Thursday, July 26, 2012

Glyphing in MoP? The Consortium has you covered



As I was searching for information about how inscription is going to change for MoP, I kept coming back to the same place. The Constortium Forums. I enjoy gold blogs and podcasts, but when it comes to collaberation, speculation and the refinement of strategy, a densely populated forum is often where our gold community shines.

Here are some of my favourite posts from the Consortium, and the places to watch for the latest thinking about the glyph market in MoP.

[Inscription] Guide on "WINNING" with MoP glyph preparation

Kathroman has written an eight step guide to preparing for the glyph market come patch 5.0 and beyond. The best step of course, is step 8 which is coming back to the forum and bragging about how much coin you made with glyphs. Don't stop with Kathroman's guide there's some great discussion in the thread about ratios of older inks for stockpiling, the fact that as you stockpile closer to infinity inks, the ratio doesn't matter and speculation on the market conditions for MoP.

My tip for most of these posts it not to brag about your ink / glyph stockpile until you've read what some of these guys are planning. They are freakin' mental.

Inscriptionist - Directory of Changes for Inscription

Ravanys has put together a side by side comparison of glyphs for the transition from Cataclysm to Mist of Pandaria. The heading link takes you to the thread on the Consortium forums, here is the direct link to the Inscriptionist page.

The first use of the page is to track glyphs that will become faded in 5.0 / MoP. When patch 4.0.1 hit, there were a number of glyphs that didn't survive Deathwing's wrath, and were burned - [Charred Glyph]. Blizzard is introducing more than 50 new glyphs for the expansion, so there's really no excuse let too many glyphs fade, and currrently there's only a couple that appear destined for the scrap heap.

I've also been using the inscriptionist page to browse the new glyphs that we'll have access to. My absolute favourite minor glyph so far is [Glyph of the Blazing Trail]. I'm going to set some $@#% on fire!

Ratios for Ink Stockpiling

There has been plenty of discussion about stockpiling glyphs for cataclysm. I like Kathroman's approach to ratios:
if you have enough ink stockpiled, specific ink distribution will be negligible
If you aren't aiming for 100k+ inks, then it's worth reading some of the discussion.

Meyer on Ink distribution ratios

Somehow I momentarily managed to hijak the Goblinventory Discussion Thread while discussing stockpiling and general methods of storage using the example of stockpiling inks and glyphs for MoP. I jumped the gun on Meyer's earlier post on the ratio of inks, and he expanded with a bunch of additional variables, including weighting the stockpile towards glyphs for Monks.

Zman crunches Twitchie's Ultimate Glyph Performance List

ZMan was kind enough to take the data from my Ultimate Glyph Performance List and provide a distribution of inks based on my sales data.
Ink of the Sea - 35%
Ethereal - 23%
Lion's - 12%
Midnight - 11%
Jadefire - 10%
Celestial - 5%
Shimmering - 4%
I was pretty pleased to see 16 months of data broken down to the distribution of inks, so adding recipe information to my database is definitely on my todo list. Whichever set of figures you look at, they all agree that stockpiling with a preference for Ink of the Sea > Ethereal Ink > everything else.

[Inscription] Scaling your glyph operation to handle over 400 distinct glyphs in MoP

Last but not least, when I looked at all the new glyphs made with Mist of Pandaria materials, and saw how few glyphs would become faded I realised that my two character glyph operation wouldn't be able to handle the large number of distinct glyphs without some modification. So I wrote a quick guide on how I would scale up my operation and give a heads up that other glyphers might want to think how the changes will effect them too.

My approach to stockpiling for the 5.0 / MoP Glyph Market

First and foremost, I've been buying all the whiptail and cinderbloom I can get my hands on... and it has been some of the cheapest bulk herb buying I've done all expansion. This morning, after the MoP release date was announcement, I managed to pick up some freakishly cheap herbs as they were unceremoniously dumped on the AH.

