Gremlin's Craft vs Buy Advisor

Gremlin's Craft vs Buy Advisor (GCBA) helps you decide whether to craft an item or buy it from the Auction House in World of Warcraft Retail. Choose a recipe and quantity to see a cost comparison, a crafting plan, and a shopping list for the materials you still need.

GCBA accounts for materials you already own while showing their estimated value separately from the additional gold needed to finish the craft. You can also preserve your owned materials and calculate the cost of acquiring the required supplies.

• Craft versus buy: Compare the total crafting cost with the cost of purchasing the finished item, using available pricing data.

• Recipe browser: Browse and search your character's learned recipes, including supported intermediate crafts needed to make the final item.

• Configured recipe analysis: Analyze selected reagent qualities, required and optional reagents, and the resulting item configuration through Blizzard's profession window.

• Preview before gathering: Use GCBA's analysis selectors to choose supported reagent qualities, Sparks, and Heraldry variants even when you do not own enough to craft. These choices apply to analysis only.

• Earned materials tracked separately: See requirements for gameplay-earned materials, such as Sparks and Heraldry, separately from the gold comparison.

• Crafting cost analysis: Review material costs and shopping requirements for Bind-on-Pickup recipes whose finished items cannot be purchased on the Auction House.

• Shopping lists: See missing materials and quantities, with Auctionator export for Auction House purchases.

• Four visual styles: Choose Gremlin Classic, Midnight, Alliance, or Horde.

GCBA integrates with TradeSkillMaster for pricing and inventory data and Auctionator for price fallback and shopping-list export. Both integrations are optional, but pricing and comparison features are limited without available data. GCBA can also check live finished-item listings when you analyze at an open Auction House. Historical estimates are identified when used; an estimate does not guarantee that an item is currently available to buy.

To get started:

1. Open GCBA with its minimap button or type /GCBA.

2. Choose a profession and recipe.

3. If prompted, configure the recipe in Blizzard's profession window, review the GCBA preview, and send the configuration back to GCBA.

4. Set your target quantity and owned-material preference, then analyze the recipe.

5. Review the recommendation, crafting plan, and shopping list.

For bug reports, please include your GCBA version, profession, recipe name, and the steps that caused the problem. Screenshots and the full text of any Lua error are helpful.