Professions can often be overlooked when discussing addons.  Many people focus on getting their raiding mods to function and look just right, but rarely think about the many ways you can use addons to ease and improve the efficiency of your day-to-day crafting!

Tradeskill Window Replacement Addons

The following four addons act as a total replacement for your profession windows, everything from First Aid to Enchanting.  They’ve all got strengths and weaknesses and slightly different features, so I’ve outlined what I found most useful and most disenchanting (*giggle*) about each of them.

Some popular features I’ve looked closely at are:

• Cross-character Reagent tracking: The ability to include items from your bank or alternative characters when considering what recipes you can create.  If I have the eternals I need on another character, I want it to tell me that I can, in fact, make that recipe.
• Queue System: The built-in queue in World of Warcraft allows you to queue up multiple items of the same recipe.  However, it’s even more useful if you can create a queue with multiple items of multiple recipes.
• Shopping List: After adding things to a queue, it would be nice for it to tell me which items I need to purchase from vendors, Auction House or grab from other characters in a neat little list.

Advanced Tradeskill Window

ATSW is probably the most popular of all the Tradeskill Window replacement addons, and with good reason.  When you first load this addon and open up one of your tradeskills, you’ll see how much easier it is to view all your recipes for each profession.  The shopping list is very comprehensive and lets you know which characters or banks you need to grab materials from.

Pros:

• Custom sorting: You can manually rearrange your recipes in the order you like.
• Clear view: Putting the recipe details in the right half of the window makes it easier to browse.
• Shopping list: The shopping list is automatically created, and tells you which items you need to buy from vendors, pull from banks/alts or purchase from the AH.  Also, automatically attaches to the AH window.
• Lightweight: Used the least amount of memory of all the replacement addons I tested.

Cons:

• No “Craftable only”: There’s no option to display only items you can create.
• No favourites: While you can sort the list manually, there’s no easy “Mark as favourite” option.

Skillet

Skillet has a very similar look and feel to ATSW (which it was originally based on), but with a few different features.  It allows for custom user comments on individual mats and items, which is unique to this addon out of the ones listed here.  While it doesn’t break created reagents down, you can easily click through to see it’s recipe.  This addon is out of date however, so use with caution.

Pros:

• Auto-queue: Automatically queues pre-crafted items (Bronze Setting, for example)
• Level requirements: An option to display the level requirements/item quality of the craftable item beside the recipe name.
• Custom notes: You can add personal notes on all craftable items and materials.
• Clear view: The number of items you can create is right-aligned, making it easier to see on the list.

Cons:

• Dead: No longer being actively developed or supported.
• Minimal development: Some support has been reestablished (within the last few days), but the release version on Curse and WoW Interface has not been updated in 6 months (as of writing).  You can see updates at the WoW Ace project page.
• No favourites: Can’t create a list of favourites or a custom order.

Cauldron

I didn’t like the look of Cauldron out of the box, but changing a few options made it a bit more readable.  I really like that it breaks things down all the way to raw mats, although sometimes it goes a bit too far, such as telling me how many Borean Leather Scraps I need instead of Borean Leather or Heavy Borean Leather.  I wish there was a way to customize that feature.

Pros:

• Favourites list: Easily add items to a “favourites” list for quick viewing.
• Raw mats: It will break down the list of items you need to very basic mats, like Ore, Leatherscraps, etc.
• “Have mats”: Allows you to view only items you can currently make.

Cons:

• Shopping list: While there is one, it’s difficult to find and you have to add things to it manually.
• Heavy: This addon used the most memory of all the replacements I tested.

Producer

I was surprised when I opened Producer for the first time, since it’s so differently organized than all of the other addons I’ve used.  The flow of the drop down menus is quite easy to follow, and things are easily organized in different ways.  Unfortunately the biggest problem I had with this one was that if you wanted to leave the window open while you looked at something else, you’d have to go all the way back through the menus again because they close when you move your mouse away.

Pros:

• New Look/feel: Drop-down lists give a whole new feel to the tradeskill window, and it’s neat to have a different flow to the menu.
• Alts: You can easily look through your other professions or even the professions of your alts.
• Linkable: Provides easily accessed links for both the craftable item and the recipe itself.

Cons:

• New Look/feel: Drop-down lists give a whole new feel to the tradeskill window, which can be problematic, because the windows are not always easily navigated or kept open.
• Queue: There isn’t one.
• Misleading colour scheme: Colour of recipes not actually based on skill level, just makes it pretty.

Additional Tradeskill Addons

While they won’t completely replace your tradeskill window, these handy addons will add additional useful functionality to help you make your stuff!

TradeSkillInfo

The regular TradeSkillInfo addon will add information to tooltips about which professions can use a material, how many recipes your characters can use it for, and which professions can craft items.  But there is also a TradeSkilInfo UI, which can be used to search through a database of all profession recipes, indicating where they can be bought or found, and which characters can learn them!

AckisRecipeList

This will scan your tradeskill and let you know which recipes you are missing, as well as where you can find them.  Great for helping pick up [Chef de Cuisine]! It has built in integration into ATSW, Skillet and Cauldron.  One thing to note, it is a bit of a resource hog, so you may just want to run in once in a while to check the list out if you’re concerned about memory.

Panda

This is an extensive crafting/decrafting addon.  It’s not organized similarly to what you’re used to, so it takes a bit of practice… but you’ll see it’s very clever once you figure it out.  It’ll indicate what you can get from milling/prospecting/disenchanting, and let you do so with just a click.  It also helps sort and find gems and glyphs and enchants in a more logical order.

LilSparkysWorkshop

In combination with Auction scanner addons, LilSparkys will calculate the cost of materials as well as the value of the crafted item so you can make a more informed decision on what you’ll get the biggest value from.