Scribe
Latest
Arcane Brilliance: Professions for Cataclysm mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take. So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces." Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.
HTC Scribe turns up in US trademark filings, could be a tablet
It's an open secret at this point that HTC is almost certainly working on one or more tablets for introduction in 2011 -- and with heavyweights like Samsung, Motorola, and LG all playing the game (or about to play the game), really, how could they not? PocketNow has unearthed a very fresh trademark filing with the US PTO -- filed this past Sunday -- for "HTC Scribe," described as a "handheld wireless device, namely, a tablet computer." Doesn't get much more definitive than that. Of course, companies file for marks that they don't ultimately end up using all the time -- from their perspective, it's better to shoot first and ask questions later -- so it's not a slam dunk, but when you think about it, Scribe could actually be an awesome name for a little Honeycomb tablet. Only question is, are we going to see this stuff next week at CES or in February at MWC?
Gold Capped: Take the Mysterious Fortune Card house advantage
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on making money in game, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Anaalius's Darkmoon deck report. There's a craze in /trade. People are advertising Mysterious Fortune Cards that can be flipped to rarely turn into a Fortune Card that vendors for 5,000g. Like lambs to the slaughter, enough people head to the AH and buy a few that it's become a serious moneymaker for scribes. I use the expression "lambs to the slaughter" mostly in jest.
Gold Capped: Why deep undercutting on the auction house works
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities. In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit. I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.
Talay Robot will document your tweet, give it a soundtrack, Twitvid the results (video)
Tweet a message @talayrobot and something magical happens. An ST Robotics arm whirs to life inside Sony Music's London HQ and starts transcribing your words of wisdom unto a glamorously lit whiteboard -- in the finest handwriting font its designers could find! Best part is that the whole thing gets filmed and the video is sent back to you within a matter of minutes, equipped with an audio clip from Sony's Talay Riley. Yes, it's a promotional stunt, but it's also undeniably one of the coolest intersections of robotics and social networking we've yet seen. Skip past the break for some video examples or get tweeting and create your own.
Insider Trader: Inscription heads into Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. Inscription is going to be going through some changes in Cataclysm. We've already had a pretty massive overhaul in patch 4.0 with the changes to glyphs, but we're in for some more after the expansion ships. Obviously, the mats we use will change: the new common pigment from milling is Ashen Pigment (for BlackFallow Ink), and the uncommon one is Burning Embers (for Inferno Ink). Kaliope, who I've come to rely on for beta profession information, informs us that the best herb to get the Burning Embers from is Twilight Jasmine, found in the Twilight Highlands. As in Wrath of the Lich King, we will be able to trade the common inks for the uncommon ones; Jessica Sellers has updated her price list to accept Blackfallow Ink. It's going to be a single Blackfallow for a single older ink, as well as 10 for an Inferno Ink or Snowfall Ink.
Gold Capped: Patch 4.0.1 fallout for cooldowns, addons and glyphs
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Thursday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Patch 4.0.1 has come and gone, and we can now use the benefit of hindsight to see how well our predictions did. I'm going to start off with the elephants in the room: alchemy transmutes and addons. I reported that the cooldown for epic gems had been removed in the PTR and that this was likely so that people wouldn't be put into the poorhouse by having to regem. In reality, the datamining that determined this was incorrect, and the cooldowns are now resetting at midnight instead of the old way. There's huge demand for epic and rare cut and raw gems now, and people are tending to go toward rares because the epics are just too expensive.
Gold Capped: How to calculate inscription costs and prices
Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. With its myriad of materials and finished items, inscription can be one of the more complicated professions for a crafter who's trying to track his expenses and profits (or even to know if he's made a profit at all). Herb prices have changed dramatically over the past several months, dropping to record lows as farming bots proliferate and climbing just as dramatically during the ban wave that followed. After months of being spoiled by a market overflowing with cheap herbs, many players stopped paying attention to what they were paying to make each item. Now that herb prices are climbing, it's left a number of sellers scrambling to reprice their items and to take a closer look at what they're paying for their supplies.
Milling cast time reduced to one second
There have been reports in the blogosphere that there was an undocumented reduction to the milling cast time in patch 3.3.3. It used to be two very long, agonizing seconds for a scribe to turn herbs into pigments, and is reportedly going twice as fast: a blazing speed of one mill per second. This is a huge deal to anyone who uses inscription to make money. Milling herbs into ink is one of those tasks that limits your production capabilities, and can't legally be done while afk. In fact, the milling grind time (four clicks, and until now, eight seconds per stack of herbs) is one of the reasons I rarely advocate new auctioneers getting into selling glyphs. In addition to generally overcrowded marketplaces and auction house campers, it's a business that requires almost super-human patience. This will probably make the glyph market even more crowded, as the amount of unhealthy AH camping you can do with a finite amount of playtime just went up by a fair bit. [Thanks to Wolfgang Staudt on flickr for the image] Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!
