Shadowlands Goldmaking: Crafting Missives

Inscription started out really well with darkmoon decks, and this week it has continued at full speed with the missives needed for crafting legendaries. They are selling at an incredible rate, so let’s take a look!

Results

Since the reset that happened about 48 hours ago I have made 625k worth of sales in missives! That’s a pretty hefty amount and they keep selling almost as fast as I can post them. Of couse I am on a very high pop realm, so my sale rate is much higher than yours may be, but the profits are lower.

What are missives?

Missives are optional reagents that can guarantee a specific stat for an item when crafted, as well as being used to give your legendary it’s secondary stats. This last use is the main one right now and leads to incredibly strong demand. Longer term these will remain relevant as players will always need these for legendaries, regardless of rank.

Unlocking the recipe

You easily get to the missive recipes without paying much. You can level inscription far enough with almost exclusively crafting inks and mas milling, which you will need to do a ton of to enter this market anyway. It’s surprisingly easily available and still very strong.

Inks take a lot of time

Do be prepared for the fact that you will have to spend a lot of time crafting inks. This is a time consuming market, as you need 11 inks per missive, so that’s more than 30 seconds of crafting time. As such a second account is obviously an incredible advantage.

Valuing your missives

Obviously TSM crafting is still not really reliable. Prices are changing rapidly, and inks are at wild prices. To get agood estimate we can use the data I have on milling rates from Nightshade and Death Blossom. This only works if we assume we craft equal amounts of all of the missives. The different stat missives take different quantities of umbral and luminous inks, but if you craft one of each, you will spend 5 of each ink per missive on average.

The crafting cost per missive then equals about 28.6 Death Blossom and 2.8 nightshade. you can use this to quickly get an idea of the cost and compare it to the price of the missives. You will likely end up selling one of them at a loss, but as long as the others make up for it that’s OK.

Selling Missives

Personally I rely on an operation with hardcoded gold values based on what I know my minimum price is. I do not suggest using the same operation for all of them, as it’s fine to sell one at a loss if the rest make up for it. You could easily implement a custom price source that shows the average cost and add it to your tooltip as shown below.

28.6*dbmarket(i:169701)+2.86*dbmarket(i:171315)

Down the line a simple setup with 120% crafting as the minimum price will make a lot of sense.

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6 thoughts on “Shadowlands Goldmaking: Crafting Missives

  1. I get how to add that custome source “missive cost”. But how can i bound that missive cost to only show on missives? and how can i adjust the group to check agaisnt missivecost instead of the normal crafting cost 😕

    1. You cant choose to show it only on missives, you could however use the missivecost custom source as the minimum price in a auctioning operation for missives.

    1. I buy herbs, I compare the average cost of a missive using the formula and the custom source in the post. If it’s profitable right now then I’ll buy 100-150k worth of herbs and turn it all into missives.

  2. How the hell are your guys realms always making gold? I’m on a huge server as well and nothing is making gold. Everything is selling for exactly its crafting cost or less. I spent 114k on missives, and made 97k back. I lost a lot of gold. I’m sick of being poor expansion after expansion cause the only way to make gold is to farm herbs until my fingers bleed.

    1. Interesting question. Due to the large number of people on my server who craft items – crafting professions are unprofitable.

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