Two Character Glyph Operation

When moving items to and from guild banks started to break addons, and when those addons adjusted, it was still horribly slow, I decided I needed to change the way I ran my glyph operation. Storing my glyph stockpile in a guild bank, when I needed them every day for my posting cycle was slowing me down and causing me some frustration. As I thought about moving glyphs across to extra characters, I came across Stede's Guide: Optimizing Glyph Operations on a Single Toon over at the consortium forums, and went to work applying those principles to a full service glyph operation.

Go read it now.

By full service glyph operation, I mean I offer every available glyph to my server through the auction house (well I can say that now). I really like the idea of crafting not just for profit, but as a service to my server. In return for a reasonable mark up, and a lucrative income over time, I keep the auction house stocked with glyphs. ALL the glyphs. I'm not kidding myself that I do it alone. I get a lot of help from my competitors. However, if for some reason, [Glyph of Void Walker] actually manages to sell out or be absent from the auction house, I want to automatically post some the next time I post glyphs. On Dath'remar(A) everyone should be able to lob up to the auction house and get the glyphs they need, day or night.

Since my operation is a full service operation, I post my glyphs for 48 hours and never cancel (well only when I'm doing a reset, but I post back straight after). That way as I get undercut, I layer the market with glyphs, providing enough glyphs in cooperation with my competitors to meet demand.

Hopefully that is a reasonable rationale for avoiding trimming the fat for efficiency and instead attempting to make the most efficient operation across the minimum number of characters.

So I took my glyph performance analysis from my own sales, and set up two separate TSM auctioning groups, one for Twitchie and one for a posting alt.

Twitchie reserves 252 slots in his bank (7x [Royal Scribe's Satchel]) and performs two separate posts. I use BankStack over Dumpster purely because it was what I was already using. I first grab the bottom 4 glyph bags worth of glyphs and post. Then I run back to the bank and swap them for the top 3 bags worth and post again. Sometimes, just for fun I use my warlock summoning portal and Soulburn to make the trip faster and more exciting (this is going to rock in MoP).

One of the many beauties of TSM is that you can auto mail based on auctioning groups. My glyph posting alt reserves 108 bag slots (3 x [Royal Scribe's Satchel]) for glyphs and was able to grab the initial influx of glyphs out of the mail as fast as Twitchie could send them.

Having a character just dedicated to posting glyphs, means the character can stand right on top of the auctioneer and perform a posting cycle as fast as it takes to log in, post and log out again. With my alt having the worst performing glyphs, I lose little business if I decide I don't have the time or energy to log on to her each day.

So that describes the posting side of the operation, with thanks to some inspiration from Stede and a whole crap ton of [Royal Scribe's Satchel]s from Moordenar, my favourite rogue.

For the supply side, Twtichie does most of the heavy lifting. I purchase herbs as fast as my price threshold allows, and mail them over to Twitchie. Twitchie then 'sponsors' our television and movie viewing as subtly as possible while milling herbs and crafting inks. Sometimes, if he is too intrusive, Twitchie Enterprises resorts to bribery in addition to sponsorship and might take a back seat when we watch something romantic.

I use 3 guild bank tabs in Twitchie's exclusive guild that is home to some of our 'quiet time' alts. One tab is for darkmoon cards, volatile life, inferno ink and anything else BoE that is handy to have on hand. The other two guild bank tabs are reserved for herbs, pigments and inks as I work through processing them, mostly afk. I have 3 regular bags in my backpack that I exchange for 3 inscription bags to store batches of herbs for milling. When I have a full guild bank tab of blackfallow ink, I'll have a bulk crafting session for glyphs and add them to the stockpile across two toons for posting. For bulk crafting glyphs I use TSM crafting with the following settings:

• Minimum Profit Method: Gold Amount
• Min Restock Quantity: 4
• Max Restock Quantity: 17
• Minimum Profit (in gold): 12g

Once I have traded my inks and start to hit the 'Craft Next' macro I've keybound, I manually scan the list to add any extra glyphs to the queue, and the rest can be done while sipping coffee and browsing the interwebz.

Spreading my glyph operation across two characters has allowed me to craft and post efficiently, while avoiding the guild bank for my glyph stockpile that I post regularly.

Inscription: Herb Comparison

Here's my guide to the relative herb prices you should be looking at when milling cataclysm herbs.

Unfortunately, on Dath'Remar at least, the party is over as far as cheap cataclysm herbs goes. The base price of the lower quality herbs seems to have settled around 3g50 up from 2 - 2g50 quite soon after the expansion hit.