Scrybe from Synaptics brings new life to your tired touchpad
Did your laptop maker not see fit to include any jazzy gesture support into your touchpad? Did you buy early and miss out on the multitouch revolution? Synaptics wants to fill the gap for those portables (and suitably-equipped desktops) with its Scrybe software. It augments Windows' existing touch functionality to add context-specific gestures and motions, and while jog-dial control for media has us most excited, you'll also be able to edit photos, look up word definitions, and plenty more -- even if you don't have a 10-finger capable device. The plan is for the company to make partnerships with various manufacturers so that this software becomes standard issue stuff, but you can get a taste of it today thanks to a roughly 10MB beta preview downloadable now at the read link. Do let us know what you think.
BlizzCon 2009 Insider Trader: Cataclysmic professions part two
A week has passed since BlizzCon 2009 and we're still digging up more news, getting clarification from the blues, and analyzing all of the panels. Last week, Insider Trader discussed some of the major professions-related features coming up in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the next expansion pack. Pass through the break to learn all about: Profession racial abilities and how they will be changing. The new direction for Alchemy. A totally revamped Fishing system! Archaeology details and speculation about the leveling process. The evolution of Inscription. Then, continue on to part three of this discussion to learn more about: Reforging and (not) repairing our own gear. Woodworking. Profession specializations and the new direction for differentiation.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Scribe
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-sixth in a series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay various aspects of the lore and gaming elements of WoW. What is inscription anyways? I mean, we all know that it's the newest profession, added in Wrath of the Lich King, and it lets you make these "glyphs" which allow you to modify or improve your various class abilities in interesting ways. In gaming terms all that makes perfect sense, but when it comes to telling a story with your character, there are a lot of details missing. Technically, a glyph is a character or symbol, like a heiroglyph or a pictograph, which we can see to a certain extent when we click on the glyph and put it into our in-game glyph interface -- it looks pretty cool with all those circles and lines and stuff. But what does it really mean? Are you pasting these symbols into a book of some sort? Are they getting magically tattooed onto your skin somewhere? And where did inscription come from to begin with? Has it been around in Azeroth all along somehow, or was it some sort of ancient knowledge only discovered recently, around the time in the Warcraft lore when the Wrath of the Lich King begins? If it was discovered, then who discovered it and how? How exactly does a scribe learn these glyphs? Does he or she pore over ancient tomes that haven't been read in thousands of years, trying to decipher ancient texts? Or is the art and magic of it more in the artistic calligraphy of it rather than any difficulty in discovering or interpreting the symbols themselves? There are far more questions than answers when it comes to roleplaying a scribe, and to a large extent each roleplayer is free to choose his or her own approach. What follows is the just one suggestion as to how you might work out a plausible solution -- please feel free to read it and improve upon it in whatever way you like.
Insider Trader: Your guide to profession-specific buffs
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.The World of Warcraft's second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, changed the way that we players, as tradespeople, view professions and altered the reasoning behind our choices to pursue them. The driving factor behind this change was Blizzard's commitment to make each profession seem beneficial and dare I say, fun, to any player, regardless of class. While we did see some changes in this direction in The Burning Crusade, such as an Enchanter's singular ability to enchant his/her own rings, this new vision for trades really hit its stride in Wrath. To accomplish this, Blizzard shifted focus away from bind on pick-up gear and added self-buffs and self-enchants, as well as some other incentives, to give players more choice. It used to be, for example, that PvP characters would take Engineering. Leather and 40+ mail-wearers would take Skinning to feed their Leatherworking. Tailors would take Enchanting because it allowed them to recoup some of the costs of crafting gear, and so on. In essence, we could choose between fun, PvP, gold-making, and the best gear. Now, we can purchase gear from the gear-crafters, and be free to pursue something else, should we wish. Today, Insider Trader is going to break down the incentives offered by each profession to help you choose what is right for you. Rather than focusing on fun items, I will be addressing stat bonuses.The purpose of this guide is not to tell you what you need to take in order to be the best raider, or make the most money, or have an edge in PvP, but rather to gather the information to one place and present it for your consideration. Don't forget to read through the comments section at the end of this article, as there are sure to be tips and stories from our readers!
Insider Trader: The patch 3.1 glyph market
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.If you are a Scribe who has not yet stepped into the glyph market since patch 3.1 went live on Tuesday, April 14th, then you'd better hustle! As we discussed pre-patch, the glyph market is undergoing a radical shift. For a limited time, perhaps very limited, it is soaring to epic heights. Unfortunately, this will not last, and I expect the market to take a sobering downturn in the next couple of weeks. This upswing is also affecting related markets, such as those for inks and herbs, and although we will likely see a bit of a price crash once the glyph market deteriorates, these should stabilize relatively quickly. Today, I will be reviewing why and how the glyph market is changing, and make some predictions for the future. I will also discuss how you can earn some of this post-patch wealth, as well as ways to continue making some profit even after the demand for glyphs drops. I will also be pointing you to some interesting stories around the web of how other Scribes are cashing in this week!
