Luckily, I had alot of Emblems of Frost with nothing to spend on at the time - so I bought 22 Primordial Saronites, sold them over night along with banktabs full of random crap, and ended up with almost 30k.
Alot of the things I sold I ended up needing later in my expanding of the business, so first lesson learned pretty early.
You have to have a very good reason to sell of raw materials.
I am so late to the business-train of WOTLK, so late that I don't think I will catch up properly before Cata (Daily jewelcrafting etc.), but I got no choice other than view it as a challenge rather than an obstacle.
Anyways, I decided to base my entire business around Inscription, as my research indicated that even though it's the most time-consuming to set up- and you need a pretty heavy front-up investment to get going- it's a reliable income which as good as guaranteed profit.
The profit will of course reflect your competition, but from a personal view it will also reflect how well you handle the organization/time-aspect.
This particular profession also benefits from a good connection and a powerful computer, of which I have both.
Since I wanted Jewelcrafting on my main (the druid), i chose to lvl Inscription on my "second main", my lovely disc priest. The shoulder-enchant couldn't hurt after all.
I was amazed over how painless leveling Inscription from 1-450 was, I spent about 2k on herbs, and got a guild scribe to mill a crapton of Northrend-herbs for me so I could just downtrade inks.
At 450, I bought all the books of glyph mastery off AH, and started stockpiling inks. I never stopped underestimating the amount of herbs I would need to get me started. The guides I read suggested making 3 of the popular glyphs for starters, gradually expanding first the amount of available glyphs, and when you had made them all - increase stack size. Alot of the recommendations are stacks of 5 glyphs.
I decided to do it a little differently, since I'm also planning for the long run - namely cataclysm, it will be a surge in the demand for glyphs. Not just the new ones, but also the old ones - as alot of them and their correspending spells gets changed. It's all about bagspace management.
So, it's like 470 glyphs ingame total. If you make some of one kind of glyph, they will 1 slot of bagspace, regardless if it's 1 or 20.
The need for stockpiling inks for Cataclysm is obvious, but the guild bank can only hold so much. So, where is the easiest place to stockpile inks in the long run? In the glyph-stacks.
Making 20 of every kind effectively gives you the ability to carry 470x15 more inks without requiring more space.
Anyways, that means I had to make around 7000 glyphs before I even started posting, and being new to the addons I actually had to redesign my system around them several times, consuming massive amounts of time.
The system I ended up with was as follows:
In QA3 itemgroups, I've currently made groups Glyph1 through 8. Each group handles 32 glyphs, and they are not sorted in any particular order.
I got 2 bankers with 4xInscription bags a 32 slots + their backback = 144 slots.
One of my first systems had different toons handling the glyphs for different classes, which took me a day or two to realize only created unnescessary timesinks for myself as I discovered new ones. It's not which glyphs that's important, it's how many.
So, after I've set groups 1-4 to be automailed to my first banker I know a couple of things:
- He's got 4 groups a 32 glyphs, and he's got 4 bags a 32 slots for glyphs. Leaving him with a free backpack. (16 slots)
- All glyphs made in the future in this group will be automailed to the correct banker, completely removing micromanagement on that end.
The reason for leaving 16 slots free is because at some point I will need a third banker for glyphs, and that will provide them with pretty equal share. The need for free spots on a glyphbanker arise during mail-sessions, as sometimes glyphs don't stack correctly. You can have 16+2 glyphs in your bags for no apparent reason, and restacking them manually is not an option.
In addition, those 16 slots are utilized on both bankers to house some extra goodies from Inscription, namely offhands, runescrolls, and vellums.
All my bankers are in Stormwind, using the SW AH trick to have access to the auctioneer and mailbox at the same time.
When I was finally done organizing and ready to do some posting, I've already made a few notes on Inscription:
- Absolutely massively time-consuming during startup
- Going for the whole market requires an insane amount of bagspace
- Without a proper system for handling your production, storing, and selling for glyphs you are not going anywhere
- Buying and milling all those herbs gives you alot of time to calculate the actual cost pr glyph. Many people expects income from Snowfall Inks to cover the expenses for herbs alone and operate with glyph @ parchment-cost. I don't.
- You amass insane amounts of Snowfall Ink, which makes you anxious to dump it. I've later learned that this will not be a problem.
Now my 2 glyphers are rotating about 128 glyphs each through the AH, still experimenting with thresholds, number to post, durations, fallbacks, posting times, frequency of posting, etc. and the competition is pretty aggressive.
The glyph-market is fortunately a massive beast, way too big for one person to control alone - and at this time of writing I'm making a pretty decent profit on a day to day basis. I also tried to be over-aggressive the other day, slamming prices down close to production-cost, but the subsequent production of a zillion new glyphs every night gave me the aids, so I'm shooting for something a little more middle ground - at least in the beginning.
I don't mind loads of sales, but dollar/time has to improve. Spending 2 hours crafting glyphs for 5s profit a pops is not a viable strategy long-term.
Next: The Expansion - Enchanting scrolls
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