Here's a guide to the table.

• Blackfallow Ink - The average yield of Blackfallow Ink from each mill.
• Inferno Ink - The average yield of Inferno Ink from each mill. I'm now valuing Inferno Ink at 10 times the price of Backfallow, since there is such a huge demand for the rare ink, many people are using the Dalaran vendor to convert them.
• Weight - Using Cinderbloom as the base herb, the weight indicates how much 'product' you get in comparison to this baseline.
• Price Eq. - An example of the equivalent price for each herb based on the baseline of Cinderbloom at 3g50s. If Cinderbloom is at 3g50s, and I see Twilight Jasmine at under 5g98s, I'll buy the Twilight Jasmine and know I'm getting more 'product' for my coin.
• Sample - The number of mills that I've used to derive my numbers. Naturally the more expensive herbs have a much lower figure, but it looks like the average product scales with the herbs item level pretty much as you'd expect.

	Blackfallow Ink	Inferno Ink	Weight	Price Eq.	Sample
[Cinderbloom]	1.21	0.12	1.00	3.50	165
[Heartblossom]	1.23	0.13	1.06	3.72	310
[Stormvine]	1.25	0.13	1.05	3.68	256
[Azshara's Veil]	1.29	0.17	1.25	4.39	35
[Whiptail]	1.43	0.26	1.70	5.96	34
[Twilight Jasmine]	1.51	0.26	1.71	5.98	72

Cataclysm Milling

I've been doing a lot of milling since the prices of herbs, while not 'cheap' have stabilsed pretty quickly. I'm surprised by just how much people are prepared to pay for Inferno Ink (up to 500% above cost)... but it's great for the bank balance.

Some assumptions for the numbers below.

• Inferno Ink is worth 8 times as much as Blackfallow Ink. The exchange rate is 10:1 but I'm being a little conservative, since in WotLK the ratio was at times 1:1, but Inferno Ink is looking to be a lot more useful in Cataclysm than Snowfall Ink was in WotLK.
• Prices for herbs are changing dramatically, so expect that to change from day to day and from server to server.

Cinderbloom
Sample: 127 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.2
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.12
Cost of Herb: 2g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 4.59
Cost of Inferno Ink: 36.75

Heartblossom
Sample: 266 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.23
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.13
Cost of Herb: 2g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 4.35
Cost of Inferno Ink: 34.77

Twilight Jasmine
Sample: 36 mills
Yield of Blackfallow Ink: 1.53
Yield of Inferno Ink: 0.26
Cost of Herb: 2.7g
Cost of Blackfallow Ink: 3.71
Cost of Inferno Ink: 29.68

So Twilight Jasmine is currently my herb of choice for milling, since you can pay up to 50% extra over Cinderbloom and Heartblossom to get the same result. I'm not sure if it will pan out (since the sample was only 36 mills) but Twilight Jasmine producing twice as much Inferno Ink is pretty awesome.

I'm really enjoying that I can make a profit from all the products of milling herbs, and it means I can really keep cranking out glyphs for sale at a base price of around 12-15g. Unfortunately Blizzard set the exchange rate of Blackfallow Ink to Ethereal Ink at 10:1, so I have to keep hunting for Outland herbs in order to make many of the (now) most profitable glyphs.

The changes to inscription are fantastic, and I'm looking forward to getting into the darkmoon cards as soon as possible. Today, Twitchie has a trip planned to Stormwind to deliver his Forged Documents.

One last tip: make sure you get your friendly Inscriptionist (or Scribe for you heathens) to craft you a Adventurer's Journal to get a 10% buff to your quest XP. Based on the prices above, you should be able to find them for around 15 - 30g on the AH if there's any kind of scribbling competition on your server.

As prices come down further I'll have a look at milling the other Cataclysm herbs.

Milling Goldclover

Yesterday, Goldclover hit 65s on Dath'Remar in bulk, and I hadn't seen the price even close to that since pre-4.0.1. A fantastic chance to not only make some coin, but get a decent sample size for determining yield.

Ink of the Sea / Mill : 1.24 (1.48 for Adder's Tongue)
Snowfall Ink / Mill : 0.14 (0.25 for Adder's Tongue)

Absolutely awful for Snowfall Ink... which is usually the bane of an Inscriptionist's workshop, however I'm trying to stockpile it, since I have an ink exchange program happening as well as churning out those cards for some reason. /winkyface

Sticking with the assumption that Ink of the Sea's market value is half of Snowfall Ink... You want to make sure you are picking up Goldclover at 3/4 of the price of Adder's tongue to get the same value from milling it.