Midnight Helper 3.4.0

Midnight Helper is written and maintained by one person. That is the honest reason updates arrive in bursts rather than on a schedule.

Two things before the list

Other languages follow within a few days. Everything new here is English in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian for now. Nothing is broken — untranslated text falls back to English rather than showing you a blank. It is roughly thirty thousand characters per language and it is being worked on. If you would like to help with your own language, or just watch it happen, the Discord is the place: https://discord.gg/kBHaHcsASQ

And do come and say hello anyway. Every correction in this release started with someone noticing that the addon told them something that was not true. That is worth more than any feature list, and Discord is where it reaches me fastest.

Professions 101 is an actual course now

3.3.0 promised a larger professions update. This is it.

Six chapters are new or rewritten: what quality is and why the same recipe gives two players different results; what those six numbers on your screen actually mean — Multicraft, Resourcefulness, Ingenuity, Finesse, Perception and Deftness; Concentration and when it is worth spending; work orders; patron orders, which are the biggest weekly source of Knowledge and the one most people never find; and making gold without fooling yourself.

That last one is split in two on purpose. Half of the subject does not age — how the two markets differ, why a lock on supply is where the margin is. The other half expires within weeks, so it carries its own measurement date and says out loud that it is a snapshot.

Fourteen chapters is a lot of scrolling

So the course has a contents list, and it can open in a window of its own beside the game.

The contents list stays off until you ask for it, because the long scroll is what everyone has had until now. The window remembers where you put it and how big you made it, and it is a reader you can keep open while you play — which is the point, since half these chapters end by telling you to go and press something.

Every profession route was wrong

All eleven of them. Ten are corrected in this release, checked against Blizzard's own game data.

• Enchanting was backwards in a way that cost you real points: disenchanting reads raw Skill and ignores every crafting stat, so the first fifty points we recommended did nothing for it.
• Inscription's order was not merely slow but impossible to follow — one step opened at skill 50 and the next at 60, in the wrong order.
• Blacksmithing lost a step we added in July with a source that did not actually support it.
• Alchemy, Herbalism, Tailoring, Mining, Skinning, Jewelcrafting and Leatherworking all changed too. Where a profession genuinely splits between playing for gold and gearing yourself, you now get both routes instead of a coin flip.

Advice you could not act on

We were telling people to spend Knowledge Points they could not spend. If no specialization can be unlocked yet, the line now says so and tells you to raise the skill first.

Finding that took a measurement rather than a guess, and it is worth knowing why: the obvious-looking function for it was wrong in both directions, and the lock is invisible on the node itself — the game reports it as perfectly purchasable.

Corrected

The work orders chapter said a crafter can take four public orders per day. You hold four and one comes back each day: about seven a week, not twenty-eight.

It also described a single order table, when there are two counters. You order at the table in the Bazaar, and you craft for others at your own profession's workbench. Stand anywhere else and there is no button and no list, which is the most common mistake with that whole system — and our own chapter was causing it.

The list under the advice line stopped calling itself "your open choices". Those are individual nodes inside your trees, not alternatives to the advice above them, and we never checked whether you can buy them yet. It now also says four of how many, instead of quietly showing four.

Getting around

A button, and /mh fp, that point the arrow at the nearest flight master from wherever you are standing, in any zone.

Silvermoon's two flight masters are on the city guide as well. The guide listed portals, Timeways and even Mythic+ teleports, and never the one thing you use most — which is a fair summary of the difference between knowing something and letting someone find it.