Why Improve Skill?
Your personal Inscription skill starts at 1, and may be raised to 450. 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 Master's Inscription at skill 400).
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 a point 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: Always.
- Yellow: Often.
- Green: Rarely.
- Grey: Never.
So if you are simply trying to gain skill, you should focus on orange and yellow recipes. Never produce anything grey, and try to avoid 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.
The Inscriptions and Glyphs chapters contain lists of trainable 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. However, trading pigments via the Auction House may bias the type of pigment used. For example, it may become easier to sell rare pigments and buy common pigments (or even the opposite...)
- 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 the easiest item to create if you simply want to raise skill. They should also sell well. When first learnt, most glyphs are "orange" for 5 skill points, then "yellow" for 5, then "grey" for 5. So you can make 5-7 glyphs before skill-ups start to take more than 1 item to gain.
- Glyphs also group. Every 5-10 skill points, you will be able to learn a new glyph for 2 or 3 different classes. You can skill-up effectively on any glyph in 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 - these rewards 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 require a lot of materials.
- 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 430 to 450 either requires a lot of materials (mostly by making Darkmoon Card of the North) or almost 2 months of Northrend Inscription Research. Full discussion is available in Leveling 350-450.
Learn More
- Milling - Introduces Milling herbs, and lists the parts created by different herbs.
- Inscriptions - Recipes scibes 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, and Leveling 350-450.
