I have a working computer and a wow subscription again (finally)! It's been so long since I first started
Learning Aid, and so much has changed in how learning new spells and abilities (henceforth "spells") works since then, that I think it's time to look at a major redesign effort.
Specifically, when I started Learning Aid, most spells had ranks, but now all spells scale. You had to remember to buy new spells from your trainer every level or two; now spells just appear in your spellbook. You had to visit your trainer, retrain, and shuffle your action bars around every time you wanted to swap specs; Dual Spec mostly eliminated that, and splitting specs from talents further reduced action bar churn. Every spec had access to a large set of core spells; many abilities that were once core are now spec-specific, and others have been merged or removed. Class pets, portals and teleports took up vast tracts of action bar space; now we have flyouts. Managing pets and mounts involved paging through a fixed, alphabetical list 6 at a time; the Pet Journal has an instant search.
I wrote Learning Aid because I'm an altoholic. Leveling with ranks, trainers, the old talent system, and single spec was a royal pain. The changes since then have made Learning Aid less vital, and I'm thrilled about that. I always felt that Learning Aid filled gaps in Blizzard's design that never should have been there in the first place.
Learning Aid evolved from an AddOn that I used all the time to an AddOn that I used once in a while. The reason I'm writing this post is to discuss these questions: Are there still ways that the base UI handles learning and managing spells poorly? What could a new version of Learning Aid do to improve on the base UI?
Are you ever frustrated by managing your spellbook? What doesn't it do that you want it to do? What would you like to be able to do in an easier and more convenient fashion?
A few concepts I've been kicking around:
- Auto-adding new spells to action bars like the base UI does, except the base UI stops when Bar 1 fills up. Possibly with automatic slotting of mode-specific spells onto mode-specific bars, like shapeshifts and Shadowform. Possibly adding newly learned shared spells to your dual spec's action bar when you swap back.
- LibDataBroker plugin.
- Integration with the level up fanfare.
- Integration with the Spellbook.
- Spellbook text search.
- Learning Aid flyout with spells learned this session on it that could be placed directly on an action bar. (This appeared somewhat difficult when I investigated it previously due to the way the flyout API is designed.)
Please let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Jamash