Addons for the Aspiring Glypher

Okay, so let's say that you've done your chores and learned a lot of glyphs via Northrend Inscription Research (and Minor Inscription Research). As I mentioned in my previous post, that's all you really need to start making a respectable income providing glyphs to aspiring adventurers. Just figure out how much a single glyph costs you, and make the glyphs which sell for more than that.

The problem is that there are 449 glyphs in the game. That's a LOT of markets to watch. It is probably impossible (or at least really, really difficult) for a single person to keep track of everything necessary to make a strong profit in the glyph market without using addons.

There are four major addons you're going to need: Auctioneer, Quick Auctions, Skillet, and AuctionLite. Note that the Skillet link goes to the current alpha-dev page for Skillet, rather than the older (out of date) version on the main curse page.

I'm not going to tell you how to use these addons, since that's what the instructions are for. Instead, I'm going to tell you what to do with them.

AuctionLite: this addon adds two tabs to your auction interface. The key one is AuctionLite-Buy. On this tab, you can search for items just like elsewhere, but in the results page, you can shift-click to select multiple auctions and buy them all out at once. This is really helpful for buying up masses of herbs to mill.

Skillet: This is a tradeskill addon. I only mention it because the Glypher module that comes with Auctioneer integrates with it (more on that later). While I'm here, I might mention that Quartz can be configured to show the total time you'll be making ink for, instead of the normal cast bar which just shows the same 2-second craft over and over (which is nice, so you know to go get a sandwich).

Quick Auctions: This addon is pretty invaluable for me. The first thing you have to know in order to use it is that you need to create an "item group", and add your glyphs to that group. You can only add glyphs that you currently have in your inventory to this group. You can use QA to do a "smart cancel" of your current auctions. Because the glyph market is highly competitive, and the deposit on any given glyph is 60c, there's a lot of undercutting. So you will probably need to play that game too, and QA is the tool for you. Go to the Auctions tab and hit "cancel". It will scan all the auctions for which you have entries in your glyph item list, and pop up a second window once the scan is complete to cancel all the undercut auctions.

Now that you have a ton of canceled auctions, QA helps you at the mail window. Just hit "open all", and it will do just that. It also helpfully shows the 60 second mail timer - you can only receive 50 mails per minute, and can be configured to automatically re-load and continue gathering your mail if you have more than 50.

QA can post all your auctions as well, and so can Auctioneer. They use different strategies, though, and I'll talk about that later.

Finally, QA has a cool Status tool which gives you an overview of the glyph market. Hit status, then select Glyphs, and Get Data. You'll see what glyphs are on the market, where you're currently the lowest, and what glyphs you don't have posted (and the current sell-price of those glyphs). Left clicking any of those glyphs adds them to your QA skill queue. Unfortunately, this doesn't integrate with skillet. Hold down shift as you open your inscription window to get the old version of the window, which has a QA button on it. The QA button opens the skill queue. Scroll to the bottom to see a list of what you need to buy from Jessica Sellers, and then clicking on any glyph name in the queue will make that glyph. Pretty handy.

Auctioneer: This is the grand-daddy of all auction house addons. It does a TON, far more than I can get into right now. First of all, the BeanCounter module should track your sales and expenditures in this endeavor. This is really helpful for seeing which glyphs sell a lot (and are therefore worth keeping multiples of on the AH. I say "should", because it's broken for me. Some addon is interfering with it, not QA or Postal, but I can't figure out which.

Auctioneer does a ton of other things. There's another utility module called Glypher. You can use glypher to scan the AH and figure out which glyphs you can make are profitable. There's a GlypherPost addon as well, which can be used to set prices and post auctions. Glypher integrates with Skillet, which is a marginally more convenient way to create your glyphs for the day.

The Enchantrix module has an "auto-disenchant" function, which applies to milling as well. Whenever you have 5 or more herbs in a bag, it will ask you if you want to mill them. While it seems impossible to mill multiple times automatically (I have the feeling that blizzard requires a hardware event per mill), clicking the same button over and over in the same spot on the screen is still considerably faster than the traditional milling style.

Auctioneer vs Quick Auctions: Both QA and Auctioneer can help you select profitable glyphs to make, and post them for you. Which is better is mostly a matter of taste. As far as I can tell, QA is faster at multi-posting (it seems like QA runs 3 posting routines in parallel, whereas Auc only posts one thing at a time, and stack-splitting is the big timewaster in both cases). The big difference is that QA doesn't really think about past performance in glyph pricing. It sells your glyphs in configured blocks (I max mine at 4 per glyph), undercutting the current low price.

Glypher, on the other hand, integrates with BeanCounter to figure out historical sale prices and frequency when choosing (a) how many glyphs to post and (b) how much to charge. This can save your gold if you notice an auction "void". QA will note that nobody's selling the Glyph of Whatever, and you'll make 4 of them and list them at 50g, but then an hour later three people will log on and post the same glyph at 1g per, and you've got some dead weight. Theoretically, Glypher helps with that, but like I said earlier due to a bug in Beancounter (or more specifically my using an incompatible addon), the data Glypher uses is not quite right, so I end up with a lot of quirks in my personal Glypher pricing model. So I use QA instead most of the time.

So, between these addons, you can generate an overview of the glyph market in general (using QA), queue up profitable glyphs to create and mass-post with automatic pricing, buy out masses of herbs, and generate inks more rapidly. With all these addons running, glyphing is still (as Fizzle said) more like a "job" - I spend about 30 minutes each evening tending to my glyph business, but the money's good.