Time to dive into another profession from Warlords of Draenor. I already covered Blacksmithing a while back and today we will be looking at Inscription. I haven’t been stocking too many of the items yet, but I have one sale. I expect it would look better if I actually stocked all of the items in the group.

WoD Crafting

I covered the basics of WoD crafting in my blacksmithing post and I won’t repeat myself to much here. Just as for blacksmithing the recipes rely on bind on pickup materials. For Inscription the main material is called war paints.

The Spirit of War recipe will allow you to circumvent the daily cooldown and can be purchased from the Herb vendor when they are up.

Unlocking recipes

The recipes can be obtained from the inscription vendor in your Garrison. You need secrets of Draenor Inscription which you obtain from the related daily cooldown to purchase them. Inscription does not have too many recipes we care about so you can get up to speed very quickly.

The recipes we want are the staves and wands, the off-hand Shadowtome and the Weapon Crystal. I haven’t dived deep enough into the rest of the items to even figure out what they do or if they are desireable, but the profit margins is possible so it might be worth checking out.

Setting up your garrison

For setting up your garrison I’ll refer you to my post on Hexweave bags. The only difference is of course that we want a rank 3 Inscription Hut and a follower with the inscription bonus rather than the tailoring bonus.

Calculating crafting costs

Crafting costs will depend heavily on whether or not you are using the spirit of war recipe with Primal Spirits. If you don’t use the Spirit of War it is quite easy, but if you do primal crafting we have to find some way of valuing the Primal Spirits.

Daily cooldowns only

If you are just using the daily cooldown and the work orders it is quite easy. At max profession level you get 20 war paints per craft. The daily cooldown craft requires 10 Cerulean pigment. We know that you get 2.375 Cerulean pigment per mill. This means that 1 pigment is roughly equal to 2 herbs. Using the daily cooldown you would quickly realize that one war paint costs 1.05 herbs.

This means that the value will generally be quite low and the crafting costs will be really low.

As with the blacksmithing setup we will set the value of 1 War Paint to the crafting cost divided by 5. The base formula gives you 4 war paints so we need to use a factor of 5 to get the price when we get 20.

Primal crafting

The Primal Crafting recipe takes 4 pigments and 1 Primal Spirit. The Primal Spirit is equivalent to 5 herbs and the 4 pigments is equivalent to 9.5 herbs. You get two war paints from the recipe so the cost per paint is simply 7.25 times your average herb price.

To help us we will create a custom price source that takes the minimum historical market value of all the WoD Herbs. We will use dbhistorical as the price source so it remains stable over a longer time period.

min(dbhistorical(i:109124),dbhistorical(i:109125),dbhistorical(i:109126),dbhistorical(i:109127),dbhistorical(i:109128),dbhistorical(i:109129))

I called it minwodherb. This should be stable enough and also close to the average cheapest price you can expect to find these herbs. Using this custom price we simply set the material cost of one War Paint to 7.25*minwodherb.

You can now use minwodherb as the maximum price for a shopping operation for the WoD herbs when you’re restocking as well. Just buy the herbs below the maximum price and you can guarantee that TSM calculates the correct profit margin and crafting cost!

TSM setup

My TSM setup is identical to my other old world markets. We use the same auctioning operation as I do in all crafted markets where I just craft one item. The crafting operations is also identical as we just want to keep one of each in stock, the sale rate is so low that there’s little point in stocking many.

The setup includes a shopping operation for the herbs that is based on the minwodherb custom price, so make sure you add the custom price source as well. If you’ve never made a custom price source before it’s under “Custom Price Sources” on the main page of the TSM menu, as shown in the screenshot below.

If you like my blog, you should consider follow me on twitch and twitter because it will give you a live glimpse into my gold making adventures!