So I recently went through items that are likely to increase in value with the Wrath Pre-patch, and somehow I completely forgot to include inscription. A new profession will always have players looking to dive in, particularly one with the extreme high end gold potential of inscription.
Leveling it yourself
Inscription is the perfect profession for an alt. Most of the glyph recipes, which is what matters, come from doing research and reading books of glyph mastery. So as long as you can get to max level inscription, you can make gold with it.
What happened with Jewelcrafting
Sadly, we dont have historical data for price history in TBC, so we cant see how prices behaved in the TBC pre-patch. That means you are going in blind, and this will be a risky endeavour.
Bottlenecks
As with jewelcrafting we mostly care about bottle neck materials, where the supply is low relative to how many are needed. Now uniquely for inscription, for the most part you do not need any specific materials, as you can get the same pigments from multiple different herbs. For every herb tier I have taken the total quantity for the currently cheapest herb, and the total quantity for that tier, as prices will likely level out.
As we can see the two pigmens that stand out are Golden and Emerald. These are the two that require the largest quantity of herbs. Golden has the lowest availability of herbs on my realm, with barely enough herbs for 4 players looking to max out inscription.
The top herbs are thus:
Are TBC materials relevant?
We could see a short term supply shortage for TBC materials as well. I doubt it will be long-lived, but I would not be surprised to see felweedspiking in price as they are the cheapest herbs for this expansion. There’s enough Felweed for 10 characters to max out Inscription on my realm, which does mean it will run out fairly quickly.
How much do you buy?
It’s very hard to say how many will level inscription. I imagine a not insignificant number of players, but what that actually means is anyones guess. Anywhere from 1 to 10 leveling sets worth of materials can be appropriate. On my realm there’s enough Felweed alone for 10 players leveling inscription, and I expect supply to trend upwards as players slow down their consumable usage in Sunwell.
There is no herb listed?
Oh, I’ll re add the screenshot as soon as I’m at a computer