We need a Mass Ink option

Inscription has become a decently popular profession in BFA with the abilities to create Tomes, War-Scrolls, Contracts, Vantus Runes, and Darkmoon Cards. In Legion, we didn’t have inks, we only had pigments. Which meant that mass milling for herbs was plenty and I would only occasionally go AFK if I were mass making tomes, which I’d only make about 200-300 at a time.

However in BFA, I have to mass mill herbs and end up with thousands of pigments that I then have to turn into inks. Even with the crafting enchant, it can take 30-45 minutes of just creating inks. Then, I have start crafting a 3rd time to make goods that I will finally sell. At this point, I might as well outsource my work or create an assembly line. It’s taking me 2 hours as I speak to create inks for Vantus runes for my guild, then probably another 15-30 minutes to create the runes.

Can we please get the ability to mass create inks? Even if it’s just 20 at a time, it’d save scribes everywhere a ton of time so we can actually play the game more instead of using our free time to afk.

And before you say “Glove enchant” - I have it.

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Mass Ink is not the answer, getting rid of inks completely and going back to pigments is. But for whatever reason, Blizzard decided they want us wasting time converting pigments to inks in BfA, so I doubt we will see any changes to that system before the next expansion.

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We also really… really… need a ink/pigment trader. The amount of blue ink is swamping all of my space on my scribe.

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I don’t disagree with the premise that we need mass inks.

but

lol… just no. inscription is awful.

this too. in legion i could make stuff directly from the pigments i got from herbs. it was nice. now i have to mill herbs, then stand around doing nothing while I one-by-one turn them into ink. i have thousands of blue pigments to turn into inks.

amen

I am going to try and leave most of the whining about the profession out of this post as much as I can. I have been making Vantus Runes and Tomes for the guild since we are progressing through the new content and have been trying many different talent setups and the like.

Here are the facts in my most recent en devour. My goal was to make 1000 “Tome of the Quiet Mind”. To do so first I needed herbs to mill for pigments.

Knowing I would get less crimson that ultramarine ink i made my focus to find that. I knew that for each herb I mill I get about .3 of a pigment. Since I would need 5000 Crimson Ink I had to mill roughly 17,000 herbs.
So i took 85 stacks of 200 herbs, milled them down into 5,000 crimson pigment and 10,000 Ultramarine pigment which turned my 85 stacks into 75, i didn’t even count the number of viridescent pigment because I was not interested in it at this time.

So now I have 75 stacks of 200 pigment, to turn that into ink I will also need 75 stacks of water.

So now I have 150 Stacks of materials in my bank/bags. 30,000 crafts to turn my pigment into ink.

4 hours later, my ink has been made. I do have the crafting enchant otherwise im sure it would have been longer.

So now I have 75 stacks of ink. next i need 25 parchment for each craft. 25,000 parchment or 1,250 stacks of 200 later and I can start crafting the tomes. This only took about 45 minutes of actual crafting time. the bigger time sync was having to stop and buy more paper as my bags emptied of the previous craft.

So what was the result of 5 Hours of work, 1,000 tomes, 5 stacks of 200. I would be able to give each of my 20 raiders 50 tomes apiece.

Now think how much more time it would have been had I actually farmed the herbs myself instead of taking them from the AH.

For those saying it shouldn’t have taken that long, I did record and stream the whole thing on twitch while I was talking to another streamer about how silly I was finding the entire process.

How would I fix this:

Option 1. Mass Ink Crafting Spell. This could limit the amount of time it takes to create the ink but will not eliminate it entirely nor will it help with the amount of bag space needed for the profession. I would grade it as a “C”.

Option 2. Use of Pigments instead of Inks, similar to Legion. This would cut down drastic amounts of time for this profession it would take away the need for water from the vendor which cuts down needed inventory by half. I would grade it as a “B”

Neither of these options alone will fix the problems inscription has entirely when it comes to the need for inks but it would be a good start.

Someone mentioned an Ink trader, while I agree one of those would be most welcome as it was done in ever expansion prior to BFA it always felt like a band-aid to help people get past content materials. While the bigger reason people want it now is to have a purpose for the pigment we aren’t wanting to process into inks. Prior to 8.2 I had more Ultramarine than I could ever want without many dumps for it I began to vendor it. there are now a couple of useful crafts for it but nothing that “fixes” the overall surplus.

The sheer quantity of ultramarine pigment compared to crimson and viridescent is nuts. Did 140 mass milling (river bud) which is overall a small amount but wanted current data. 2272 ultramarine, 918 crimson, 376 viridescent. So 2.47 times as much ultramarine as crimson and 6 times as much ultramarine as viridescent.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the point of the ultramarine pigment was to just be filler to vendor most of the time.
The amount of processing time is generally insane. Letting us use pigment instead of ink would be nice, a super mill for herbs would be nice (let us mill full stacks). Processing time should be either minimal or could be made engaging to where the processing adds value, rather than just an afk or watch netflix endeavor.