Inscription Guide for The War Within

Being a scribe is now the main way to get Darkmoon Cards as random loot from enemy NPCs or when combined with Fishing. These can be turned into Decks once you have all the cards in your inventory, producing trinkets like Darkmoon Deck: Ascension. While these are not particularly powerful trinkets, they can be converted by scribes into powerful embellishment versions of themselves, such as Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension.

Besides this new business, Inscription will still be responsible for Vantus Runes for the raids, such as Vantus Rune: Nerub-ar Palace, reputation contracts, such as Contract: The Severed Threads, secondary stat fixing Missives, such as Algari Missive of the Fireflash, Off-Hands, such as Vagabond's Torch, Staves, such as Vagabond's Bounding Baton, and multiple reagents, such as Boundless Cipher.

They can also craft profession gear, such as Hasty Alchemist's Mixing Rod, and new Algari Treatises to improve profession knowledge weekly, such as Algari Treatise on Inscription.

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

Inscription can make great use of all four stats, but you might want to focus on specific stats with different Inscription specializations. We go into detail with Inscription stats and the gear you can use to boost them in the specialized guide below:

Increasing your skill in The War Within is done by crafting items that grant skill points as usual, but in order to be efficient we recommend trying to get as many first-craft bonuses while leveling Inscription as possible, with the specific items to aim for while leveling varying depending on what material costs are like at the time you are leveling and their current sale price.

A simple way to level Inscription once regular recipes stop giving skill is to unlock the Pursuit of Knowledge tree, in order to unlock the Algari Treatise on Inscription. By crafting it or any other learned treatise, you will have a high chance to learn other treatise recipes, and treatises give 1 skill per craft all the way to 100 while being quite cheap to craft!

You will be able to track all weekly and one-time sources of profession knowledge with Myu's Knowledge Points Tracker, a very helpful Weak Aura!

There are multiple treasures around Khaz Algar that you can loot for up to 24 extra knowledge. You can find them all easily in-game with the aforementioned Weak Aura or the Rarescanner addon, which will put up small treasure icons with a hammer underneath at their map location, as exemplified below.

Using the crafting interface, you can mill all herbs of a type on your inventory automatically over time as if you were crafting items in a batch.

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:

• Mycobloom mills into Nacreous Pigment, which is used for Apricate Ink;
• Luredrop mills into Luredrop Pigment, which is also used for Apricate Ink;
• Orbinid mills into Orbinid Pigment, which is used for Shadow Ink;
• Blessing Blossom mills into Blossom Pigment, which is also used for Shadow Ink;
• Finally, Specular Rainbowfish mills into a bunch of pigments.

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.

We recommend starting by investing into the Pursuit of Knowledge tree, in order to unlock the Algari Treatise on Inscription, which is a great way to gain profession skill and knowledge at the same time! Knowledge spent on this tree works towards building your crafting stats, making you more efficient at doing all Inscription crafts.

The best second specialization for you depends on what your goals are. If you are only in Inscription for the passive bonus to finding Darkmoon Cards, then all you need to do is invest into the left side of the Archival Additions tree and unlock each of the Deck type sub-nodes up to 15/30 to increase your chance of finding Darkmoon Cards by 50%, stacking up to 200%.

Fully investing into the nodes of this side of the talent tree is needed for maximizing your skill at crafting Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension and the other Darkmoon Sigils, while the right side nodes focus on contracts, missives, and Vantus runes, respectively. All of these are very profitable for Concentration usage, especially Sigils.

Alternatively, in order to be able to produce all the reagents, inks, and pigments necessary for Inscription crafts in the most efficient manner, you might want invest into the Pursuit of Perfection tree, which improves efficiency and skill when doing those crafts.

Last but not least, the Careful Carvings tree improves your skill and efficiency at creating combat and profession gear, with the left side focusing on Staves and Off-Hands and the right side focusing on the three types of profession tools Inscription can do for itself, Alchemy, and Cooking.

Unfortunately the amount of points needed to maximize each of these individual tools is extremely high, making it a very expensive path with little actual gain at the end, as you will also only learn the Inscription blue tool recipe in the process, as the Alchemy tool comes from Delves and the Cooking tool comes from the Darkflame Cleft dungeon.

Ideally, Inscription allows you to convert cheap materials into expensive runes, missives, Darkmoon Sigils and end game gear and profession tools. You will also be able to produce treatises to increase your own knowledge and that of other players through the crafting orders system.

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.

Until you fully max out skill, gear, and knowledge for your desired crafts, you will be reliant on Concentration to get maximum ranks out, which can quickly be exhausted every day, so make sure to create some alts to increase your production cap while it is still very profitable to do so! Even later on those can still be useful as they will be able to create maximum rank items more cheaply than the guaranteed method, which requires full Rank 3 reagents.

We have a specialized guide for The War Within gold-making below, which contains a gold-making tier list and goes deeper into techniques and habits for successful gold making, as well as websites and addons that can help you on your journey!