Breakfast Topic: Are you a Trade Chat grammar narc?
I don't know which is funnier, watching people in Trade Chat trying to figure out what to call someone with the Inscription profession or watching the people who get upset by it. "Inscriptionator" versus "It's SCRIBE, you morons!!" -- they are both pretty funny.Trade Chat, as you know, includes a lot of things besides Trade chatter: Guild recruitment, LFG, general help, gold spam and, of course, every topic under the sun. It also includes a lot of typos and grammar errors. Some of them are pretty benign, but others are so bad it's hard to decipher the meaning. And then there are the pet peeves. You're a literate bunch. Do you correct people in Trade Chat? If not, do you mind or care when people do? And doesn't it take longer to type "ne1" than it does to type "anyone"? I know it does for me.
Insider Trader: Inscription from 100 to 200
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Last week, we began the journey towards becoming a Grand Master Scribe. Starting with the basics, we discussed how to reach skill level 100, along with some general tips and strategy, and there were many helpful reader comments.Today, we will continue from skill level 100 to hit 200, which will place you partway through what a level 20 is capable of training. When herbs are mentioned, clicking on any of the links will take you to a Wowhead page showing you where you can find them. If you feel you need more background information on inscription tools, milling, or research, check out last week's column to brush up on the fundamentals. Otherwise, pass on through the break!
Arcane Brilliance: Inscription and the common Mage
Each week Arcane Brilliance gathers energy from the nether, spinning it from the bowels of the universe itself, then threads that dark matter together into a tapestry of destruction. This is a fancy way of saying that Arcane Brilliance summons up a column about Mages each Saturday. Then, over the course of a 5 second cast-time, it balls that column up into a giant ball of flame and nukes your face with it.Patch 3.0.2 hurled a new profession into our little virtual pond, and like Jewelcrafting before it, Inscription has plunged beneath the surface like a cannonball. We'll likely be sorting out the various waves and ripples that splash has created for months to come, but having spent the better part of three weeks with it, we can begin to see some results of the impact. Some of us have dived right in, picking up the profession and leveling it with gusto. Some of us only know that we saw a big splash, and that we are now very wet.As a Mage, this profession intrigues me more than most. Several of the glyphs for Mages are quite powerful, the Scribe-only shoulder enchants are pretty spectacular, and the off-hand weapons Scribes can create and equip seem like an attractive leveling option going into Wrath. What are the pros and cons of this new profession? Is it worth dropping old standards like Enchanting or Tailoring for? As a Mage, is Inscription worth learning, or am I better off just buying glyphs when I need them?Though we're still in the early stages of learning about this new tradeskill, we're at a point now where we can start to weigh its costs and benefits. After the break, we'll evaluate Inscription as a profession for Mages, and go over the glyphs available to us both now and after November 13th.
Insider Trader: Inscription from 0-100
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.This week's edition of Insider Trader will stand as an introduction to becoming a scribe. After covering some of the basic information you will need to know, I will walk you through the leveling process until you reach the 100th skill point. I will also discuss Minor Inscription Research and glyphs in detail, ensuring that you can make informed choices when choosing how to level your inscription. In the coming weeks, I will continue with the guide until the new maximum, 450.Hop on through the break to learn how to boost your scribe's levels quickly and cost-effectively.
Apprentice Scribe: An Inscription FAQ
Inscription was just added to the game two days ago, but many people have it at 350+ already. Understandably, there are a lot of questions. In this post I will attempt to answer some of them. This post is aimed at people who are scribes, or are interested in becoming scribes. If you're just interested in how to use glyphs to enhance your skills, but not in making them, you may want to look into the glyph FAQ. So what's this Inscription all about, then? Inscription is a new primary profession to make glyphs (permanent enhancements to spells), mostly. Scribes can also make scrolls, and for themselves, shoulder enchants and caster-oriented offhands. What goes into making a glyph? Herbs, primarily. Lots of herbs. You mill them into pigments, turn the pigments into ink, and put the ink down on parchment to make glyphs. What's the difference between a major and a minor glyph? Major glyphs make big changes to spells, minor glyphs make small ones. We have slots for both; you can't put a major glyph in a minor glyph slot, nor vice-versa. At level 70, we have two major slots, and three minor. At level 80, we'll have three of each.
Ask a Beta Tester: All about Inscription (and a few other things)
Twan kicks us off this morning with.... Is it worth stockpiling herbs or bars/ore if I had to pick one? There's not much you'll be doing with Outland or Azerothian ore... unless you want your new Death Knight to be a Blacksmith or Jewelcrafter... but herbs of all levels will be used in the new Inscription profession. Use them to train Inscription, sell them on the auction house post Wrath... either way, you win! For more of your beta questions -- and our beta answers -- read on! We've got all there is to know about inscription after the break. But if you're the sort who wants to avoid spoilers, turn back now. We're aiming to avoid major story spoilers, but this feature is all about beta content and we can't talk about the beta without giving a few things away.
