Inscription Guide for Dragonflight

Last updated on Nov 07, 2023 at 01:40 by Seksixeny 3 comments

This page covers the most important aspects of Inscription in Dragonflight, including talent builds and suggestions on how to make gold with the profession.

1.

Inscription in Dragonflight

As usual, Inscription will be responsible for improved Darkmoon trinkets, Vantus Runes, reputation contracts, secondary stat fixing Missives, Off-Hands, and Staves.

Inscription in Dragonflight

They will also craft new profession gear, such as Alchemist's Sturdy Mixing Rod Icon Alchemist's Sturdy Mixing Rod, new temporary weapon enchants, such as Howling Rune Icon Howling Rune, new fortune cards such as Fated Fortune Card Icon Fated Fortune Card, new Draconic Treatises, such as Draconic Treatise on Alchemy Icon Draconic Treatise on Alchemy, and cosmetic items such as Illusion Parchment: Shadow Orb Icon Illusion Parchment: Shadow Orb or Highland Drake: Black Hair Icon Highland Drake: Black Hair.

Dragonflight introduces Crafting Specializations, which you are able to unlock once your profession skill hits 25. These serve as a profession talent tree system fueled by Inscription Knowledge, obtained from weekly quests, one-time treasures in the Dragon Isles, Draconic Treatises, and first-time crafts.

While you will eventually be able to unlock all talents, doing so will require a long time as the sources of knowledge are very limited, especially once one-time treasures and first-crafts are exhausted.

2.

Best Race for Inscription in Dragonflight

If you are a Horde player, Nightborne will grant you +5 skill points, while Alliance players can be Kul'Tiran for +2 skill points.

3.

Crafting UI in Dragonflight

Dragonflight introduces a few new concepts to professions, which can be seen in the annotated Crafting UI screenshot below:

Crafting UI
  • Most crafting reagents will now have detailed descriptions on how they can be obtained, such as their profession source;
  • Quality, depicted by the number of diamonds on the top left corner of most profession items, is a measure of how proficiently the item was made, and how powerful it is. On crafted gear, this translates to extra item levels, while crafting reagents with higher quality contribute some skill towards any craft they are used on;
  • Doing the First Craft of an item (as indicated in the UI) grants some Artisan's Mettle Icon Artisan's Mettle and one profession knowledge point, as well as significant experience, making it worthwhile to craft every item at least once;
  • Crafting Specializations, the second option in the bottom tabs, are a new system which allows you to spend profession knowledge points for various talent-like bonuses to your crafting abilities;
  • Crafting Orders, the last option in the bottom tabs, allows you to manage your orders, a new system which allows you to craft gear which requires bind on pickup materials for other players, as long as they provide these materials. You can also recraft equipment, in order to change its optional reagents and quality.
First Craft Bonus
4.

Crafting Stats for Inscription in Dragonflight

Recipe Difficulty represents the profession skill level needed to craft the selected recipe at its highest quality potential. It starts from your baseline profession skill, but can be improved with profession gear, specialization bonuses, the quality of the materials used to craft and other special items.

Crafting UI

The Expected Quality bar under the recipe stats give an idea of the quality outcome of crafting the item under current conditions.

There are four new stats for crafting professions, which can show up on your crafting gear:

  • Multicraft provides a baseline (increasable by talents) chance to craft 1 to 2.5 times more items than the usual items a craft produces. A Multicraft proc on a craft that produces 2 items will grant between 1 and 5 extra items, for example;
  • Resourcefulness provides a chance to use fewer tradeable crafting reagents when crafting;
  • Inspiration provides a baseline (increasable by talents) chance to craft a recipe with bonus skill (33% of Recipe Difficulty for crafts with 3 levels of quality, 16.7% for crafts with 5 levels of quality) added on;
  • Crafting Speed increases your craft speed, allowing you to finish your crafts faster.

These stats, when activated, will show up on your Crafting Results panel, as displayed below:

Crafting Stats Procs

All stats have their uses, but for Inscription we recommend focusing on Inspiration and Resourcefulness for most crafts, as recipe difficulties tend to be on the high side for the best crafts.

If you are focused on crafting Fated Fortune Card Icon Fated Fortune Card or other similar items where quantity is worth more than quality (which does not even exist for the cards), then swap out your Inspiration gear for Multicraft, instead.

5.

