Calg's Profession Planner

Levelling a crafting profession by a written guide costs more than it needs to. The guide picked its route once, in the abstract, and it has never seen your server's auction house.

This works out the cheapest way from the skill you have to the skill you want, using your own prices, and tells you exactly what to buy.

Why it beats a guide

Three reasons, and the last two are the ones that surprise people.

It knows what things cost where you play. Mat prices differ wildly between servers and between weeks. A route that was cheapest when the guide was written may not be cheapest now.

It credits what you make on the way. Craft blasting powder for skill-ups, then spend that powder on grenades, and the powder was never a wasted cost — you would have bought it anyway. A guide that adds up "mats for step 1" plus "mats for step 2" double-counts it, which is why guides steer you towards odd one-off crafts when spamming explosives is cheaper.

It makes the mats it can make. Rough blasting powder, copper bolts and copper tubes are engineering recipes, not commodities, and a guide that says "buy 160 powder" has not asked whether 160 are there to buy. They generally are not: a market price is roughly what the cheapest few went for, and a plan wanting 160 is buying the depth of the market. So anything the profession can make, it makes — that becomes a step in the route, the shopping list asks for the rough stone instead, and the batch is placed early enough to earn you skill on the way past. If your auction house really does carry the volume, Buy craftable mats from the auction house in settings takes whichever is cheaper.

Using it

/pp opens the window. Pick a profession, check the skill range, read the route.

• From is read off your character, and follows your racial bonus — a gnome's engineering caps at 315, the same character's cooking at 300. Editable, so you can plan an alt or a profession you have not taken.
• To is where you want to get to.
• Route is the plan: which skill range, how many to craft, what it costs. The colour of the skill range is the difficulty band it starts in — orange is a guaranteed skill-up, and the chance then falls away to nothing as the recipe approaches grey, which is why the plan keeps moving on. A row marked craft is one you are making rather than buying, and it shows a single skill (at 60) instead of a range because it is there to supply a later step. It sits as early as it can while still being worth skill-ups, so a craft row in orange or yellow will level you on the way past.
• Shopping is the same plan as a buy list, netted out twice: the mats the plan makes for itself are gone, and so is whatever is already in your bags. A row you hold some of shows what is left, and a row you have covered drops off the list. It is ordered the way the plan uses them — each row shows the skill it is first wanted at — so the top of the list is what to buy first. Vendor mats are marked, so you do not go to the auction house for flux. The footer still quotes the whole route, so once you have started buying, the two figures legitimately disagree.
• Send to Auctionator pushes the list into Auctionator as a shopping list named for the profession. Sending again replaces it, so one list per profession keeps up with you as you buy.
• Trainer / All / Guide decides which recipes it may use. The first two are what they sound like. Guide is the interesting one: it loads the published levelling route from wow-professions.com — their steps, their quantities — and prices it against your auction house. Hover Net spend and it tells you what that route costs, what planning it properly costs, and the difference, along with the craft counts side by side.

The window sizes itself to the plan, so a short route gets a short panel, and the gear in the title bar holds the settings. Hovering a row gives you the item's own tooltip and nothing else — the plan says what it has to say on the row itself, rather than in a panel that follows the cursor down the list.

Click a step to see its reagents, with the quantity that step needs and what it costs.

Every step carries one button, and it answers "what can I do about this row?" It is bright when you can act on it and dim when you cannot:

• The profession's own tool — a flask for alchemy, a hammer for blacksmithing, a wrench for engineering and so on — means you know the recipe. Bright when your bags cover at least one; clicking crafts as many as they cover, up to what the step needs. (Enchanting is one per click: its crafting API takes no repeat count.)
• A book means the pattern is in your bags and you have not read it yet. Bright once your skill is high enough to read it; clicking learns it, and the button turns into the tool.
• A trainer means this recipe is taught rather than sold. Bright once you meet the skill for it. It is a reminder, not a button — you cannot click your way to a trainer.
• No button at all means the recipe comes from a pattern you are not carrying. The recipe tag on the row and the pattern on the shopping list already say where to get it.

The recipe name is coloured when your bags already hold the mats for one — green if you know it, orange if you still have to learn it — and it shows how many you can make, the way the profession window does (Rough Dynamite [12]). Uncoloured means you are short of something. A levelling route is made of recipes you have not learned yet, so marking every unlearned one would light up the whole panel and tell you nothing — held to the steps your bags are ready for, the colour is the step you are actually on.

Knowing what you have learned takes one look, and it takes it itself. There is no API that answers it — an individual recipe is not a spellbook spell — so it is read from the two places the client will say: your profession window and your trainer. The first time you open the planner or pick a profession, it opens that profession, reads it and closes it again in the same instant, before anything is drawn. You should see nothing. It cannot do this at login: opening a profession is a spell cast and the client only allows one in answer to a click, which is why it waits for yours.

If that never happens — you were in combat, or the client refused — /pp scan does it on demand, and simply opening the profession yourself works just as well. Readings only ever add, so a filtered or part-collapsed list can be short but never wrong.

Bags only: the bank and the mail do not count, and neither does a reagent an earlier step would have made for you. Click a step to open its reagents and see which one you are short of.

Crafting needs the profession window to have been opened once in the session — the game only lets an addon craft from a list it has loaded — so the first click opens it and the next one crafts.

Right-click a step to exclude that recipe and re-plan without it. Worth knowing about because a recipe can be the cheapest on mats and still a bad idea — the pattern may cost more than the detour saves, or drop somewhere you have no intention of going. Steps that need a bought pattern are marked recipe, and its price is counted in the total.

