To get started I over spent on ink. I needed it to help me level in places and to get my glyph machine off the ground. I was paying up to 2.4G an ink off the AH. That put my glyphs at 5.3G each and I sold them for 6G or more. Slim profit but it got me started.
All the gold I earned was getting put back into mats. I started to look at herbs to meet my growing needs. Tigger Lilly was the cheapest I could find at 14G a stack the day I was looking. I never tracked it, but it felt like I got 4-5 inks per stack. But now I was able to produce a lot more glyphs as the inks were scarce on the ah at a reasonable price. Doing the math, it felt like I was over paying for my needs. I just banked the snowfalls and figured that would make a difference.
I later found a spreadsheet that took into account the value of snowfall inks when buying herbs. I recall reading something about that before but now the numbers were looking at me. The more expensive herbs produced snowfall ink more often. That put the milled value per gold huch higer on those herbs. I switched to adder’s tongues at 24G and have purchsed very few of those others. I was able to unload stacks of snowfalls during the darkmoon event for 18-20G each. (I could have done cards but didn’t feel like dealing with them.)
So if I can get herbs at 24G and sell the inks at 20G, I am only paying 4G for the ink. If I only get 4 inks, that 1G an ink and my glyph cost is 2.5G each. I know some glyphs only take one ink and they don’t all take the expensive parchment. I am confortable thinking of each glyph as 2 inks + .5g and knowing that I have some hidden profit in there.
I went from 5.3G glyphs to 2.5G glyphs by taking full advantage of my milling. My next step is to contract a farmer to send me the herbs. If he can sell direct to me he gets to bypass the AH and saves the 5% AH cut. I am over stocked on herbs at the moment or I would have already made that happen. I already see one farmer that I constantly buy out his entire stock.
I love this simple mod. It lets me move and sort my glyphs very quickly.
I create 2 custom groups
glyphs 1,2,3,4
bglyphs 5,6,7,8,9
The first one is the 4 inscription bags on my character and the other is the 5 inscription bags in my bank. To move all my glyphs to the bank I type this command:
/fill glyphs bglyphs
And to move them back just swap the the names:
/fill bglyphs glyphs
Once I have that working, I create a macro for both of them and put the buttons in my action bar.
Then to sort everything:
/sort
It makes glyph management very smooth. When it sorts glyphs, it does it by class/color. Very clean looking.
I ended up with a 4 tab guild bank on this char from when our guild changed names (well, chagned the name back to what it was). If my system of swapping bags in the normal bank didn’t feel so fluid, I would have use the guild bank to hold glyphs. I did manage to put it to good use.
My first tab is mostly partial herb stacks, scrolls, and odd inks. The partial herbs are from when I buy low/mid level herbs that are listed too cheap. Its common that those are never in a full stack. I mill what I can and toss the left overs in the bank. So this tab is my left overs tab.
Tab 2 is my ink/pigment and spare parchments. At the moment I have half of it ink of the sea and the other half the pigments to make more. Tab 3 is all Adder’s Tongue. Tab 4 had a bit of Adder’s Tongue and a bit of Icethorn. Now that I buy in bulk, I have to put that bulk somewhere.
If I took more time to mill my herbs, I could do with much less space.
I was checking out some other blogs and I found http://www.warcraftecon.net/ listed a LW pattern that makes Dream Shards.
Dark Nerubian Leggins, Dark Icebourne Leggins, Dark Frostscale Leggins
They take 4-6 heavy borean leather and 4-5 Crystallized Shadow.
I ran to the AH and saw my favorite farmer had the cheapest shadows up. I bought then all out. Then I did the math on scraps -> leather -> heavy. I purchased every scrap under 8 silver, leather under 55 silver, and heavy under 3g.
My autitor told me I spent 150G and made 11 dream shards. It works out to be 13.33G each and they list for 16G. I also had 8 eternal shadows and some spare leather left.
I may have to add this to my schedule.
I need to stop getting shocked about how many herbs I am buying or how much ink I have. That number keeps growing and growing. I keep thinking about cutting my farmers off but I am using so much ink. Another huge crafting session last night.
Now that I have a solid system for milling and inking. I turn the herbs into ink fast and its easy to manage that way. I need that space available for when I make those herb buys. I have 3 farmers working to sell me herbs. It has pushed my cost way down. They work with me because I take every thing they have every day.
I am also tempted to get into flasks when I get over stocked. As it is, I am sitting on 240 flasks to sell this week. I am running into problems with all this snowfall ink. The key to making everything work is cheap ink of the sea. I have to sell snowfall ink to make that happen at the price I pay for herbs. I am kind of holding it for darkmoon to unload it. If that does not work, I will have to rethink some things.
When dealing with so many glyphs you have a lot of inventory to manage. I use bank bags that I swap around when posting. So I have 5 inscription bags in the bank and 4 on my character.
