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.