Pathfinder (Forever) 1.6.2 - An arrow that gets out of your way, routes that explain themselves, and a map you can read

1.6.1 gave Pathfinder a new look. 1.6.2 is about the things you look at while you play: the arrow, the route to a faraway quest, and the markers on the map. The arrow no longer takes your mouse clicks and points where the world map does. A route says what it is for, lists every step and can always be stopped - with a card on the world map. Everything that counts for an achievement is purple on the map and the minimap, so it cannot be taken for an ordinary quest. And the headings of the Plan window are quest yellow, so the parts of a page are easy to tell apart.

Your settings come along. The addon still only shows information: it never casts, equips, fights, loots, trades, moves you or presses keys. The four optional Time savers are still off until you switch them on.

At a glance

• The arrow and the box under it let your clicks through. Click, target and mouse over everything behind them. Hold Shift (or Ctrl) over the arrow to use it or to see its tooltip.
• The arrow points where the map does. Quests handed in, quests that end at a chest or a barrel, and quests with objectives all get a place, and the text says which kind of place it is.
• A route says what it is for. The tracker shows ROUTE 1/5 - To The Doomed Fleet - Wetlands - about 9 min with a Stop this route row; the arrow's tooltip lists every step; a route card on the world map lists the steps and where each one starts.
• Achievements are purple: a quest that counts for one, an unexplored area of an Explore achievement, a dungeon entrance. Quests in your log are light blue, quests you can take are grey (with a small D when they are for a dungeon), and a quest you can hand in has a yellow ? of its own.
• The map markers are on the minimap too.
• A quest that leads to another continent says so, and the tracker and the map tell the same story about where a quest is.
• The Plan window's section headings are quest yellow; a card that is switched off has a dimmer yellow.
• Tooltips and plates you can see through: the arrow's text box (50%), the arrow's tooltip and the minimap icon's tooltip (75%) and the route card (25%) each have a transparency slider.

The arrow

• Your clicks go through. The arrow and the text box under it take no mouse clicks, so nothing behind them is blocked. The game only tells an addon about the mouse over a frame that can take clicks, so while Shift or Ctrl is held Pathfinder lets the arrow have the mouse: Shift-drag moves it, Ctrl-click puts the world marker at the target, and Shift+right-click or Ctrl+right-click stops guiding - the route too, the target and the beam - and the arrow goes back to the nearest quest; a second time, with nothing left to stop, it hides the arrow (/apq arrow brings it back). With Display > Move the frames unlocked the arrow can be grabbed without a key. The chat explains the controls the first time the arrow shows.
• Shift-click no longer hands the target to Waypoint UI or TomTom - a second arrow nobody needs here. The tracker's Shift-click still does.
• The tooltip needs a key. Hold Shift (or Ctrl) over the arrow or the box under it. On a route it lists every step and where it starts (starts at Stormwind Harbor (Stormwind City 21.8, 56.9)), what the route is for and how long it takes. If you want it when you just point at the arrow: Display > Arrow > Tooltip without Shift or /apq arrow hover on (off by default, because it got in the way).
• The text box under the arrow is see-through - 50% to start with, and everything in it follows: the background, the distance, the name and the time (Display > Arrow > Text box or /apq arrow plate 0-100).
• The arrow's tooltip and the minimap icon's tooltip are see-through too - 75% to start with, the whole card with its text (Display > Arrow > Tooltip, Display > Minimap > Icon tooltip, or /apq tip arrow 0-100 and /apq tip icon 0-100). The minimap icon's tooltip is now shown beside the icon, never over it, so you can still see where to click.

It points where the world map does

The map knew where a quest is handed in because Pathfinder's own quest database has that place; the arrow only looked at the game's markers, so it could say the game does not show where this quest is and point at the middle of the zone while the map showed the right spot (found with Captain Sander's Hidden Treasure in Westfall). Now both use the same places, in this order: the game's marker, Questie's or Pathfinder's own objective marks, then the database. What the arrow does depends on the quest:

• A finished quest the game gives no place for: the arrow goes to the one who takes it in (Ready to turn in to Gryan Stoutmantle) and can pick the quest by itself.
• A quest that ends at an object (a chest, a barrel, a footlocker): the object is what you are looking for, so the arrow goes there (Where this quest ends: Broken Barrel) and can pick the quest by itself.
• A quest still in progress that ends at a person: the objective can be anywhere nearby and the game does not mark it, so the person is only a hint. The arrow points at that person when you pick the quest and says so (pointing at where you hand it in (Salma Saldean)), but it never takes the arrow by itself.
• Only the place where the quest starts is known: the same, with where it starts. Nothing known: the middle of the zone, said plainly.
• Checked for every quest in the database (about 5,300, in progress and finished, with no marker from the game): 4,702 have a place where they are handed in (207 of them an object) and 1,310 have the places of their objectives from Wowhead's data.
• Guide me (Find quests, quest chains, Here) says what the arrow points at, the distances in the tracker and on Here are measured to the same place, and the world marker (beam) follows the same rule: it is not put on a guess or a hint.

Getting the beam back

Shift or Ctrl+right-click on the arrow stops guiding and takes the beam away, and now says how to get it back: click a quest in the tracker (or Ctrl-click the arrow). A click on the quest you are already guided to puts the beam back when it is gone (you arrived, the target moved on); with a beam you can see, the click stops the guide as before. When you cannot see the beam, Pathfinder says why two seconds after the click, every time, and the arrow's tooltip says how the beam is doing.