The first thing that I do is put as much into my bank bags as I can. I use that as my stacking point. I don’t want to have a partial stack in my bag and the other 1/2 in the bank. If you don’t manage it you could easily have partial stacks of the same glyph in several different bags. I use a mod called bank stack to compress and sort everything.
I then fill my inscription bags and make a trip to the ah. I then return and swap bags between my char and my bank. This way each trip has a different set of glyphs. I don’t loose time rescanning glyphs that I just posted and its quick to move the bags. (instead of trying to move glyphs in and out by hand one at a time)
This is starting to feel more fluid then it did at first. Several people sugested to use 2-3 alts to post glyphs. If doing it that way its common to give all of a class’s glyphs to set alts. You can do it by color if you want. But its a symple system to know who gets what glyph. It is also common to use a guild bank to save on postage.
My goal with this blog is a post a day. Sometimes a lot happens and just feels better as a different post. At the moment I am putting them in the queue to be published later.
Thats fine becuase most blogs do it that way. But then I am new to it so I may not be very consistant in my writting. I may have something I am working on over two days become 2 posts several days appart.
I will try to keep them together but I already see posts that are related to each other on a time line but the publication of those posts are far appart. Those posts commnig up are to do with buying bulk herbs. I made what I thought was an insane purchase of 120ish stacks of herbs on a Saturday and then early this week I purchased 320 stacks. That big of a purchase so soon after the other it a bigger deal then it would be a week later.
I am learning still. Blogging isn’t that natural for me but I think I have usefull information. I also know I have dry spells. I would rather queue up every post instead of drop 20 in 3 days and you dont hear from me for a month.
My alt didn’t have much for bags. He was power leveled as a RAF alt and didn’t need the space. I picked up that mats for 2 16 slot bags and 2 32 slot inscription bags and had my other characters make them for me.
The more I got into glyphs, the biger the demand on my bag space became. I later replaced those 16 slots for 2 more inscription bags. Then my bank bags were next. Today I have 4 inscription bags on my scribe and 5 inscription bags in my bank. I have those 2 empty 16 slot bags (and 2 other smaller bags) handy for when I make large herb purchases or do mass milling.
My stock grew much faster then I thought it would. At first all of my inventory was kept on the ah. So I only needed space to run from the mailbox to the AH. Now I keep a stock of glyphs above whats on the AH and I am listing so many different ones that I cannot fit them all in my 4 inscription bags.
When I am stocked up the glyphs take up atleast 6 inscription bags.
Did you know there was an ink trader in Dalaran that lets you swap Ink of the Sea for any other ink used in glyphs. Well, I knew about it but didn’t realize that she included even the low level inks. I was way over paying for herbs to mill to make the inks I need to level at this point.
I picked up 2 stacks of Ink of the Sea and purchased a port to Dalaran to find this vender. Standing next to the inscription vender was the ink vender. I found my better way. I could buy the Ink of the Sea off of the AH and get the inks that I needed here. I was too low to mill for those ink so I was stuck paying ah prices.
I was still making enough off of my glyph sales to keep this up. I was also getting close to the point where I could mill my own herbs so it didn’t last that long. Thats when I ran into my next problem.
My inscription alt was lvl 64 and I needed to be 65 for that last tier of inscription.
Quick Auctions puts the automation into posting glyphs. After you install, you will want to run these commands:
/qa toggle glyphs
/qa fallback 72g13s54c glyphs
/qa threshold 4g57s9c glyphs
/qa cap 2 glyphs
/qa undercut 1s76c glyphs
And make sure /qa smartcut is off. It will round down your undercuts to the nearest gold.
Fill your bags with every glyph you can fit in there. At the AH on the auctions tab is a button at the top to post with. It will prescan the ah then post your glyphs.
The fallback price is the price it will use if nobody has anything listed. It’s ok to set it high. When people need a glyph, they need a glyph. You will sell more then you think you should at that price.
The threshold is the lowest you want to post an auction for. Set it above your cost of mats and you will make a profit on every glyph that sells. Set it just under a solid gold amount. It is common that people will set limits at nice even numbers.
The cap is how many you are willing to post at a time. If you have been undercut, it will post 2 more. If you have 2 at the lowest price it will not repost anymore. 3 is also a good number. I find that doing more makes the other people relist more often.
The undercut is the undercut value. I like to use odd looking offsets, Keep them small. If you do large undercuts and repost often, then all you will do is crash the prices. Unless you are driving your competition out, I would keep them small.
This mod will also allow you to cancel auctions that have undercut you. With glyphs its dirt cheap to post them so its possible to stop them and repost with little cost. This is very common for people to do. I have recently started just reposting more glyphs at the lower price and leaving the old glyphs up.
