Tradeskill Master: the Intro

I'm usually quite pleased by the WoW Insider's articles on addons. They tend to be informative and useful when I want to learn how to use a new one, but I was quite frustrated with a recent article on TradeSkill Master. I read and re-read the post but I just could not make the modules work the way I wanted them to, or the way that my husband who has much less tolerance for fiddly addons wanted them to. I ditched the article, went to google, the official TSM forums, youtube, and finally spent some time playing around on my own.

I can now help you get your feet wet with TradeSkill Master, if you would like. First of all if you do your own googling you may hear lots of talk about TradeSkill Master 2. It's still just TradeSkill Master at curse.com though. It is a 2.x file, but the name hasn't actually changed. Also, it's more convenient to refer to it as TSM, so that's what I'll be doing from here on out. By the way I think this is an extremely unattractive addon, but it's not being installed for its looks. It will take a few clicks to get set up, but I promise it isn't too bad for our purposes today.

All we are going to do is use TSM to see which items our profession can make that are profitable, and then if you're feeling adventurous we'll also use it to craft our items. (Warning: lots of screencaps)

If you want to know which items your profession can make that are profitable, without resorting to charts or slips of paper then this addon can help you. Go to the TradeSkill Master page on Curse. You'll need to download and install: TradeSkillMaster (main), TSM_AuctionDB, and TSM_Crafting. The main one is the backbone of the addon, the auction DB stores the information you glean from scanning the auction house, and the crafting module handles your crafting. There are several other modules that can let you do lots of cool stuff, but if you want it as easy as it gets with TSM, then these three are all you need.

Once you have those three installed you are good to go. Log in on your crafting character and open your profession. It may look like this the first time.

 Don't worry, you can always click the TSM in the top left and return it back to it's usual Blizzard profession look.













 It may also automatically pop up this window. You want to click Yes, let it do it's job.

Open the main TSM module. Do this by typing /tsm or by clicking the mini-map button. On the top left you'll see blue crystals, clicking them will take you to your Groups panel. Once Groups is open click on the little plus signs and expand them Groups->Professions->Alchemy (in my case)->Crafts & Materials. If you click on Crafts and then on Items you'll see the right hand side populated with items that you can create with your profession.

If the groups didn't populate, or the window didn't automatically pop up open your profession and click on TSM Groups and at the bottom left there is Create Profession Groups. Click that and create the groups. When you've verified that your crafts are there, you can close TSM.

Now go to the auctioneer of your choice and interact with them to open up the auction panel. On the bottom right is a new tab for AuctionDB. Click on this and the click "Run GetAll Scan". In only a few seconds you'll have all the information from the auction house needed for your crafting. The addon recommends doing a /reload to reload your UI after doing this scan. So if things seem sluggish, please do that.

Close the auction house and open up TSM once more. This time click on the spring/washer/screw tab for Crafting. In the middle is where you can set the Professions Filter to your active profession. You can click on any header to change how your list is organized, you can see that I set the highest profit to the top.

~~~~~~~~

That right there is really where my husband would be happy with this addon. He now knows what items he can craft are worth the most. But wait there's more! Just to the left of your profession filter you can toggle it to only show what you have mats for. If you just want to unload what you have without buying more mats, click this and see what you can make. But wait there's even more! My list shows that an Arcanite Bar has a profit of 391%, so I want to make one. From this window I can just click that line and add it to a crafting queue. (Left click will add one, and right click will take one away.)

Once I've queued up an Arcanite Bar I can close this window and open up Alchemy. Now when I "Show Queue" it will show me what I want to make at the top, the materials that I have or am short at the bottom, the estimated costs of materials, and the estimated profit. Once you've gathered your materials from vendors, bank, or auction house you can click Craft Next and it will make the items in your queue in order, or you can click on the line items of the queue to craft whichever you'd like.

After Hitting Show Queue

And that's it. That's the bare bones of what this addon can do. If you want it to help post auctions effectively you'll need to download additional modules. If you are a low volume auctioneer or if say you just want to be able to craft various enchants/gems to stock up yourself or a guild, then this is all you need.

For easy shopping and auction posting I actually prefer Auctionator, but TSM is quite good for crafting.

If you want to delve deeper into any of TSMs abilities I found the youtube videos by Phat Lewts to be quite informative and easy to follow. See his video on setting up groups which is kind of a launching point if you want to do more with this beast of an addon.