The glyph industry

Readers keep bugging me about details on the glyph industry, my moneymaking mainstay. I wrote several articles covering different points, now I write one big summary and will link it on the about page.

Chapter 1: getting inks

The scribe uses inks and parchments to make glyphs. (Surprise!) Jessica Sellers is kind enough to sell us any inks for the highest level ink. Inks come from pigments. Pigments come from milling of herbs by scribes. Milling provides "white" inks, used for glyphs and "green" inks, used for various things. Most of these things are non-profitable, except the usage of the highest level green ink, snowfall ink, which is used to craft epic offhands, darkmoon cards, inscription research and inscribes self-enchant for shoulders.

Tip: you can speed up the millings by a set of macros on one of your button bars:
#Showtooltip herb_name
/cast milling
/use herb_name
The buttons show the herbs and have a number on them showing how many herbs you got.

To make the milling profitable the price of the inks must be higher than the price of the herbs. This seem to be obvious but it's not, since the "price of the inks" is not a properly established market price. Most scribes mill for themselves and not buy or sell white inks, therefore Auctioneer returns some random number as price of the inks.

Tip: sell inks. There are people who want a glyph, find it overpriced and wants to buy ink to bring it to a guild scribe. So there is market for single inks, I sell them for 5G.

You must define a price to the Ink of the Sea. This is an internal transfer price between your milling and glyph-crafting industry. This price determine the bottom price of the glyph. If you set it to 2.5G, you must not sell any glyphs below 3G or you are at loss. Of course if you set this price too high, you find too many "cheap" herbs and too few sellable glyphs, so you'll soon be drown into inks. You must modify this price according to your ink deposits. If they become too big, decrease the ink price (this will decrease herb price limit, so you'll buy less, and decrease glyph bottom, so you'll sell more).

Captain obvious says that if you find inks below your price or pigments below your price /2, you shall buy them instead of wasting your time with milling. Don't just check for Sea, you can find other inks/pigments too.

El has measured how many pigments come from the different herbs and found that it depends on the level of the herb. The first digit of the level defines what type of pigment comes (7x herbs give Sea, 6x herbs give nether). The second digit defines amount gained. It's 2.5+x*0.05, (so 2.6 pigment for the lvl 72 Deadnettle and 3 for the lvl80 Icethorn). The green pigment (Snowfall for 7x herbs) comes in the amount of 0.24+0.036*x.

With this in mind, the acceptable price of the herbs is the one below. In parenthesis you will find an example with my current prices, 2G/ink of the sea and 12G/snowfall ink:

• Icethorn, Lichbloom (lvl80): herb_price * 5 = 1.5 * sea_price + 0.3 * snowfall_price (1.32G)
• Adder's tongue (lvl 77): herb_price * 5 = 1.43 * sea_price + 0.25 * snowfall_price (1.16G)
• Talandra's rose, Goldclover, Deadnettle, Tiger lily (lvl72): herb_price * 5 = 1.3 * sea_price + 0.16 * snowfall_price (0.89G)
  
• Other herbs (approximated with lvl x5): herb_price * 5 = 1.38 * sea_price (0.55G)
  

After this price is determined, go to the AH and buy the herb with the lowest relative price. Relative means that an adder's tongue at 1G is cheaper than a felweed at 0.5G (since 1/1.16 is smaller than 0.5/0.55). When milling for "other inks", keep in mind that they are not interchangeable. So even if you can buy felweed for 0.1G, you can only use it for eternal ink and no other. However buying eternal ink from Jessica while cheap felweed is available is also a loss.

Note: for maximum profit, consider the herb "normal" price, not the actual price of the stack. If you see 50stacks of Deadnettle for 60s and 49 stacks of Goldclover for 70s and 1 stack of Goldclover for 20s, mill the nettles and flip the 1 stack of Goldclover.

Note2: Snowfall price cannot be higher than 10x Sea price, since Jessica Sellers sells Snowfall for 10 Sea. So if the Snowfall has some insane price on your server, make some profit on it.

Since time is money, you can cut the herb buying and milling part if you make a business with a non-goblin scribe. Tell him to CoD you Ink of the Sea for your price. He can keep the Snowfalls and make some profit. This profit is around 1G/herb, not a bad income for buying herb, milling them and crafting the ink.


Chapter 2: crafting glyphs
If you made all the researches and bought all the books, you have 343 glyph recipes and 6 vellum recipes. If you have not finished research or not bought all books, you can and shall start. Some need 2 inks, most need 1 and also a parchment. If you have the addon "LilSparky's Workshop" the AH price of the glyphs will be listed on the crafting window. There will be 2 columns, first is the product price, the second is the crafting price, but this is useless, since the ink prices are screwed.
Those glyphs that has higher price than your base price (ink + parchment + minimal work fee) worth looking at.

Click on the glyph and you'll see 2 more important data:
The first data you must look at is the auctioneer undercut price. The glyph prices are very hectic, so the middle price is just a first filter. Auctioneer writes a price to the lowest row and a text telling "undercutting competition" or "competition above market" or "no competition" or "cannot undercut". If it's "cannot undercut", don't craft. If the undercut price is too low, don't craft.

If you have Possessions and Whohas addon, the tooltip shows how many glyphs your bankers have. Of course get all mail from the mailbox before you do it. You must have bankers since 4 scribe bags and a backpack hold only 144 glyphs. I have 3 bankers, beginners may run with 2. Theoretically you could use your bank, swapping bags but then you'd have no place for your raiding stuff. If your inscribe is an unguilded alt, you can get a guildbank to hold your extra inks. Always have at least a week's ink in the bank (or in an alt's bag), otherwise you may run out of inks in case of a herb shortage.

If you already have enough glyphs, don't craft, otherwise fill up your stocks. Of course "enough" depends on your pricing strategy, described tomorrow. You can just make enough glyphs to fill all up to 8 or 10, but there is a method to decrease workload during it. Craft all glyphs (except those that has price under production cost), not just "flavor of the week". The guy with glyph of innervate is maybe stupid (or rather raids with stupids lacking replenishment) but his money is just as good as Kungen's.

I found no mean to automatically create more than one type of glyphs, a mod that would create 5 glyph A, 10 glyph B and 4 glyph C for one click would be a salvation. Since I know of none (and maybe cannot even exist due to Blizzard restrictions), you must sit by the crafting process. There are addons that allow you to queue crafting up, but you always have to push "continue queue", so no point. The time limiting factor is the crafting itself, I use this time to manually look at the next glyph, determine how many to craft.

In part 2, I'll discuss pricing, undercutting and mass-listing.

Since these posts are kind of "sticky" (that's why they are on the about page), I will cleanse the comments often, after incorporating their data. So it's not disappeared because you was considered "troll" simply because it's answered in the post. I leave only comments with data that does not fit into the post or I had no time to check it out.