EDIT: I hade wrongly assumed the distribution to be equal for the misty pigments, but getting 2 or 3 is very rare, the numbers have been corrected now.
Today we will take a look at milling in Mists of Pandaria, the math for herbs per ink and what herb you should prioritize!
Different tiers, different yields
As usual there are differences in how much pigment you get depending on the rarity of the herb. The main one this time around is Fool’s Cap which has a MUCH higher chance of yielding Misty Pigments than the others. This can be quite important as the uncommon Starlight Ink is used in a lot of high end recipes, including darkmoon cards and the shoulder enchants.
Base herb math
All the herbs except Fool’s cap have the same chanes. Each time you mill you will get 2 or 3 Shadow Pigments and you have a 25% chance of getting between 1 and 3 Misty pigments. This works out to 1.25 Ink of Dreams and 0.125 Starlight Ink per mill, or roughly 4 herbs per ink of dreams and 20 herbs per Starlight Ink. We can further assume that one starlight ink is equal to 10 Ink of Dreams at the vendor to get the Starlight Ink equivalent which would be 0.5 ink of dreams “equivalents” per herb.
The Fool’s cap math
For Fool’s Cap you will get 2-4 Shadow pigments and you have a 50% chance of getting 1-3 Misty pigments. This means you get 1.5 Ink of Dreams and 0.25 Starlight ink per mill. Calculating it into ink of dreams equivalents we get 0.8 ink of dreams per herb.
Comparing the values
Usually for milling the uncommon ink has been worth about 10 times the normal ink, as that is the exchange rate at the ink vendor. If we assume that then we can use the equivalent values I calculated to compare the two herb types directly. We can see that a fool’s cap is almost 2 times as valuable as the other herbs for milling purposes, and you spend less time per ink as you get more materials per mill.
Mill macro
To mill effectively you can either choose to use a milling macro or the TSM destory feature. Personally I prefer the macros as it is just one button press, whereas I have the TSM macro set up with a scrollwheel and a modifier, but both will work. Below is a simple milling macro that will mill any herbs you have. This macro won’t work if you have some, but not 5 of a herb higher on the list, so you may need to swap the order, or just use one with just one herb name and swap it out based on what you have in your bags.
/cast Milling
/use Rain Poppy
/use Silkweed
/use Desecrated Herb
/use Green Tea Leaf
/use Fool’s Cap
/use Snow Lily
I feel like this math isn’t adding up to live servers. I’m doing Darkmoon cards with required 10 expensive inks per craft in 10 inscribes for 4 days now and the number im using is 200 base herbs per Darkmoon considering Ink trade-ins. It really doesn’t fell like it’s just bad luck after milling enough herbs to deforest the Amazon.
Agreed, I’m doing the same thing and have been needing to buy more herbs than expected based on the rates posted here.
You realize the chances of getting 2 or 3 pigments per mill very low.
You’re starlight ink per mill is not accurate.
I just wanted to comment the same thing. People are taking this calculation at face value and are selling starlight ink at a loss on my server atm.
He says he edited the calculation to make up for the rare 2-3 pigments, but it’s still not correct.
In his old Post, you wrote 0.25 Starlight ink per mill, but that was already false, because it is 0.25 PIGMENT per mill. That is now correct because he changed the 0.25 into 0.125.
But the error, that you mostly only get 1 pigment is still in the calculation.
Basically it comes down to the chance of getting 1 vs 2 vs 3 pigments (normal as well as Fool’s Cap) as this is not evenly distributed. Anyone did a sample of herbs to find out?