Inscription is back in Dragonflight, with a brand new way of crafting darkmoon decks and some new toys!
Recipe types
As you can see Scribes get a huge set of recipe categories. Some of these are fairly self-explanatory like reagents and inks. There’s missives both for normal gear and for crafting and gathering tools to guarantee a specific stat. There’s the new darkmoon deck trinkets, some weapons. Runes and Sigils includes vantus runes, new consumables you apply to your weapons as well as the optional reagent sigils for darkmoon decks. Mysteries include darkmoon cards and fortune cards, scrolls is mostly weapon enchant illusions. Contracts are rcontracts for reputation. Profession specialization is a new category of items that grand profession knowledge. And then there are 4 categories of various dragonriding cosmetics.
Overall inscription covers a lot of different bases and is looking very good.
Darkmoon decks have changed!
Darkmoon decks are getting some huge changes. There’s now two tiers of trinkets, the basic finished deck, and then the darkmoon deck box. The deck boxes are crafted trinkets that take the darkmoon deck as one of it’s reagents. In addition you now craft a bundle of cards. The bundle contains two cards on average. Aces are now epic quality and are MUCH rarer than the other cards. Based on feedback in the alpha they should also drop out in the world, so expect to have to buy your aces. I crafted 200 cards on beta, and got 2 aces. There are nodes that increase the chance of getting one type of card, which will make 50% of your cards come from that specific deck.
The cards only require various awakened items as reagents, so you don’t have to mill to craft cards this time around. If you put enough points into a specific card type node you can recycle cards of that type. gives less than 1 awakened per scrap, and is VERY low value considering a card on average costs 7.5 awakened of various types.
Gear
In addition to the darkmoon decks there are some other gear crafts. There are two staffs and an offhand. One staff each for melee and casters. As with blacksmithing I expect high quality weapons to be in-demand, and this is no different for inscription. You do not however get access to any pre-embellished gear, so you will have to rely on embellishing reagents if players want embellished effects from their weapons.
Treatises
Treatises is a new item type. They are BoP items that give you 1 profession knowledge. They have a weekly cooldown, but they are not consumed. Every crafter in the game will want these as early as possible. Since they are BoP they can only be sold through crafting orders. I expect there will be a lot of public orders, and you may even be able to sell them as private orders providing your own Artisan’s mettle for a profit. They don’t have a quality so you just want to unlock the ability to craft them.
Reagents
You can craft a lot intermediate materials, primarily for use in other inscription recipes. Cosmic ink is crafted from multiple lower tier inks and you may have to specialize to get it to quality 3. Players need this for darkmoon deck boxes, so q3 of cosmic inks will be in demand.
Missives
Missives are back, and they now pick the full combination of secondaries, so there are six of them. Higher quality missives reduce the recipe difficulty increase, but do not affect the power of the crafted item besides that.
Knowledge break points
As we can see here inscription requires quite a lot of knowledge to guarantee quality 5 basic crafts. For basic weapons the requirement is 65, mostly due to the fact that a lot of generic nodes provide less skill than for other professions, and a slightly higher base recipe difficulty. For max quality mythic ilvl decks you can’t guarantee the quality, but have to rely on inspiration chance for the last 3 ilvls.
Optimal knowledge points strategy
From my perspective there are two options for early specialization. You either choose the Archiving tree, or the runebinding tree. Archiving will get you access to crafting darkmoon deck boxes as well as treatises, missives, sigils and contracts. Almost all of these are likely to be great from a goldmaking perspective.
The alternative in Runebinding will get you access to nodes focused on weapons, off-hands, vantus runes and profession tools. The most interesting here is in my opinion the weapons. For professions tools quality does not have too much of an effect, as the base items have the exact same amount of profession skill.
Archiving
For the archiving build I would suggest putting 20 points into the base node, to unlock Darkmoon Mysteries and Shared Knowledge. Then you would put 10 each into those two nodes. The 10 points into Shared Knowledge will get you to Draconic Treatises. After unlocking that you should dump points into Darkmoon mysteries, or the end nodes for each deck. Priority will depend on simulation results, always target the top DPS choice as it is almost always the top gold maker. If one deck is significantly more in demand than the others you may want to prioritize that decks end-node, both to unlock illustrious insight for extra skill, as well as to get the proc bonus.
Runebinding
For the runebinding build you would simply beeline towards staves. Start by putting 10 each in Runebinding and woodcarving, then we max out Staves. Then you max out woodcarving. After that you should swap to the Rune Mastery Node in Rune Mastery if you just want profession skill, or you can put more points into Runebinding to go towards vantus runes.
Notable recipes
Below is a list of the recipes that most excite me, alongside some quick notes on how you would go about profiting from them, as well as their source. As we can see most of the power increasing recipes come from knowledge. The main reputation that gives valuable recipes is the Artisan’s Consortium for profession tools and missives. Contracts come from the respective reputation, and are usually an item class that is incredible if you are first to market, so grinding reputation can be very valuable.