Leveling Inscription in Dragonflight

Increasing your skill in Dragonflight is done by crafting items that grant skill points as usual, but the endgame of the profession is in the search for Inscription Knowledge and using it to unlock Inscription Specializations.

Some crafts require special bind on pickup reagents, such as Artisan's Mettle Icon Artisan's Mettle or Spark of Ingenuity Icon Spark of Ingenuity. These reagents are heavily time gated in how they can be obtained, and thus caution should be used on what you use them for, especially early on.

Spark and Artisan's Mettle

In order to be efficient, we recommend trying to get as many first-craft bonuses while leveling Inscription as possible, but the specific items to aim for while leveling depend on your server's material costs and current sale price for whatever you are crafting.

6.

Dragonflight Milling and Ink Guide

With the new crafting interface, you can now mill all herbs of a type on your inventory automatically over time as if you were crafting items!

Also, as it can often be confusing, here is the information on what each herb type mills into and what ink can be produced from the pigment:

  • Writhebark Icon Writhebark mills into Flourishing Pigment Icon Flourishing Pigment, which is used for Flourishing Ink Icon Flourishing Ink;
  • Bubble Poppy Icon Bubble Poppy mills into Serene Pigment Icon Serene Pigment, which is used for Serene Ink Icon Serene Ink;
  • Saxifrage Icon Saxifrage mills into Blazing Pigment Icon Blazing Pigment, which is used for Blazing Ink Icon Blazing Ink;
  • Hochenblume Icon Hochenblume mills into Shimmering Pigment Icon Shimmering Pigment, which is used for all inks listed above;
  • Prismatic Leaper Icon Prismatic Leaper is a fish that can be milled, giving the same pigments as a randomly picked herb with no quality;
  • Burnished Ink Icon Burnished Ink is crafted by combining two of each of the previously mentioned inks;
  • Cosmic Ink Icon Cosmic Ink is crafted by combining two Burnished Ink Icon Burnished Inks, a Serene Ink Icon Serene Ink and other materials.

Investment into higher quality herbs and / or milling and inking related talents will result in higher quality pigments / inks, as well as higher chances of saving materials along the way and faster milling and ink crafting.

At this moment in Beta, the recipe difficulty of the baseline inks is only 80, making it trivial to craft maximum quality inks even when using minimum quality materials. If this stays the case on launch make sure to not waste gold by using high quality herbs for milling!

7.

Best Inscription Gear

Scribes, like most other professions, can use three pieces of gear:

  • Left-Handed Magnifying Glass Icon Left-Handed Magnifying Glass and Magnificent Margin Magnifier Icon Magnificent Margin Magnifier, made by Jewelcrafters;
  • Bold-Print Bifocals Icon Bold-Print Bifocals and Fine-Print Trifocals Icon Fine-Print Trifocals, made by Jewelcrafters;
  • Scribe's Fastened Quill Icon Scribe's Fastened Quill and Scribe's Resplendent Quill Icon Scribe's Resplendent Quill, made by Scribes.
Profession Gear

As shown in the image above, quality is a big factor in the stats you can get from the gear. Green versions are bind on equip and from trainer recipes, but blue versions require faction / renown grinding for their recipe and are bind on pickup, requiring you to submit a Crafting Order for them.

Also, remember to enchant your primary tool with Enchant Tool - Draconic Inspiration Icon Enchant Tool - Draconic Inspiration or Enchant Tool - Draconic Resourcefulness Icon Enchant Tool - Draconic Resourcefulness.

8.

Crafting Orders

Speaking of crafting orders, all you need to do create one is to go to the NPC responsible for them in the capital city and open the auction-house like interface. Type a part of the name of the item you are looking to get crafted in the search box and pick the exact item from the list that shows up, resulting in the following interface:

Crafting Orders Sender PoV

Here you can pick between a Public Order, which requires you to supply all materials but should result in a very fast craft (as long as the gold Commission for the crafter is decent enough) as the whole server will be able to do your order, or a Personal Order, which requires you to specify a character that will then receive this order in their profession crafting log:

Crafting Orders Receiver PoV

In public orders you cannot specify the quality of the crafted item. This means that, no matter your commission, there is a very high probability that an unskilled crafter will pick up the order and produce a low quality item, as that will still grant skill points without requiring materials from the crafter, making it useful even at a 1s commission.

