As soon as I decided which character was going to level inscription, I started old-world herb farming. It's fairly boring to run around in the lowbie areas collecting herbs, so I did that in small spurts, starting about a month prior to the patch. I made a list with each herb arranged by tier of use for inscription, and tallied my herbs, and kept herbing until I met the BETA users consensus on about how many herbs it will take to level. Of course, those numbers changed a good 3 times from my initial tally, so there were a few revisits to the Hinterlands, both Plagues and STV. My ultimate herb cache was based on the numbers from Banana Shoulders' indispensable inscription leveling guide.
The last pre-patch preparation I made was to go to WoWhead and read about just what all the major inscriptions did, then ticked off the ones I wanted to be sure to make for my four Alliance characters. It was a bummer, initially, to realize that only the major glyphs are trainable, and that so many of the pre-375 glyphs (i.e. everything 350 and above) require materials from Northrend. Oh well. Wrath of the Lich King will be here soon enough. I hope that it doesn't take until then, however, for my inscription research spell to conjure up the mage polymorph polar bear cub and penguin glyphs (I caved and bought one of the latter for 75g but would like to be able to make them). Wish me luck.
Here's What I did Once the Servers Came Up on Tuesday
I lol'd that I actually thought my ain server would be up and playable on patch night. It's twitchy even on non patch weeks. My secondary server was up, however, and I was able to log on there and play around a bit. And as an aside, I've had the missing flying mount and 1 pet returned, but I am still without my Black Tabby.
But on Wednesday, my main server was crashing less often so I dove in.
After milling and making inks for hours, primarily following the aforementioned guide, but substituting the rare inks and the cards you can make with them whenever possible, I got up to 363 inscription.
I milled about 1700 herbs or so to get there (I may be in denial and that # may be closer to 2000).
I donated 60 or so glyphs to my guild bank, and have sent out minor glyphs to friends for their alts. It's been a blast so far. And I have helped a number of 70s fumble their way through choosing and equipping their first inscriptions. It's too bad there isn't an ingame newsletter (an Azeroth Times) to push out information to folks since it appears from the "What's a Lexicon of Power? Where is Lexicon of Power?" questions that lots of folks do not read patch notes or profession guides.
The only annoyance thus far has been with strangers whipsering me, LOLing at minor glyph prices in the 35-45g range and saying "how much if I just give you the mats?" Uh, same price. Why? Simple math.
With current AH prices, leveling inscription took $1700-3400g in herbs, plus $400g training, and parchment costs. Therefore, strangers have no reason to expect me to give away an inscription I learned through research (1 possible new minor glyph every 20 hours). Prices will go down a bit overall after folks have their first set equipped, but its my opinion that glyphs should be similar in price to blue gems a few months back, especially for minor glyphs sice they are more scarce.
Dealing with strangers wanting cheap/free glyphs reminds me of how annoying leveling enchanting was, with all the non-tippers. And the peeps who would agree to a fee for rare enchants then not cough it up and find all their mats right back at them in the trade window. Thankfully, inscription's vellums will mean I won't have to go through that again — I can just make extra enchants and cast them on vellum. I can then send them to my alts(yeah! finally!) or put them in the AH. A much appreciated alternative to reenchanting my gear over and over to skill up.
So YEAH! for inscription!
