Here are my reasons for disliking Inscription to the point of using the word HATE. It wasn't hard coming up with an even 10 reasons, I actually have a few more but they're really nit-picky. If you like Glyphs and DMF decks and making staves/off-hands, please stop reading. You have been warned.
1) This is a profession, that since Cataclysm, has practically been for "opening of expansion only" and then turns into a bot farm - both actual bots cancel posting and people bots doing it manually. Right now the only thing you can do is upgrade what you have, and in most cases the gear offerings are subpar and really only appeal to non-raiders in LFR or those raiders who have gotten extremely unlucky with particular drops and want a weapon with their exact secondary stats. Unfortunately with talent trees being reduced to only a few real choices with each class and glyphs being only learned once, they become a market for Pokemon style players and new players just needing a few for their alts.
2) Glyphs are the lowest form of goldmaking within the crafting family and as such are a beginner's profession. If you run over to The Consortium and read the endless questions about setting up glyph making empires, you can find oodles of explanations about what not to do and the mistakes of others. And if you don't want to do a search, be like everyone else and start a new thread. Yes, the people doing this tend to be getting 'serious' about goldmaking, so their first act is downloading TSM and setting it up incorrectly. To do it properly, you HAVE to set up the actual costs, because we all know you aren't out farming your own Celestial Ink, you're trading it for current content inks like everyone else. Further, it's a make money button in most people's eyes. Very little depth to it so it appeals to the people not interested in thinking too much so the overall market is saturated with stupid.
3) Gevlon used to make all his gold off glyphs. If you ever read his blog when he was actually grinding gold, his #1 suggestion whenever he wanted to "help" people on other servers make gold was "make glyphs". Gevlon LOVED to troll the bads in this game, so if Gevlon recommended it, you know something was awry with it. While Gevlon's more or less long gone, the armies of people sold on this profession is endless.
4) The weapons made with the profession carry an extremely high opportunity cost to craft (and for me at least) don't move. With everyone now able to reroll for very little gold, this craft is now all about who can craft that staff with the best stats and post it for the lowest price on the AH. As a complaint in general, all weapons are 630 and will always upgrade to a max of 10 points below the content. Today a person can snag a 640 out of LFR with no problem so there's no appeal to grab an item that will make do until they get what they need... unless they intend to upgrade it with expensive Savage Bloods, it's probably going to sit around a while, or someone got desperate and failed Bronze Challenge modes. In summary, your target market is the masses who either have no gold, no skills, no guild, and no luck. Yuck.
5) DMF trinkets were changed this expansion to be available for crafting without the DMF being in town. This means that all the junior scribe geniuses can keep deck prices screwed up year-round now rather than once a week. DMF decks already lost their luster within the first tier of content, and thanks to most of them being poorly itemized come down to one deck that everyone wants, and then 3 others that you work hard to give away; see Tanking Trinkets. You spend an inordinate amount of time trying to trade off bad cards so you can get good cards. Of course there are those that swear by these items, and every so often MrRobot says they're a BIS for crafted items, but I'm not interested in appealing to specific niches when I get to be the one constantly reposting them.
6) It's too time consuming for low reward. Post a hundred glyphs, spent 2 minutes clearing out your mailbox of them. Posting them takes far too long even though it's almost entirely done with TSM. Undercutting happens within 5-10 minutes of a post, and resetting your inventory takes half that amount of time if not the same amount. This is why there are so many glyph bots - people are willing to lose their accounts rather than manually deal with the market. Need I mention milling? We were told before beta that we would not be milling our own herbs. They could easily have done for Inscription what they did for Jewelcrafting, and I would not be making this post. I've been messing with glyphs lately and it boils down to about 1-2k revenue per day. On my server that's astoundingly awful. I used to pull an easy 5k per day before MMOC made this mainstream in Wrath, and I miss those days.
7) At the end of every expansion since introduction of the profession, you get charred glyphs. When they change the content, they remove glyphs from the game and your reward are a bunch of vendor grays. Like I always say, glyphs are nothing more than a substitute talent tree. You have to buy new ones each expansion because they flat out cannot remove this profession because too many people are in love with it.
8) The majority of glyphs are horrible and boring. This is just poor design. They removed talent trees because of complex decisions having to be made by their playerbase, which is mostly non-gamers calling themselves gamers. Now the new mantra is to make the major glyphs do almost nothing for you, but just being somewhat useful in given situations. I really dislike that and I say remove talent trees all together and have glyphs be the talent tree. Level 15, 30, 45, etc there are glyphs for everything you want. This would at least make them sort of interesting again. They could have made glyphs in reduced quantity through the garrisons (see above) and made a very rich talent tree via glyphs. Talent trees and glyph UIs look extremely similar, merge the two and set level requirements on glyphs that aren't game breaking. Revamp the crafting of these to require you to actually perform a CD for each level of glyph you wish to make, up the mat requirements.
9) As I alluded to, it is the ONLY profession in WoD that did not get some sort of major change or overhaul. Jewelcrafters no longer have to prospect. Leveling it requires the same trek as before, unless you want to spam something for 600 levels that's ultimately not profitable. Armor crafters received the ability to make great items for disenchanting. And I'm still milling by hand.
10) It takes very little for the entire market to get screwed up within seconds and there's very little you can do about it unless you want to constantly play the White Knight and reset the market, only to have the same thing happen within minutes or hours. Like I mentioned with #2, it's so easy, any mouthbreather can do it. Therefore, the prices are generally screwed up because said mouthbreather cannot compute the actual costs of herbs as it relates to inks and they post it because TSM told them to (mouthbreathers are bad at settings). But then said mouthbreather will tell you they have no costs because farming makes them free so deal with the 10g glyphs that cost 40g to make in real costs, these guys have their leet dual gatherers running all over turning gold into lead. Mouthbreathers make me sad.
That's a lot of hate right there. I guess it sucks that the only use I've gotten out of my scribes since WoD's launch has been in daily cooldowns and weekly work orders. I do have a lot of love for one particular part of the profession however, and I'll let you guess which part. Everything I talked about above makes my process continue to be highly profitable, so if you can guess how that works then you're looking at a gold mine of your very own.
The Number One US? World?
Lately I've been seeing friends and extreme goldmakers like myself drop like flies. One of my heroes notified the world last week that he was out. Others have been inactive and not interested any longer. Am I the number one by attrition? Have I outlasted the best? You can talk about streamers and such, but they're all pretty sketchy. Here, this is my week, which is almost 100k less than the week prior.
Appeal to the masses and sell them what they want, being exclusive doesn't guarantee a consistent income.
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