BfA Inscription: Milling, inks and profitable crafts

Today I will go a bit deeper into inscription than I have done previously. I will look at the yields from milling and compare it to the various crafts that can potentially be profitably crafted to see which items to focus on and what you can expect from the profession.

The inks

There are three pigment types and three corresponding inks in BfA. In decreasing order of rarity they are Ultramarine pigments, Crimson pigments and Viridescent Pigments. When milling normal herbs you will get 6.3 ultramarines per 2.4 crimson per 1 viridescent pigment.

You get on average 0.13 viridescent pigments per herb.

Viridescent inks are by far the most limiting ink in the high level crafts and as you can easily tell this means you will end up with truly ludicrous quantities of ultramarine pigments.

Milling

Generally you will only want to mill the normal herbs. Anchor Weed is generally too expensive due to the large demand for flasks. The same goes for Riverbud and Siren’s Pollen. All the herbs except Anchor Weed have the same pigment yields so you want to go with whatever is cheapest. Winter’s Kiss, Akunda’s Bite and Sea Stalks are typically the cheapest ones so focus on scanning for those when buying materials.

The main value from milling will always be the viridescent pigments as they are by far the most limiting factor when crafting inscription items. All the highest value crafts require viridescent inks. If the price of one Viridescent ink is less than 8 times the price of a herb you may be better of buying the inks, at least if you are focused on darkmoon decks.

The crafts

I suggest using my spreadsheet to figure out which items are most profitable. As you can see below there are probably quite a few items that will be profitable, depending on your recipe rank and realm.

Darkmoon Cards

I have written an entire post on darkmoon decks and cards. I have not been active in this market since the Battle of Dazar’alor opened, but based on my spreadsheet and prices on my realm it will still likely be profitable. There are no new trinket BoEs with BoD so the only issue is the increased item level from other sources.

Darkmoon cards do not require crimson and ultramarine inks meaning you will have to find another way to dispose of these if you do your own milling. On average you will get 19 crimson inks and 50 ultramarine inks per card crafted. This will scale up incredibly quickly as you will have to craft hundreds of darkmoon cards to avoid the RNG risks.

Vantus Runes

Vantus runes are a great item to sell as raid performance items are always useful. The quantity used is sadly a bit low though as you only need one per reset. They require ultramarine inks and viridescent inks in a ratio of 25/6 at rank 3. This makes them a good choice for getting through some ultramarine ink, but turning all your pigments into inks is still a massive time drain and you may be better off vendoring your pigments and buying finished inks.

Contracts

Contracts are essentially just a way to get rid of pigments. The price is generally low compared to the crafting cost and they will not generally yield a profit if you bought the materials. If you are milling to craft darkmoon cards though you will end up with thousands of crimson and ultramarine pigments and this may be the most profitable way to move them.

At this point the main point of contracts is for Paragon caches so players may be more willing to swap as they get their paragon rewards.

The recipes all use crimson pigments and ultramarines in a 1:2 ratio which means you will end up with excess ultramarine inks. I suggest vendoring them or turning them into vantus runes.

War-scrolls

War-scrolls are mainly used for warfront turn-ins. To a lesser degree they may be bought by players using them for PvE content. I suggest keeping a stack of 20 of each on your banker and just posting them as long as the price makes sense.

They use only crimson inks and will make your ultramarine pigment situation even worse.

Tome of the Quiet Mind

The talent reset tomes are a great way to move tons of inks. Demand is always high as raiders and other players want the flexibility of swapping talents on the fly. The main use is once again as a ink dump for the common inks. This is by far the best way to move really large amounts of inks, as it has higher demand than anything else.

That being said the recipe is rarely straight up profitable, so once again this is mostly a way to dump the lower level inks that you get thousands off from milling herbs for Viridescent inks.

Sinister combatant gear

Sinister combatant gear can be great, but it does require a lot of expulsom as well as viridescent inks. Both of these materials are hard to generate and this will limit the amount of items you can craft. you do not need to satock too many though as it’s only an off-hand and it should be easy to keep five of them in stock.

Dealing with all the pigments

The main issue with inscription is the abslutely massive amount of pigments you end up with. Processing them all into inks will take a ton of time. You need to use craft all and go afk to get through it and the time value is really low. Just vendoring all your low level inks or buying viridescent inks straight up for any high level crafting is often the best approach.

I mostly bought viridescent inks when I crafted Darkmoon cards as I did not want to deal with the hassle of an inventory filled to the seams with useless ultramarine pigments.

At the end of the day it depends on how much time you have and the relative costs of your realm. Milling can be profitable, but not hugely so, and almost all the value will generally come from the viridescent and crimson pigments.

TSM Settings

You can find my TSM setup in my pastebin. It includes crafting based settings for selling all the items mentioned above.

Good luck!

If you want to level up your gold making come join me on Patreon and get access to awesome rewards like Early Access to all my posts. 

2 thoughts on “BfA Inscription: Milling, inks and profitable crafts

  1. Re Ultramarine inks. I made a few thousand gold by listing them on AH in stacks of 60 for around 500g when it is used as the turn in for AP by the docks.

Have a question or a thought? Leave it here:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.