Obligatory Capitalist Posting (or how I learned to get rich and love the glyph market)

Okay, so I'm sure that this market is not for everybody. The high-end glyph market takes a combination of patience and, well, more patience, to get into. And in the event too many people get into the market, the profitability of this market is going to plummet.

That said, I've just today crossed the 10k gold mark on my characters. I started with approximately 2k gold in the bank, which I spent down to something around 500g after buying up a reasonable amount of raw materials. Since then I've spent more money on expenses and am currently sitting on approximately 800 ink of the sea and 10k gold. So I'd say that I've cleared the 10k mark in pretty much profits. All this in two weeks and change - I started seriously playing with the market on february 1st, and I typically spend about 30-45 minutes per day dealing with this business.

I'll post a series of articles about my particular take on the glyph market in the upcoming week or two. But let's start with the basics.

Before you can leverage this market, you need to understand why it's such a lucrative one: investment of time. There are approximately 80 or so glyphs that can only be learned by conducting Northrend Inscription Research, plus the 60 or so minor glyphs that only come from Minor Inscription Research (that's the only way to learn a minor glyph). Naturally, the trainer glyphs, while of high utility, are typically of very low profit margins. And by very low, I mean: you will lose money on them.

So, if you're starting Fresh, you not only need to get your inscription skill high, you also need to spend 80 days conducting research to learn the more profitable glyphs. You also need to spend a sizeable amount of gold on books of Glyph Mastery to learn that set of 50 or so glyphs that can only be learned that way. Now, you can jump straight into the glyphing market once you learn your first researched glyph, and if you're lucky it will be one that's of high utility and demand (and one that your competitors don't know yet). I've learned approximately 50 of the major researched glyphs, all of the book ones, and all of the minor ones. So there are still about 30 glyphs that I can't compete in (ironically, one of these glyphs is Felguard, which I just had to buy from the AH when I decided to respec Mariwocket to Demonology). But even with only a portion of the market covered, I have been making gold a lot faster than any other method I've found to date, at least in terms of price/effort ratios - you could probably make a ton of gold in a lot of ways, but glyphing isn't too much work.

Because of the artificial limit on how long it takes to learn your glyphs, there will be natural scarcity in the markets. Meaning that prices for useful glyphs will tend to be high enough that it is profitable to sell them. But what makes glyphs so lucrative is not individual profit (my margins run anywhere from 1g to 40g per glyph, but the majority of them are less than 10g profit per sale), but the volume of sales. There are some glyphs that people buy in bulk - for example, my warrior has a stack of glyphs of Blocking and Cleaving, because I like Cleaving for heroics and Blocking for raid tanking (not that I raid tank very much). There are some glyphs that just sell very quickly because they are the must-use glyphs for competitive specs, especially DPS specs (so when a rogue changes from muti to combat, they need all new glyphs), and there are some glyphs that I know are bad, but people seem to buy anyway (because, let's face it: most glyphs are just a 1% DPS "icing" on the spec/gear/skill, so it doesn't matter too much what they take).

Anyway, the key to glyph sales is volume. You can make a lot of money, because people buy a LOT of glyphs. The trick is to just figure out where your profit comes from. You'll need to completely write off the cost of training inscription in the first place. You'll make it back eventually, but don't worry about factoring that into your pricing scheme. The only thing you really need to worry about is the cost of ink. Profitable glyphs come in any number of paper types, but the most expensive paper is still only 50s, which needs to be attended to, but tends not to figure into my cost calculations (because I demand at least 1g expected profit per glyph, that works out to be a little less than that, you see).

There are two ways to get the ink for glyphs. You can just buy northrend herbs in bulk and make Ink of the Sea, which can be traded down for any needed inks in dalaran, or you can buy up lesser inks and herbs on the AH. What you do is up to you, but this is my strategy.

I buy up northrend herbs in bulk from cheap supplies. I tend to watch the AH prices, and when herbs dip below some threshold, I buy a TON of them and wait until I start to run low again before watching more. Currently, I'm on a batch of ink I manufactured from some lichbloom and icethorn that was dumped on the AH at 83s per herb. I spent like 2500g buying up all those herbs, and got a good deal out of it.

Let's assume for argument's sake that one of the "greater" nothrend herbs (lichbloom, icethorn, and adder's tongue) can be bought for 1g. I usually look at the lesser herbs, but those are often more expensive per stack than the greater ones (because farmers tend to farm flask materials and a single frost lotus proc will make the lichbloom market saturation worht it). Five of those herbs seem to mill for about 3 pigment, on average. That means a single Ink of the Sea (two pigments) costs about 3.3 times the base price of your herb, so if you spent 1g per herb, your ink cost you 3.3g to make. Glyphs are all scribed with 1 piece of parchment (which we're ignoring the cost of) and 1 or 2 inks.

That's all it takes to figure out profits. If there's a 1-ink glyph that you can sell for 5g, under those conditions you'd turn a profit. If there's a 2-inker that you can sell for 8g, profit. So all you need to do is watch the auction house for a little while to get a good feel for what the various glyphs are worth.

My secondary activity involves scanning the AH for lesser inks. Often, I'll find a dump of 20+ inks of the lesser types (lion's ink, celestial ink, etc). Provided they're the white-quality inks (the green-quality inks have no real use in the glyphing profiteer, as they're used to make offhands, darkmoon cards, and the like), and they are less than my current "per-ink" price, I'll buy them. Eventually I use them instead of trading down from ink of the sea, which will increase my net profits a bit over time. It's also possible to watch the AH for bargains on lesser herbs, but I find that the low-level herb market is WAY too volatile, and since the per-herb pigment milling value is not consistent (some herbs yield more pigments), it's too much work to do this manually. I will, however, post an article about automating this process in the future.

Anyway, that's the background for now. It's really all you need to know about the glyph market - there's plenty of sales, you've just got to get the useful glyph patterns and figure out what your ink costs are to establish profitability. In the future, we'll talk about practicality and automation in the business.