I've picked up a guild bank, and sent a teary eyed alt packing from our 'quiet time' guild to start stashing glyphs. My usual operational stockpile is anywhere between 10 - 18 of each glyph, and I bulk craft with TSM about once per week. I'm in the process of adding a 20 stack of each glyph on top of that and storing it in the new guild bank - mostly so I can monitor the stockpile and not overcraft glyphs by accident. Once I have that out the way, I'll see how much blackfallow ink I have left over and do a conversion to older inks and most likely store all that in the mail.

The beauty of the way TSM is set up, is that I can manage both my operational inventory and my 5.0 / MoP stockpile at the same time. When I want to bulk craft to top up my operational inventory, I go into TSM Crafting options > Inventory Settings and deselect my storage guild from the 'Guilds to include:' drop down. I can then hit restock queue and beef up my regular inventory to 18 of each glyph. When I want to bulk craft for my stockpile, I add the guild back in, and it's easy to see which glyphs I've already precrafted.

I will be posting about the logistics of topping up my operational inventory from my stockpile once I figure out the best way to do it, so keep an eye out for that.

5 comments:

  1. wow i did the exact same thing as Zman http://theovercut.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ink-purchase-distribution-by-sales.html
    lol great minds :P

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  2. If you are stocking inks by the sales distribution in Cata... You sir are doing it wrong:) IMHO only.

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  3. @Iammoney

    If you think I'm stockpiling based on sales distribution in Cata, you didn't read my whole post. The last paragraph shows I'm stockpling glyphs across the board (although I still thinking stockpiling trainer learned, inscription leveling bottleneck glyphs is a bad idea).

    In my opinion, it's not all that humble to say a strategy is wrong without saying why or offering what you think is 'doing it right'.

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    1. Sorry for the misunderstanding twitchie, I directed my comment only at the person who made the last comment and not at your post. Even then I should have explained my comment. Simply, I don't believe cata sales will be much representetive of the possible distribution in MOP given all the changes and specially blizz'es desire to move away from cookie cutter specs. And I did read your whole post as I always do because there is always something to learn even after 7 years playing this game. And I respect you more for explaining (very succintly I should say)to Sapu and them (at the consortium) the issue with transmog and TSM. I added the last bit to let you know that I know what you are taliking about :) These are all IMHO only.

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    2. No worries, I did assume that it was directed at the whole post.

      The ink distributions for previous glyphs sales and for a flat 'craft every glyph' aren't really all that different. What my data showed was that the trainer bottleneck glyphs have been priced so low over the last 16 months, that I haven't sold many. There's no reason that won't continue to be the case in MoP. So on that basis, stockpiling by previous sales does have some merit.

      What you're talking about with the changes in sales, absolutely. Different glyphs will be more or less popular. Classes will be more or less popular (i.e., we may not have a freaking glut of paladins (I can dream, right? (says me who just got their paladin to 85))).

      So on particular glyphs being more or less popular, there's really no way to determine what impact that will have. For every glyph I think is worthless, someone else will love. For every alt that I only buy the glyphs I know I'm going to use, there's 10 completionists out there that will be every glyph no matter what and not care that they don't use many of them. They will be able to sleep at night though, because their character is educated. So analysis from that angle is largely a guessing game, so I just assume they are more or less equal.

      The other thing to consider is that if you are stockpiling ink, you don't have to worry about what glyphs are most popular specifically. You just know that previously, Book of Glyph Mastery glyphs sold well, and for a great profit, and the sales were roughly in these ratios of inks. If there's a standout glyph, you can just use your ink reserves to make more of those, and less of the 'dud' glyphs.

      What I consider when pre-crafting my glyphs is 'what time frame am I stockpiling for?'. Basically I want to go for as long as possible (a month maybe?) after the expansion without crafting another glyph. More importantly though, I don't care if I don't make a [Glyph of the Awesomesauce] for the rest of the expansion. MoP herbs aren't going to be any cheaper than Cata herbs right now... so if I make 40+ of a particular glyph and it takes all expansion to sell them, that's fine with me.

      The best thing about putting this all down in writing of course, is that when MoP hits, no matter how it goes, I'll have something to write about ;)

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