How difficult will it be to change Legion talents with Inscription?

We’ve previously covered the new restrictions coming to talent changes in Legion. In brief: Talent changes are free in rest areas, but would require an Inscription-made item to change talents elsewhere. In the latest beta build, the Tome of the Tranquil Mind appeared, giving us an indication of just how much this item will cost. And the Tome only affects the player who uses it — groups, whether they be 5-mans or raids, will need the much more expensive Codex of the Tranquil Mind which appeared in last week’s beta build.

The recipe for this Tome requires 10 Roseate Pigments and 1 Sallow Pigment along with a pile of Light Parchments which are so cheap they aren’t worth thinking about. The Codex, however, currently requires 100 Roseate Pigments and 10 Sallow Pigments — a tenfold increase in material costs. Given Legion is still in beta, it’s too early to try to predict the final cost of either the Tome or the Codex. Droprates might not be final, material costs might not be final, and there’s no way to simulate a live-realm economy on the PTR. If we assume you’ll get the same number of pigments per herb as you do in Warlords of Draenor (which is not guaranteed), a full stack of 200 herbs will provide less than the 100 pigments required for a Codex.

Milling a full stack of herbs typically gives somewhere between 80 and 90 pigments. If we’re assuming Roseate Pigments drop from herbs as often as Cerulean Pigments, each Codex would require slightly over a stack of herbs — and we need to throw Sallow Pigments into the mix, which doesn’t have a Warlords of Draenor equivalent. Despite the Sallow Pigment tooltip describing it as common, it’s currently quite rare. If you’re on a strong of bad luck, you might only receive two or three of them from a full stack of herbs. Each Codex of the Tranquil Mind might require multiple stacks of herbs to create.

Compounding the issue of any attempt to estimate a price is the nature of Herbalism in Warlords. Every player in the game has an herb garden, which caused the herb market to bottom out entirely in the current expansion. To verify how many pigments I received from a stack of herbs in Warlords, I bought a few stacks of Talador Orchids for 50g each — a pittance considering the rate of gold acquisition in the current expansion. Without the herb garden in play, Legion might shake out completely differently. Herbs could end up cheap again — or they could be ludicrously expensive. We won’t know until the expansion is live with a live realm economy.

What we do know — assuming none of this changes dramatically before launch — is the production cost of the Codex is, surprisingly, not too far off from the production cost of the cosmetic glyphs scribes can still make in Legion. The Glyph of the Feral Chameleon, for example, requires 60 Roseate Pigments and 4 Sallow Pigments. If the Codex’s cost is meant to be a collaborative group effort, then basic glyphs will be much more difficult to make in Legion than they have been in expansions past. That’s quite the leap from two inks and a piece of paper.