Short answer: brute force. My scribe knows every glyph in the game, and I have an excel spreadsheet with every glyph listed. I track sales, and survey the AH about once a week to see what is in my “make” range. The web interface makes this pretty easy to get through in about 30 min.
As a rule, leveling glyphs are flooding the market and are worthless to make. You’ll flag them as no-gos on the spreadsheet soon enough. As noted upthread, the good money is in discovered glyphs, so do minor & northrend research every cooldown. Books of Glyph Mastery are a bitch to get now, but you really need these to be competitive.
Then there’s ink, which has been totally screwed up due to the ink trader change. Glyphs are made from:
Midnight (mageroyal, bruiseweed)
Lion’s (kingsblood, liferoot)
Jadefire (fadeleaf, Khadgar’s whisker)
Celestial (sungrass, blindweed)
Shimmering (golden sansam, dreamfoil, mountain silversage)
Ethereal (outlands)
the Sea (northrend)
and one from Blackfallow (Cat)
The bolded ones are your priority. A solid chunk of the most profitable glyphs will use these inks. The others are important, too, but much easier to find on the AH for a reasonable price. A stack of herbs will mill out to 10.8 pigments per stack on average. So, 2 stacks = roughly 11 ink.
The formula I use to determine glyph cost is (stack price)/10.8 x 6. Based on this formula, I get this cost table:
herb unit herb stack glyph cost
0.75 15.00 8.33
0.88 17.50 9.72
1.00 20.00 11.11
1.13 22.50 12.50
1.25 25.00 13.89
1.38 27.50 15.28
1.50 30.00 16.67
1.75 35.00 19.44
2.00 40.00 22.22
2.25 45.00 25.00
2.50 50.00 27.78
3.00 60.00 33.33
3.50 70.00 38.89
4.00 80.00 44.44
4.50 90.00 50.00
So, even at the nastiest herb prices, there is still profit to be made if you are selective. My no-brainer buy price is 1.5g per herb, or 30g per stack. I usually check the AH on my bank alt and buy up all of the herbs below my buy price (denying them to competitors) and ship them to my scribe so they are waiting in the mailbox when needed and not clogging up bags or bank space. In a pinch, cinderbloom and stormvine often sell for a low of 55g per stack, making them useful for ink trading for Ethereal Ink, which is by far the hardest to accumulate. Also, there’s the benefit of Inferno Ink that sells for ~90g on my server.
Then selling, where persistence pays. You need to make posting a habit, the undercutting is fierce. 3 or 4 times a day should get you some decent sales, and the remote AH is very useful for this (200 transactions per day for $3/mo.). Also, a lot of glyphs cycle in price, so set a floor that you will not post below, mine is 25g. Below that, I wait for it to come back up, there’s other ones to sell. My “make” price is 55g and above to allow for fluctuations, lower if the ink is common. Make at least 3 of each to have them ready for undercutting cycles. I usually undercut about 1% for glyphs under 100g, and more for over 100g. My arbitrary max glyph price is 150g, and I make quite a few sales at that price.
