Scribe's Guide to Cataclysm Buyers

In a continuation of my new series started last week, in today's post I'm offering my suggestions for best Inscription items to craft for Cataclysm leveling toons. Inscription is going to be challenging since we have so many glyphs available and presumably more coming. I'm not going to tackle that sector here. We are very likely to see talent shifts and stat changes as part of Cataclysm, which will affect glyph popularity down the road.

It should still be reasonable to evaluate other items in terms of their usefulness to various classes. For now I'm just reviewing the off-hand items and card decks. This is a pretty short list, but hopefully valuable to scribes who'd like to start preparing for the next expansion.

As before, I've ranked these items based on it's value to each class within set level ranges (10-19, 20-29, etc). Then I've averaged each ranking across all the classes who would reasonably use the item to create an average score. The highest scoring items are at the top of the list:

Off-Hand Items
1.0 Mystic Tome (level 15): #1 off-hand for all relevant classes
1.1 Book of Stars (level 40): #1 off-hand for almost all relevant classes
1.7 Rituals of the New Moon (level 70)
2.7 Tome of Kings (level 30)
3.3 Twilight Tome (level 70)
3.3 Tome of the Dawn (level 20)
3.5 Fire Eater's Guide (level 40)
4.1 Stormbound Tome (level 50)
6.4 Royal Guide of Escape Routes (level 30)
7.7 Book of Clever Tricks (level 60)
8.6 Manual of Clouds (level 50)
9.2 Hellfire Tome (level 60): This one suffers from +resist weakening it's usefulness

The first number listed above is the average rank for each item. Most of these books are available in pairs, there are two types for each level. If you're looking to minimize your efforts, you could just craft the higher ranked book and ignore the arguably inferior ones.

The Darkmoon card decks for lowbies are a bit harder to evaluate. Each one grants a choice of items, and some don't appear to be itemized until created. Instead of trying to crunch all the various scenarios, I'm just giving them a gut reaction rating. If you want to see the items for yourself, you can check them at WoWWiki. The low-level decks are at the bottom of the page.

In my view, the Demons deck creates the most valuable items because it's the only deck that rewards weapons. Next I would probably vote for the Mages deck, followed by the Swords deck. The Swords are difficult to quantify since you receive random stats on the rewarded item. I'm not sure how many folks will want to play Russian Roulette with gear at level 20. The lowest priority deck for me would be Rogues. It's the only one that gives uncommon quality items, instead of rare items like the higher decks. Sadly it also suffers from the Russian Roulette situation. Since it only gives out level 10 items, I don't see it being a popular product.

For those of you who decide to venture into the Deck business, I would suggest creating decks yourself instead of selling individual cards. Generally buyers will pay more for a completed deck then they will for individual parts. Items from the Demons and Mages decks are some of the best itemized gear available, come Cataclysm they should have strong sales value.