about: I wrote this mod for 1 function; it finds the cheapest recipe to skill up for a particular tradeskill at some skill point. This makes use of auctioneer advanced and HEAVILY uses tradeskillinfo. (As you can see I pretty much ripped out the entire ui, I’m horrible at ui programming) This also makes use of my skillup rate formula which I approximated after gathering some data, rate = (current skill-grey) / (yellow-grey)

Notice, Tradeskill Info is available at http://www.wowace.com/addons/tradeskill-info/ (its working with version R: v2.1.0 in case you have issues)

Why write/use this?
My primary purpose was to use up to date pricing information from auctioneer to tell you what the cheapest per skillup item you can make is. Why not use guides such as that forum post in the main wow forums? Because it isn’t always up to date. A great example of this is enchanting 291-300. They say to make enchant cloak superior defense, using 8 illusion dusts. My mod says make enchant shield superior stamina for 10 dream dust. On my server illusion dust is 3 gold 50 silver a piece, making this 28 gold a combine. The dream dust however is only 90 silver a piece making it 9 gold a combine. Even at 300 the skillup rate is approximated to be 62.5%, it would take 30% or less to make it more expensive to do the shield enchant, saving you a rather large portion of money.

This mod will occasionally recommend you make some obscure belt using a rare pelt or something instead of standard leather…the reason is auctioneer saw 2 of those pelts for very cheap and thousands of normal leather at a relatively high price. It is technically cheaper to craft. Why not just use the common leather? Well let’s throw out a kind of garbage situation…. You have 10000 rugged hide, they go for 1000 gold a piece, there’s plenty of frost saber hides for sale, for 1 copper a piece… it doesn’t matter if you could already skill up as far as you wanted, you would technically make more money selling the rugged leather and buying the frost saber hides.

I wrote the skillup version to assume you achieve no profit(beyond selling to merchant), lets face it, no one is going to buy your 40 rough bronze leggings even if they do somehow sell a few pieces for double what it costs to make.

How to use:
/tsa shows options
/tsa menu opens the ui
Before you start, make sure you have at least one auction addon scan and most components/items made are known in the local cache. It WILL assume something not in cache is too expensive to make
First select your trade skill (I tried to have it default to your highest non 450 skill)
Then type your point ranges (doesn’t affect gather time, just display length) and check if you only want to use known recipes
Click gather data
Click a plus sign on an item
Click the skill point of interest (ie 134)
On the right side will pop up details showing components, and alternatives for that skill
Clicking a component will “ban” it, so if you don’t want to farm strangle kelp or its way too expensive, then click that
Clicking an alternative or the item itself will ban that recipe (the current recipe is always the top one)
In both ban attempts a confirmation box will pop up, if you want it to take effect you have to click get data again.
Mouseing over an alternative pops up the item tool tip…. Names were just too long to display a list and all that pricing information

Options are stored in the standard add-on interface option list. Here you can reset ignored recipes, components, set your pessimism factor, your fudge factor, and whether or not to dig subcomponents (downright required for engineering)

The little blowhorn/speaker icon pulls up a window to report your results to guild say or whisper, its limited to around 14 lines so you may have to report in batches… this part is hardcoded so you need to do multiple scans for multiple ranges if you must absolutely give the entire path to someone

The number fields are as follows:
Left pane(for the ranged list) has skill level range, average price per skill up, total price for the skill level range, and expected combine count
Left pane(for each individual skill) has the skill, the cost per skill up for that skill point, the skill up rate (1=100%) and the expected combines to get a skill up
Right pane has the item id, the skill up rate, the cost/combine, the cost/skill up, and how much more it costs you to make that alternative compared to the cheapest option.

Features:
-coroutine slightly slows down the gather data function to keep your wow from lagging too horribly or getting disconnected
-Pessimism factors for yellow and green recipes if you don’t trust either your luck or my formula.
-Drills down through subcombines to figure what is cheaper, buying the component outright or having it crafted.
-fudge factor to keep using the same recipe a little longer (very useful for JC) this is to keep 2 recipes to chase each other in almost the same price back and forth (8 vs. 8.01 then 8.03 vs. 8.02 then 8.04 vs. 8.05 over and over) to keep the changing back and forth between recipes to a minimal
-ignores recipes with cool downs, such as transmutes unless it’s the only option available
-is aware of multi skillup recipes for orange items.

Known issues:
-number values in the options don’t show, they’re there just don’t display
-the scroll bar on the left doesn’t play nice with the bottom of the bar.
-the interface is still ugly, especially the number legend. If anyone wants to fix anything feel free to post code suggestions
-auction addons order used are hardcoded but I built it in a way to use “current scan lowest buyout” ones first
-report feature does not allow for chat channels or raid, temporarily disabled to keep spam lower
-last line of results might be skipped if there’s very few lines to display, expand all lines to view, reporting results still works.
-does not take into account the guild perk working overtime which DRASTICLY improves green skillup rates.