Right-click a shopping row when the auction house cannot supply it. This is the thing no scan can tell you: the price is what the market asked, and whether there are sixty of them at that price you only find out by going. One mark, and the planner works out what it means — a reagent it can make becomes a craft step and the list asks for that reagent's own mats instead; a pattern that is not listed takes its recipe out of the route; a base mat nothing can make takes every recipe that needed it, because a plan built on something you cannot obtain is not a plan.

Everything you have rejected lives behind the prohibition sign in the title bar, as two lists: Crafts for the recipes you excluded and Materials for what the auction house could not supply. Each row has a Restore button to put it back. Settings clears each list in one go, and the two are deliberately separate: a recipe you did not want stays unwanted, while "the auction house did not have this" is true of one evening and routinely wrong by the weekend, so clearing the second should not cost you the first.

/pp plan eng 225 skips the clicking.

Prices

With Auctionator installed, prices come from its scan history, and the addon distinguishes an auction it actually observed from one it interpolated.

Without it you still get a working planner, but a generic one: vendor prices are exact and everything else is an estimate off the item's vendor value. Treat the route as sound and the gold figure as indicative. The footer says which situation you are in.

TradeSkillMaster is not used, even if you have it — its own crafting module already does cost maths.

What the numbers mean

Three figures along the footer, each hoverable for the detail:

• Outlay — what leaves your pocket. Mats and any patterns, already net of everything the plan makes for itself.
• Salvage — the vendor value of what you are left holding. A vendor always pays it, so it is a floor rather than a hope.
• Net spend — outlay less salvage. What levelling the profession actually costs you, and the figure the route is chosen to minimise.

Every part of that is money you can realise. The auction value of the leftovers is deliberately not one of the three — it lives in the Salvage hover, next to the vendor figure it is the optimistic version of. It is usually the largest number available and the least bankable: assuming 60 rough blasting powder clears at market is how a planner ends up quoting 800g for a 2,400g job. It is worth knowing, because 200 sapper charges really do have value to raiders, but it is a ceiling rather than a forecast and it never influences the route.

The honest bit

Some of this data is inferred, and the addon says so rather than hiding it.

Skill-up breakpoints and reagent lists come from the game client's own data, so they are exact. The skill at which a recipe becomes available is not in there for trainer-taught recipes — that number lives on the server and only appears when a trainer window is open. Those were originally estimated; they are now all sourced, from recipe items, from live trainer readings, and from Wowhead's Era pages for the remainder.

Recipes that exist in the client's data but cannot actually be obtained on Era are excluded, so the planner will not route you through Season of Discovery content or through the never-implemented oddities like Cowardly Flight Potion.

The skill-up chance is a real formula, not a fudge. It is 100% while a recipe is orange, then falls away linearly to nothing at grey:

chance = (grey - your skill) / (grey - yellow)

Which means green is not a flat 25% — two green recipes can sit at 48% and 5%, and that difference is exactly why the plan moves on when it does. Most tools quote the 75%/25% averages instead, which is what makes them recommend grinding one recipe far longer than you should.

/pp audit keeps the rest honest. Run it:

• at a trainer — reads the exact skill requirement for everything it teaches, including recipes you already know, and remembers them account-wide. One visit per profession and that profession's thresholds are data instead of estimates.
• with a profession window open — checks the shipped reagent lists against the client's. If you have the profession maxed this verifies hundreds of recipes in one pass.

/pp audit notes shows what it has recorded.

Known limits

• Making your own mats stops at the profession boundary. An engineering plan will make its own powder and bolts, but not its own bolts of linen cloth even if you have Tailoring, and nothing smelts its own bars — smelting is Mining, which the planner does not carry. It also will not buy a schematic in order to make a reagent, because what that schematic costs per unit depends on how many you make.
• A batch is placed for skill, but the route around it was not chosen knowing that. Forty-two copper bolts made at skill 30 are worth twenty-seven points, and the plan does count them: the step they interrupt is cut in two and its second half starts from where the bolts left you. What it does not do is go back and re-choose that step in the light of them, so the route is the cheapest one for the points it thought it had to buy, not necessarily for the points left over.
• Enchanting needs something to enchant. Era has no vellums, so an enchanting route assumes you have gear to put the enchant on. The mats are right; the target items are your problem.
• "Trainer only" is cautious until you have audited. Whether a trainer teaches a given recipe is server-side, so before an audit the filter excludes anything that might need a bought pattern. After a trainer visit it is exact for that profession.
• Auto-detecting your current skill needs an English client. Era has no API that reports a profession by id, so it matches on name. Elsewhere, type the number.
• +skill gear is ignored. A gnome's engineering racial is fine — the client folds it into your rank and raises your cap, so it counts as the real skill it is. But a bonus from an item, like goggles or a gloves enchant, is left out, so a plan never depends on you wearing anything. You may be offered a recipe a few points later than you could actually take it.
• Effort is not weighed. The route minimises gold, so when a reagent is nearly free it will happily ask for hundreds of crafts. The Outlay hover reports the total crafts and mat stacks so you can see what you are agreeing to.

Commands

Font

The panels are drawn in Cuprum by Jovanny Lemonad, bundled with the addon and used for every label in it, so the layout looks the same on your machine as it does on mine. Nothing outside the addon is touched. Licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — the full text ships in Media/Fonts/OFL.txt.

Credits

Route data in the Guide comparison mode is from wow-professions.com — those are their editorial choices, reproduced so the route can be costed against your own auction house. Recipe, reagent and breakpoint data comes from the game client's own tables. Prices come from Auctionator when you have it installed.