Inscription worth leveling just for shoulder enchants?

[Gares]

Pretty much what the title says?

The shoulder enchants are pretty awesome compared to what you can get for them from normal means.

My only concern is how much would it cost to level inscription from 1-400?

[HPB]

I went back on a pair of Paladins and leveled Herbalism, Skinning and Mining before going into outlands. I can tell you that if you level herbalism, inscription is practially free. It's by far the cheapest non-gathering profession I've ever leveled. That said, it is also the one I use the least. Glyphs don't sell. It's handy to make scrolls for my enchanter though.

[Stabface]

There is some money to be made with enchanting scrolls, but to be honest its often cheaper and easier to buy a stack of vellums off the AH than it is to make them yourself.

[Hachoo]

and FWIW you can buy yourself honored with sons of hodir for that shoulder enchant for way way way way less than it would cost to power level inscription.

[HPB]

"and FWIW you can buy yourself honored with sons of hodir for that shoulder enchant for way way way way less than it would cost to power level inscription. "

As an example, compare the Exalted shoulder enchant from Sons of Hodir:
Greater Inscription of the Axe
Binds when picked up
Requires Level 80
Requires The Sons of Hodir - Exalted
Use: Permanently adds 40 attack power and 15 critical strike rating to shoulder armor. Does not stack with other enchantments for the selected equipment slot. Requires a level 60 or higher item.

Now here is the self-only Inscriptionist shoulder enchant:
Master's Inscription of the Axe
4 sec cast
Requires Miscellaneous, Cloth, Leather, Mail, Plate
Reagents:
Snowfall Ink
Permanently adds 104 attack power and 15 critical strike rating to shoulder armor.
Can only be applied to your own armor, and doing so will cause it to become soulbound.

Please don't say that you can get the Sons of Hordir enchant easier. It's also worth less. 140 AP > 40 AP. They're all that way. That's the perk for being an inscriptionist.

"There is some money to be made with enchanting scrolls, but to be honest its often cheaper and easier to buy a stack of vellums off the AH than it is to make them yourself. "

Blank Vellums were going for insane amounts on my server until recently. They've finally dropped down to 15-20g apiece (They used to go for 50+). It's still far cheaper to make them myself. Again, if you have herbalism and get the mats yourself while out questing, these are practically free to make.

"After that, I stopped because farming took too long, and buying the mats was absurd for the price that was asked. "

Any profession where you resort to buying mats off the AH to level is going to be expensive. Imagine the cost of Engineering if you bought all of your mats... If you farm them yourself there is very little cost involved in leveling up inscription. Since I was leveling herbalism anyhow, I just mailed all of the herbs to my inscriptionist.

No one is going to say Inscription is the best profession in the game. It's not essential to have an inscriptionist in your team or on your main character. But it's not bad to have on an alt (especially an alt you don't plan on grinding out Hodir rep with any time soon). If you're leveling enchanting on any of your characters, there is no reason to waste enchants - inscription can save hundreds of gold worth of mats while struggling to reach max enchanting. The return on your investment might not seem like much (glyphs don't sell well at all, you just use them to level up skill - a point I've complained about in the past), but it's such a cheap profession that it's practically impossible to lose money on it. The longer I've had the profession, the more I've come to appreciate some of its benefits.

[Khatovar]

Please don't say that you can get the Sons of Hordir enchant easier. It's also worth less. 140 AP > 40 AP. They're all that way. That's the perk for being an inscriptionist.

Alternatly, you can make up for that with other tradeskills. 2 extra sockets from BS, Ring enchants, JC gems, etc. They all offer a boon of their own, on top of being useful...except perhaps engineering. Inscription really has no use, at all. The only inscriptions you want are ones that 1. require you to discover them and 2. have already been discovered by most of the sever. As such, it's cheap to buy most inscriptions, cheaper have someone make them for you with your mats and impossible to sell the ones you make most of the time.