Private orders do allow you to specify a minimum quality for the item, and you can always send them to your own alts or trusted players, who will then be able to contribute some, or even all of the crafting materials required themselves. This should be the favored method for anything but the most basic of crafts, but absolutely make sure to talk to the crafter first and / or put in a very large commission, as otherwise you are likely to have your order ignored, rather than finished.

8.1.

Recrafting

All professions which craft gear can perform Recrafting, which takes an existing item and crafts it all over again in the hopes of a higher quality result, using a fraction of the original materials:

Recrafting UI

Recrafting's purpose is to allow you to craft gear upgrades as soon as you can, with the knowledge that you can upgrade the item for much cheaper later. Take note that, if you use low quality materials to craft the original item, future recrafts of the item will not gain as much quality from having maximum quality materials used in the recrafting as would be expected!

While the exact math behind it is not well understood yet, you can think of it as having the recraft use all previously used materials instead of only the newly submitted materials.

You can also use the work order system to submit a recrafting request, allowing you to recraft items you do not have the profession to make:

Recrafting Work Order UI
9.

Best Inscription Specializations and Talents in Dragonflight

Inscription Specializations UI

Inscription Specializations are divided into three disciplines, which also have sub-specializations within which can be unlocked as you put points into their pre-requisite disciplines, akin to talent trees.

The best specialization for you depends on what your goals are: do you want to be an efficient miller and produce inks efficiently, be a Darkmoon deck specialist, focus on mass-producing the new Treatises and Fauna Runes or the old Contracts, Missives and Vantus Runes, or maybe you want to be a cutting-edge weapon or tool crafter? We will give suggestions on how to accomplish each of these goals below.

9.1.

Best Inscription Talents for Milling and Ink creation

  1. 10 points into Rune Mastery for pathing;
  2. 20 points into Understanding Flora for for efficient Milling;
  3. 10 points into Rune Mastery for further pathing;
  4. 20 points into Flawless Inks for more efficient Ink creation;
  5. 10 points into Rune Mastery for further pathing;
  6. 30 points into Perfect Practice for more efficient creation.

All Inscription crafts rely on milling herbs and processing it into inks. Thus, one of the first basic steps is to specialize on doing these steps as efficiently as possible, in order to reduce costs down the line for crafters specialized in using them.

9.2.

Best Inscription Talents for Darkmoon Deck Trinkets

  1. 10 points into Archiving for pathing;
  2. 10 points into Darkmoon Mysteries for pathing;
  3. 30 points into Fire or Earth or Frost or Air for specializing into crafting one of the four Darkmoon Deck Boxes: Darkmoon Deck Box: Inferno Icon Darkmoon Deck Box: Inferno, Darkmoon Deck Box: Watcher Icon Darkmoon Deck Box: Watcher, Darkmoon Deck Box: Rime Icon Darkmoon Deck Box: Rime, or Darkmoon Deck Box: Dance Icon Darkmoon Deck Box: Dance;
  4. 10 points into Archiving for pathing;
  5. 1 point into Scale Sigils for pathing;
  6. 1 point into Sagescale Sigil to unlock Sagescale Sigil Icon Sagescale Sigil, an optional reagent that allows you to create Darkmoon trinkets whose variable outcomes can be controlled and optimized, vastly improving their potential power;
  7. 30 points into Darkmoon Mysteries for more efficient card and trinket creation.

Darkmoon Decks look very strong in Beta, and are likely to be some of the most sought after trinkets, making them have high gold making potential. Make sure to research about each deck in order to determine ahead of time which type of Deck you want to specialize in, to minimize wasted points.

It is also possible to maximize Darkmoon Mysteries as soon as possible before diving into the optimized end game decks, which should help you make a profit from creating the base cards, but it could be risky if the card drop rates from PvE content are high.

9.3.

Best Inscription Talents for Vantus and Fauna Rune Crafting

  1. 10 points into Runebinding for pathing;
  2. 10 points into Runic Scripture for pathing;
  3. 20 points into Fauna Runes for optimizing your Fauna runes, such as Howling Rune Icon Howling Rune;
  4. 10 points into Runic Scripture for further pathing;
  5. 20 points into Vantus Runes for optimizing your Vantus runes, such as Vantus Rune: Vault of the Incarnates Icon Vantus Rune: Vault of the Incarnates;
  6. 10 points into Runic Scripture for added craft efficiency;
  7. 20 points into Runebinding for added craft efficiency.

