Can you make gold with Inscription?

I’ve had inscription on my main in Dragonflight, and I’ve pretty much not made any gold with, but let’s see if we can change that. My build is gigascuffed, but I do have a lot of knowledge since it’s my main, so we’re approaching 200 total knowledge spread out over an ungodly amount of different markets. The good news is that you can reach my level in any one market with 70-100 knowledge, so there might be something here for you!

Preliminary results

I did a small bit of crafting earlier today to test the waters and I could find multiple profitable recipes. I crafted some chilled runes and sold the q3s on the AH for 100g more than materials and then used the q2s for my other crafting, which sells for pretty much material cost. I crafted vantus runes and the iskaara contract and they sold quickly.

Consumables

I do not have time to sit in trade and fish for crafting orders, so this will only focus on items you can sell on the AH, which for the most part means consumables and intermediate materials. Luckily inscription has a lot of this, so there are some great options.

Skill or inspiration

Most of the inscription items that are sold on the AH have recipe difficulties ranging from 260 to 360. With the right bonuses you can reach guaranteed quality 3 on quite a few of these. As of the time of writing this, there’s a good amount of items that are profitable with inspiration, but that will not remain the case.

I would suggest going pure skill, which will require a bit more knowledge to get online, but it is a lot better long term right now.

Runebinding or contracts

There are essentially two routes to go with inscription, you can either focus on contracts and missives or vantus runes and weapon runes. Missives are for the most not really profitable currently, and contracts require a lot of reputation, so I would in general suggest fauna runes and vantus runes in Runebinding as the way to go. It’s also a little more point efficient, where the final nodes give multicraft and resourcefulness bonuses.

Either way you can find example builds for both approaches below.

Contracts: https://www.wowhead.com/profession-tree-calc/inscription/BBl3EB4APzom-OD4CXoUBeGe

Vantus and weapon runes: https://www.wowhead.com/profession-tree-calc/inscription/BCl3EB4APzol4HE4AQmPBPCeEe

Intermediate materials

Due to the existence of crafting orders there is very high demand for quality 3 rune writhebark. This is another item that it can make sense to specialize in. I haven’t been able to test if Flawless Inks impact it or not, but I expect it works.

Selling

Contracts can sell any time as the duration is 7 days, but I expect demand will peak around the resets. For vantus runes and fauna runes demand will definitely peak on the reset day, and you want to focus your effort on selling them at that time.

Multicraft is king

When we go the +skill build to reach guaranteed quality 3 multicraft is by far the strongest stat. You will want to get a q5 rare tool with multicraft and a q5 fine-print trifocals to mazimize your multicraft stat. If you are in inspiration land I suggest getting uncommon +multicraft and +inspiration tools, and using CraftSim to swap to whatever combo is most profitable.

CraftSim errors

Quick note at the end here is that CraftSim has been way off on a lot of inscription items for me. It’s telling me q2 and q3 Chilled runes have the same profit when the q3 variant is selling for 100 g more on the Auction House, so there is clearly something wrong here. It also hilariously showed q2 Tuskarr contracts as selling for a 3000 gold profit when they were selling for 175 gold. Hopefully this is ironed out in a later release, but you may need to use my inspiration calculator for some manual math.