Also, unlike most everything else, inscriptions are a 1-time purchase. You go on your first raid and clean house getting like 5 new pieces of gear? You're buying new gems, enchants, spellthreads at 40g+ a pop. But inscriptions are not on that list. Sure, there's some people who will go out and buy new inscriptions all the time for swapping specs, but even those people are about to disappear with dual specs coming in. At the very best, you'll see like a 2 day spike in sales as people buy a second set of inscriptions for their second spec, but smart people bought them weeks ago and stuck them in the bank.

Blank Vellums were going for insane amounts on my server until recently. They've finally dropped down to 15-20g apiece

I should have played on your server. They sold for about 20-30 on my server for about a week. Now you can't give them away for more than 7g.

but it's such a cheap profession that it's practically impossible to lose money on it.

I really, really disagree there. I can make a lot more money shipping those herbs over to my alchemist or selling the raw herbs. Especially when they decided to make the move to being able to buy rare ink for the piddly cost of 10 generic ink. It bottomed out the sale price on cards, snowfall ink and pigment, which were the only items that ever actually sold. The second I mill those herbs down, it's like deleting money. Glyphs are vendor trash, cards aren't worth the Life you put into them, even if you do manage to get a Nobles card. Rare inks are inconsequential since you can buy them. Velliums are nice to have if you sell enchants on a regular basis, but it's more efficient for me to just buy up cheap ones on the AH.

Inscription is the only tradeskill I've kicked myself over having. I found more use out of engineering than I did in inscription. By far. I'm starting to wonder if inscription was put in to make engineers feel better.

[Bigfish]

From an economic standpoint, it depends on how much you value grinding Hodir Dailies and how much you're willing to drop on Relics of Ulduar. If you absolutely despise the Hodir Area and want to just get exalted, you're looking at about 4680 Gold, assuming the relics go for 3g each. That's assuming you buy your way through. If you grind dailies, that goes down and gives you some cash as well.

If you're more interested in A shoulder enchant than the best one, getting honored is relatively cheap, 720 gold. Now, is leveling Inscription going to cost 5k? Not likely, and yes, you do get your shoulder enchant out of it without having to worry about all that silly Hodir stuff, at which point it becomes a matter of whether you have a free profesion slot and whether you want to spend it on inscription.

Personally, if you want the really good shoulder enchant, I don't see much difference time and gold wise between the two.

[Catamer]

I hate inscriptions and it's my least used profession.
I don't think I ever sold an incription and eventually vendored all of them.
I can make scrolls for my enchanter but the last time I needed those I just bought them off the AH.

incriptions are overly complicated in that everything is two or 3 levels away ( you need an inscription that requires a particular ink which requires a particular pigment which comes from a particular plant of which you need 5x of them ).
with alchemy you need only need a particular plant (i.e. soooooo much less complicated )
I would rather have 4 hours on a flask myself via alchemy

I still have the inscriptions on one of my team but I haven't used it in months and I will never level up another one.
unless they come out with an inscription that works just like a alchemy potion or an enchanter directly then I won't bother with it again. ( scroll of intelect is ok, they need better ones )

[Bigfish]

The nature of player based glyphs is pretty silly: player created training. Now a couple sell ok, but most are just kind of silly. Would make a lot more sense to me if inscription produced glyphs that worked like mana oil and sharpening stones, or produced enchantments for slots not commonly available. SOMETHING consumable anyway.

[puppychow]

I made 10k gold the day patch 3.0 (or was it WOTLK I don't remember) came out by power leveling a inscriptor and selling inscriptions. Since then I've maybe listed 10 on the AH, there are really only about 20 glyphs that sell well and the other 200+ never sell. BTW my inscriptor now has EVERY SINGLE glyph in the game, he just finished getting his last major one last week - thats nearly 3-4 months of daily discovery (very expensive). My guy is a inscriptor/herbalist and I make a ton more money either selling the herbs raw or converting them to snowfall inks and selling those. I did make about 5k gold on nobles cards for a few days, but now its too risky given how low other cards sell for and your chances of getting nobles cards are low.

Still I don't regret having it on one of my guys, its nice when I decide to respec my pally/mage/DK to go off and crank out some new glyphs without paying anyone. If you have a herbalist its a joke to level, just spend a few hours a week doing herb laps and you will have all the mats.