We are now onto the last two professions to check out. Sadly Jewelcrafting and Inscription are the ones that require the most amount of testing as both Milling and prospecting requires a lot of data and is very key. I’ve luckily gotten some herbs from YourBuddyDinec, so go check him out when he’s online.
Milling
In Shadowlands we get three new pigment types, Luminous and Umbrals are the common ones with Tranquil Pigments the uncommon variant. Below you can see the results I’ve had on beta with the herbs I’ve personally gathered and what I got from Dinec.
It looks like you can not get Tranquil Pigments from Death Blossom, which is the herb that spawns in every zone. For luminous and umbral inks it looks like all the common herbs give you 1 or 2 pigments, and it’s a 50/50 chance of getting luminous or umbrals. This yields about 1.5 pigments per 5 herbs, which is exactly 30%.
The zone specific herbs seem to have the same rate, with a small chance of getting a tranquil pigment in stead.
Nightshade seems to always give a Tranquil Ink, as well as the common inks, but the sample is way too small to really be certain of anything.
We’ll have to do more testing and i will be buying more herbs with transfered gold as well as farming, if you want to help out and have beta, let me know!
Recipe types
As we can see there are mostly familiar faces on the list of recipes. Scribes get talent reset tomes, contracts, darkmoon cards, vantus runes and staves and off-hands. New this time around is the optional reagents, where scribes craft the Missives that are needed to apply secondary stats to your legendary as well as to set the specific stats you want on crafted gear. I think they might be a tad too expensive for that use case though, particularly early on.
Optional Reagents
Like all the crafting professions scribes get the crafter’s marks. In addition you can craft missives to apply secondary stats both to crafted gear and legendaries. The missives will likely be extremely in demand early on as players want to get their legendaries as soon as possible.
They use different combinations of luminous and umbral inks, which can lead to very lop-sided prices. it all depends on which secondaries turn out to be most in demand. They also require a Tranquil Ink, which will be a huge bottle neck overall for crafting.
An example is the versatility missive which requires 2luminous and 8 umbrals. Vers is almost never the best PvE stat and generally more players optimize for pve than pvp. This should mean that demand for luminous for missives might be higher than umbrals and luminous could turn out to be more expensive as it seems to have the same milling rate.
Tomes
Scribes get talent reset tomes, codexes and a lockpicking scroll. The tomes requires slightly less than half the inks of the codex for luminous and umbrals, but you save the tranquil ink. Most likely codexes will be more economical for guilds, but in smaller content you will want to run tomes. Both should sell quite well.
Contracts
The contract recipes require revered with the respective faction to obtain. I expect these will sell, even if the reputations seem to have slightly less value this time around. They take 5 each of the umbral and luminous inks.
Darkmoon cards
Darkmoon cards have traditionally been rteally good. I haven’t seen sims to show if these are as strong, but I expect they will be in demand. The item level is 200, which is really good. This time around you can also get blank cards, which give you a random card from that deck. I don’t have enough herbs to level inscription and test it, but it looks like you get a blank card for a specific deck, and then need to use another tranquil ink to finish it. The overall effect is that this makes crafting decks more expensive, as you need to spend an extra tranquil ink to get a card every time you get a blank one. Unless there’s a blank wild card you turn in this system seems completely pointless.
The basic cards require 7 each of luminous and umbral inks and a tranquil ink. Doubling the tranquil ink cost for some cards will most likely increase the crafting cost significantly. I’ll try to get enough herbs to test this, but no guarantees. The recipe is vendor trained, so you do not have to level your scribe to get access to it.
Vantus rune
The vantus rune is a staple raid consumable. The recipe is obtained from Nathria, so run it on every difficulty week one to maximize your chances of getting it before mythic opens.
It requires 10 each of the basic inks and one tranquil ink and should be relatively expensive, particularly with the barrier to entry.
Staves and off-hands
Lastly scribes get two staves and an off-hand. All of these are uncommon items, which means they only take one optional reagent to set the item level. The base items are all level 50 and item level 100, so they will absolutely need crafter’s mark rank 2. Interestingly the int staff requries 22 luminous inks and the agi staff 22 umbrals. I expect the int staff will sell significantly better as there are way more casters than 2h agi users.
Overall outlook
Inscription looks quite good. I think Tranquil inks will be a significant bottle neck, as nightshade is relatively rare outside of the Maw. Since darkmoon decks is a trainer recipe you do not have to level your scribe at all. I would suggest just crafting away as fast as possible on day 2 to get darkmoon decks and missives onto the AH. There is no urgency in leveling to 60.