Vantus Runes, such as Vantus Rune: Vault of the Incarnates Icon Vantus Rune: Vault of the Incarnates and the new Fauna Runes, such as Howling Rune Icon Howling Rune are essential consumables with good gold making potential, especially as there are significant stat gain increases from higher quality crafts but recipe difficulties are high enough that Inspiration has great value for occasionally crafting higher tiers.

9.4.

Best Inscription Talents for Treatise, Contract, and Missive Crafting

  1. 10 points into Archiving for pathing;
  2. 10 points into Shared Knowledge for pathing;
  3. 20 points into Draconic Treatises or Contracts and Missives, as preferred;
  4. 10 points into Shared Knowledge for further pathing;
  5. 20 points into Draconic Treatises or Contracts and Missives, depending on what you skipped before.

Draconic Treatises, such as Draconic Treatise on Inscription Icon Draconic Treatise on Inscription are new bind on pickup Inscription items that grant a knowledge point for a Dragonflight profession. You can only use one per profession every week and due to their bind on pickup nature most players will have to use the Crafting Orders to acquire them.

Missives, such as Draconic Missive of the Feverflare Icon Draconic Missive of the Feverflare allow for customization of the secondary stats present on crafted combat and profession gear. Finally, Contracts, such as Contract: Artisan's Consortium Icon Contract: Artisan's Consortium make you gain reputation with a specific faction for every world quest you complete in the Dragon Isles, accelerating your reputation grinds.

9.5.

Best Inscription Talents for Weapon or Profession Tool Crafting

  1. 10 points into Runebinding for pathing;
  2. 10 points into Woodcarving for pathing;
  3. 20 points into Profession Tools or 30 points into Staves, as preferred;
  4. 20 points into Woodcarving for added craft efficiency;
  5. 20 points into Runebinding for added craft efficiency.

While you can technically become proficient at both weapon and profession tool crafting, talents spent into Profession Tools do not affect Staves crafts and vice-versa, encouraging full specialization into one kind of tool before delving into the other, especially as Woodcarving has a strong 30-point bonus.

Scribes can make Agility and Intellect two-hand staves: Kinetic Pillar of the Isles Icon Kinetic Pillar of the Isles and Illuminating Pillar of the Isles Icon Illuminating Pillar of the Isles. They can also make multiple profession tools, including their own best in slot tool: Scribe's Resplendent Quill Icon Scribe's Resplendent Quill. All of the blue and epic quality gear is bind on pickup, so remember to browse public Crafting Orders and advertise your expertise wherever you go to gain clients for private Orders as well!

10.

Making Gold with Inscription in Dragonflight

Ideally, Inscription allows you to convert cheap materials into expensive runes, missives, Darkmoon decks and end game gear and profession tools. The commodity nature of some of its crafts implies it is very likely that the consumable market will quickly get loaded with runes and missives that are only marginally more expensive than the materials used to create them, but Inscription has a lot of depth within its talent trees, and different crafters will have different markets to explore.

Making gold with Crafting Orders is very dependent on your server, how many (and how generous) clients you can get for your wares, and on timing the public Crafting Order market. Theoretically the best gold from orders should be found in the middle-to-late part of the week as many crafters will have exhausted their weekly public crafting order quota already but the panic to use what is left of the quota before the weekly reset has not set in yet, either.

Doing orders just before popular raid hours could also be a great goldmaking opportunity, as slackers will want to get their shiny new gear crafted quickly at any cost and thus increase their commission to ensure speed in completion.

When mass-producing and selling commodities, most of your profits will come from timing the market in two steps:

  1. Figure out your server's raid days. Wednesday, Sunday, and Tuesday are the typical candidates. On these days it will be easier to sell consumables for higher prices. To make sure, track the worth of your crafts over time in your server with The Oribos Exchange website, and sell during high price periods.
  2. Before leaving the website, search for the materials used in the crafts. Take note of when they are cheapest, and aim to buy during these periods.

Although it sounds simple, most players do not have the patience or knowledge to take advantage of timing the market, and doing so correctly is where your profit will come from in the long term. Buying materials to craft and selling the crafts randomly could actually lead to losing money if you buy high and sell low, so take a little bit of time to understand the market before you dive in!

11.

Changelog

  • 07 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2.
  • 04 Sep. 2022: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7.
  • 27 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight.
  • 18 Feb. 2022: Updated for Patch 9.2.
  • 30 Jun. 2021: Updated guide for Patch 9.1.
  • 09 Nov. 2020: Guide added.
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