Routes

• A route says what it is for, and you can always stop it. Clicking a quest far away makes Pathfinder plan the way (a boat, a flight, a walk). It used to show a bare NEXT - Fly to Stormwind that you could not get rid of. Now the tracker's block says ROUTE 1/5, To The Doomed Fleet - Wetlands, 5 steps - about 9 min left (an estimate) and has a Stop this route row. A click on the block, Shift or Ctrl+right-click on the arrow, Stop the guide in the minimap menu and the Stop button on the map card all end the route, and it stays ended.
• A route Pathfinder planned by itself is not taken up again after a reload or a relog (a route you made in the Route Planner still is, and a route saved by an older version is cleared once).
• Click another quest and the guide follows the click: one you can walk to ends the route and points at it, another far away gets a new route to it, and a click on the quest you are routed to stops the route. A route you made in the Route Planner waits while you guide to something else and goes on when you let go; a route whose quest is gone (handed in, abandoned) stops and says so.
• A route card on the world map. Bottom left of the map: Route to The Doomed Fleet - Wetlands, the time, and a row per step saying where it starts (place, zone and coordinates) with the step you are on lit. Click a step to open its map, click the heading to fold the card, Stop route ends the route. The numbered markers and the dashed line are drawn as before, now also when something else on the map fails.
• The card is see-through, 25% to start with, so you can see the map behind it and where to run - the box, its border and the text follow (Route > Options > ROUTE CARD ON THE MAP > Transparency, 0 = solid, 100 = hidden, or /apq route card 0-100).

The map and the minimap

• What you can take is told apart from what you have taken. A quest you can pick up is a medium grey dot with a dark grey !, with a small D beside the ! when it is for a dungeon. The dots for the quests in your log - their mobs, items and merchants, the turn-ins and the arrow's target - are light blue. A $ on a merchant and the numbers on a route are dark.
• Everything that counts for an achievement is purple - a purple dot on a darker purple ring: a quest to pick up that counts for one (with a yellow !), such a quest in your log, an unexplored area of an Explore achievement (it used to be light blue, the same as the quests in your log) and the arrow's target when it is one of them. A dungeon entrance (the dungeons you are missing for Spelunker) keeps its skull and has a purple ring.
• A quest you can hand in has a yellow ? of its own - bigger, with a thick dark outline and no dot - and it pulses when it is the arrow's target. While the quest is not finished yet its turn-in stays on the light blue dot as a dark ?, dimmed: it only shows where to go back.
• The same markers are on the minimap, placed by where they are in the world and the minimap's zoom: they turn with a rotating minimap, follow a square minimap and fade out at the edge. They take no mouse clicks, so pings work as usual. They follow Display > Map markers; switch them off with Display > Map markers > On the minimap or /apq minipins off.
• A quest that leads to another continent says so. ... and that note you found is picked up in Westfall and ends in The Barrens (the Horde version the other way round); the map was right to show nothing in Westfall, while the tracker and the arrow named Westfall. Now such a quest is listed under ELSEWHERE, in a group named after the zone it leads to, its Objective or Turn in line says The Barrens, and the arrow and the Guide me texts name the zone.
• The tracker and the map say the same. The game files a quest under one zone in the quest log and Pathfinder keeps that grouping, but a quest whose map place is in another zone now says so: The Doomed Fleet 0/1 > Wetlands under Duskwood. The quest's tooltip explains the difference.
• Achievement quests are purple in the tracker too: a purple pick-up row that says which achievement the quest counts for, an ACHIEVEMENT QUEST block when the arrow points at one, and the notice when you enter a zone now names the quests, who gives them and the achievement.

The Plan window, the tracker and the chat

• Every section heading in the Plan window is the quest yellow: the card titles on Display, Time savers and Here, the tiles on Here, the capital heads in lists and details (WHERE, REWARD, WHY, STEPS ...), the heads on the Route page, Gear's Equipped, the groups of the search results and the Live preview. A card that is switched off (the Info bar, a time saver that is off, a hidden tracker) has a dimmer yellow title, so you can see what is on at a glance. Names (a quest, a dungeon, an item), breadcrumbs and tabs keep their colour.
• The tracker's quest names have the colour of their level, and the title Quests and the zone line under it are gold.
• The whisper and guild box fills from the top: the first message sits at the top, next to the info bar, and the next ones come below it.

Commands

/apq route card 0-100 - the route card's transparency. /apq arrow plate 0-100 - the text box under the arrow. /apq tip arrow 0-100 and /apq tip icon 0-100 - the arrow's and the minimap icon's tooltip. /apq arrow hover on|off - the arrow's tooltip without a key. /apq minipins on|off - the markers on the minimap. /apq route probe now also says which route is followed, what the arrow is pinned to and what is on the world map.

Good to know

• If something in Pathfinder fails, the first errors of each part are printed in the chat (at most a dozen per session) instead of being swallowed, so a missing marker leaves a trace. /apq debug and /apq route probe print what Pathfinder saw - please include them in a bug report.
• The arrow's click-through, the tooltips that need a key and the markers on the minimap are new in this form. If something behaves differently in your client (a minimap addon, a square or rotating minimap, another UI scale), please tell me.
• The quest database still has no objective place for some quests (about 4,000); for those the arrow says plainly that it points at a hint, a start or the middle of the zone.
• The addon folder is still named AchievementPathfinder, so an update replaces the old folder and keeps your settings.