Inscription Power Leveling Guide (1-350)

This is a materials list and suggested progression chart for power-leveling Inscription. While I do present some alternative recipes at certain levels, I do not suggest using the more component intensive recipes. You're always welcome to take a detour for those items if you're more interested in the profit potential of a particular item rather than component cost. You might also want to review my inscription guide if you want to learn about the basics of Inscription.

List of Herbs

The following chart shows the amount of pigment needed to make the Inks on the Progression chart at the end of this guide. Next to each pigment is a list of the herbs that can be milled to produce it, and the number of stacks you should collect of those herbs. The quantities in this chart represent a worst case scenario, hopefully the maximum number of herbs you'll need to progress. This chart assumes a minimum of 2 pigments per milling action, you will often get 3-4 pigments. Stop milling when you hit the target number of pigments.

Preliminary Instructions

There are some recurring issues in the leveling process, instead of reiterating it every time it comes up I'm going to cover it here. Glyph recipes tend to turn yellow after five skill points so when making glyphs to level up you need to switch to new recipes every five points. On the chart this will simply be noted as "change recipes every 5 points". Glyph recipes that are orange to you (guaranteed skill point) will give you 3 skill points as noted by the number 3 to the right of the recipe name in your tradeskill window. You still need to switch recipes every five points even though you're getting skill points in threes.

The Recipe column lists alternate recipes that can be used interchangeably within the same skill range. In other words, there are two recipes that can gain the same skill points, you select which column has the materials that are easier for you. In some cases the alternate columns has somewhat "higher" ingredient requirements. I've included them because they might allow you to conserve your regular inks, by using up more of the 'rare' inks. When milling your herbs for pigment, rare pigments are a bonus item. There are some areas where you can make items with one regular ink and one rare ink vs. two regular ink, so I advise using the rare ink recipe since you're unlikely to use rare inks for anything else in a power leveling scenario.

Inks are not very good grinding recipes, they often start green and change to gray very quickly. Since you'll need much more ink than skill points allow, there's some play in how many points you actually end up milking from them. Most of the time I indicate this with a range "20-25" for the ink and the recipe immediately following it. I assume you will adjust your numbers depending on how many points you ended up getting from ink. In other words, if you end up getting an extra five points on the ink, deduct five from the next item. Rare inks have a similar problem, since the rare pigments are a random drop I really can't dictate how many you should make. On the other hand, they are a bonus item and don't require additional milling (ie: destroying) of herbs. Since the recipes can occasionally give skill points, in a sense they are free points. I'm including them in as alternates, use them when you can.

Progression Chart

Enjoy!
Kaliope of Llane

PLEASE NOTE: This chart was compiled on the Cataclysm Beta Realm. If you notice any errors, please contact us!