Why Improve Skill?
Your personal Inscription skill starts at 1, and may be raised to 525. Currently, higher skill allows you to:
- Learn new (and sometimes "better") recipes.
- Mill a wider range of herbs - for a full list, see Milling Skill Required.
- Make Inscription-only items (including the best Master's Inscription at skill 500).
There are no known items, enchants or abilities that give a bonus to Inscription skill. So you will need to develop your personal skill.
Gaining Inscription Skill
Like other manufacturing professions, there is a chance to gain points of skill when you make something. Recipes are colour-coded in your Inscription manual ((trade-skill window)), to show the chance of gaining skill:
- Orange with ⇑ (illustrated right): Always the number of skill points shown - for example, 3⇑ = 3 skill points.
- Orange: Always 1 skill point.
- Yellow: Often 1 skill point.
- Green: Rarely 1 skill point.
- Grey: Never skill points.
So if you are simply trying to gain skill, you should focus on orange and yellow recipes - especially orange recipes with more than a 1 point skill-up. Generally avoid grey and green recipes.
Milling does not give skill-ups. It isn't hard! Slightly less space is required to store the pigments produced than to store the raw herbs, so you should consider Milling herbs as soon as you know what pigments will be needed.
One quest rewards +5 Inscription skill: Writing the Future from Sayge, the fortune teller on Darkmoon Island. This quest is only available during Darkmoon Faire week, which normally starts on the first Sunday of the month. Simply bring 5 Light Parchment, then use the items provided by the quest. This quest is expected to be repeatable each month.
The Inscriptions and Glyphs chapters contain lists of trainable (and discoverable) recipes.
Skilling-Up Concepts
For scribes that do not want to follow the leveling guide, keep in mind these concepts:
- Milling herbs (after those that make Alabaster Pigment) creates an average of 2.4-3.0 common (primary) pigment and 0.2-0.6 rare (secondary) pigment per milling. The precise amount depends on the herb used. The best leveling strategy may use both types of pigments, because both will be found by milling.
- Recipes group together: Typically, a specific ink is required to make items in each group. Each group lasts about 50 skill points.
- Inks turn grey very fast - commonly after 5 skill points. So the best levelling strategy is to make the ink you need first, then create the items with it.
- Glyphs are often the best (most material-efficient) way to gain skill-ups when orange: They require 3x ink (plus a parchment) per glyph, but most gain 3 skill points by making a single glyph. This is indicated in the data tables as "3⇑". Once the recipes turn yellow, there is only a chance of a single skill point gain, so other recipes may become more efficient. Glyphs also sell well at auction, unlike most other items made while leveling Inscription.
- Glyphs group: Every 5-10 skill points, you will be able to learn a new glyph for a few different classes. You can normally skill-up effectively on any glyph within that small group. So, you may wish to make a Warrior glyph rather than a "Special Mage" glyph, if the Warrior glyph is worth more to you.
- Inscribers learning the profession as they level should make some Tarot Cards and Off Hands - rewards that are genuinely useful at low level. These recipes are also very slow to turn "grey". They allow lower-level herbs to be used to gain skill-ups for longer, but some require more materials than Glyphs or Scrolls.
- Between skill 390 and 400, you will need to research at least one major glyph using Northrend Inscription Research. There are no trained recipes that bridge this gap.
- At the time of writing, leveling from around 500 to 525 either requires a lot of materials (mostly to make Relics) or several weeks producing Forged Documents. For further discussion read Leveling 425-525.
Learn More
- Milling - Introduces Milling herbs, and lists the parts created by different herbs.
- Inscriptions - Recipes scribes use to create inscriptions, except glyphs - abilities, inks, items, cards, scrolls, vellum.
- Optimal Profession Skillups - Analysis of the skill-up chance based on color-coding, by Sservis.
- Also in Training: Ranks, Power-Leveling, Leveling 1-75, Leveling 75-100, Leveling 100-150, Leveling 150-200, Leveling 200-250, Leveling 250-290, Leveling 290-350, Leveling 350-425, and Leveling 425-525.
