoon Faire for random stuff. At this exact time, those other non-glyph items pretty much only exist at the Apprentice level.
Starting Off With Inscription
Inscription uses herbs of all levels. You'll need a bunch. 3-4 stacks of each major herb type is probably more than plenty if you're stocking up.
When you first start off on the road to becoming a scribe, (that is the preferred term for "someone who does inscription",) you'll find the trainers in all major cities. The old world trainers were just patched in this weekend, much to my surprise. (Wish I had known that during the DAYS worth of dealing with Northrend crashing. You see what I go through for you?)
After you lug all your herbs to an Inscription Trainer and abandon your old profession to pick up Inscription, you'll have two things you can make -- Silver Ink or Ivory Ink. Unlike every other ink, these are made directly from Silverleaf and Peacebloom, respectively. (You don't get Milling until a skill level of 35.) With a little parchment, you can use those inks to create attribute scrolls.
When you get to 35, you'll start milling your herbs instead.
Milling
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Different herbs produce different pigments, but they are broken into herb tiers:
- Alabaster Pigment: Bloodthistle, Earthroot, Mageroyal, Peacebloom, Silverleaf
- Dusky Pigment: Briarthorn, Bruiseweed, Stranglekelp, Swiftthistle
- Golden Pigment: Kingsblood, Grave Moss, Liferoot, Wild Steelbloom
- Emerald Pigment: Goldthorn, Fadeleaf, Khadgar's Whisker, Wintersbite
...and so on down the line. Thanks to WotLKwiki for this partial list, but all the herbs are eventually millable into other pigments. Specifically, you can't mill the Dusky Pigment herbs until you have a skill of 75, Golden not before 125, Emerald at 175.
Basic inks are created on a 1-for-1 basis with your pigments, (which were originally called pomaces.) Moonglow Ink, created from Alabaster Pigment, is the most basic ink you create from milling, before you learn to make any glyphs. You'll probably create a bit of Bleached Vellum with that.
Milling will typically produce one of two pigments, with the potential for a third rare item that appears from time to time. However, you never get both pigments. Just 1-4 of the one you do get. Because they appear to have equal frequency, and one is supposed to be the one you use for basic stuff and the other one is just for special recipes, this was very frustrating, as I detailed below.
Vellum
There are two kinds of Vellum. Bleached Vellum is a target for enchanters for any armor enchant. Even though it may not actually be a piece of armor, it can be enchanted as though it were. After this is done, the enchanted scroll can be sold via Auction House or traded to other players, who can then apply the enchantment themselves. At a slightly higher skill level, (100 rather than 75,) Treated Vellum does the same thing for weapon enchantments. One of the biggest issues surrounding enchantment was the inability for enchanters to actually sell their services through any means besides face-to-face. Now they are every bit as salable as other professions. Vellum is surprisingly easy to make, so unless Blizzard changes something to only be good for enchantments up to level X, enchanters can probably rejoice, and scribes can be fairly certain they have at least one valuable commodity besides glyphs.
Glyphs
| I suggest reading the Glyph article to find out more about how Glyphs function. In a nutshell, glyphs are class-specific modifiers to a single ability. You get 3 real glyph slots for meaningful effects, and then there are 3 "minor" glyph slots that are for cosmetic or silly things. Each time you add a glyph to one of your slots, it goes on cooldown for 60 minutes, meaning you can't replace it with another one rapidly. And yes, they work like gems or enchants -- you have to replace the old one, so you might want to think carefully about swapping them around for PvP and PvE. (You can add different types of glyphs quickly, but not the same one a second time.) |  |  |
Raising Skill
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- 20 Silverleaf -> Silver Ink. (Due to weird server glitches, this ended up being 40.)
- 20 Peacebloom -> Ivory Ink. My skill was essentially 40 by doing this.
- 20 Scrolls of Spirit
- 10 Scrolls of Intellect (the scrolls used up all the ink)
- 56 Moonglow Ink from 6 stacks of milled Peacebloom and Silverleaf
- 20 Bleached Vellum. This brought me to a skill of 90. Although I could make some glyphs now, they required Midnight Ink, which was a green recipe, so...
- 62 Midnight Ink from 4.5 stacks of Briarthorn and Bruiseweed. Midnight Ink grayed out at 95, which happened to be the skill needed for the next tier of glyphs.
- 60 Glyphs of Rejuvenation. Plateaued around 108, but eventually reached 119.
- 44 Lion's Ink and 50 Hunter's Ink from 8 stacks of Liferoot and Kingsblood. This finished the trek to 120.
- 14 Glyphs of Entangling Roots to 125.
- 24 Glyphs of Healing Touch to 148.
- 50 Mysterious Tarot to use up the Hunter's Ink. With the current list of recipes, this was a mistake and I should have done this first. Only a very few recipes are actually recipes, and the rest are a placeholder recipe using low-end mats. There was nothing else to use Hunter's Ink on, and the Healing Touch glyph was still yellow when I ran out of Lion's Ink. I doubt this will be the case on live, but just sayin'
- 26 Jadefire Ink from 5 stacks of Goldthorn and Fadeleaf. (Also 25 useless Indigo Pigment, since it takes 2 of the jadefire ink's pigment to use the indigo. Hey Blizz, can we get these changed to like 80/20 instead of 50/50?)
- 26 Glyphs of Moonfire and later Insect Swarm to get to 189.
- Lacking enough resources to get to 200, I had to use the "cheaty recipe" with low-end mats to get there. Took 16 combines of another top-level glyph.
- 29 Celestial Ink from 6.5 stacks of Blindweed. (And 50 useless ruby pigments. GFG.)
- 29 Glyphs of Rebirth to get to 229.
- Returned to my bank and found a few more herbs at this tier. In 15 more mills (almost 4 stacks,) I got 14 ruby and 16 violet pigments. I made 8 of the special inks with them since they were orange...and got to 236.
- I was stuck using the cheaty recipe from here since I didn't have any higher-level herbs. 21 combines got me to 250. At the next tier of herbs, 24 combines got me to 274 before I ran out of Mageroyal.
OK, so as you can see, Inscription's recipe list is not complete, nor is it done being tweaked yet. The secondary inks are thoroughly useless right now and out of balance. Only druids have actual recipes for their glyphs and everything else has a temporary set of mats I referred earlier as the "cheaty recipe" of 1 Moonglow Ink, 1 Mageroyal, and 1 of each parchment. There are a VERY limited list of things that run up the list that are not inks or glyphs, but they only go up to about 150. Everything else is druid glyphs (real recipes) and other class glyphs. (cheaty recipe for now)
But here's the rundown of what I used at this early level:
- (1-90) 9 stacks of Peacebloom and Silverleaf.
- (90-120) 4 stacks of Briarthorn and Bruiseweed (this was excessive. I'm curious why this range is so short.)
- (120-150) 8 stacks of Liferoot and Kingsblood. (Could have also used Gravemoss or Wild Steelbloom)
- (150-189) 5 stacks of Goldthorn and Fadeleaf. (This was insufficient. Could have also used Khadgar's Whisker or Wintersbite.)
- (200-236) 10.5 stacks of Blindweed, Sungrass, Firebloom, and company. (Due to the current set-up, this was woefully insufficient.)
- (250-300) ? stacks of late Azeroth herbs
- (300-375) ? stacks of Outland herbs
- (375-450) ? stacks of Northrend herbs
From the looks of things, I need to put some massive focus on the later herbs. Guess I'm gonna head off to farm some Dreamfoil and Plaguebloom now, before wracking up the Felweed.
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