As the launch of The War Within expansion draws near, we’re very happy to announce the Beta test of the 4.14 addon update to TradeSkillMaster! If you’re a Premium member you will shortly be receiving an email inviting you to participate, along with instructions on how to get started.
Additional invites through our Beta sign-up page will be distributed on a First-In-First-Out system, so make sure you sign-up if you’d like to get involved!
Let’s take a look at some of the major features 4.14 brings!
New Sniper Mechanism
Patch 8.3 in Battle of Azeroth changed the way the Auction House works fundamentally. Blizzard removed the concept of ‘pages’ and since then all items are essentially part of the same pool of auctions for a given realm or region.
This caused some changes to the sniper behaviour for TSM in Retail which deviates from the original style of sniping that’s available in Classic WoW. So to try and close that gap and improve the efficiency and capabilities of TSM Sniper in Retail, we have introduced some changes to the way the Auction House is queried during a Sniper scan. If you’re familiar with other Sniper-focused addons, such as Point Blank Sniper (PBS), TSM 4.14 will function in a similar way.
Additionally, in Retail you’ll be able to apply a Sniper Operation to the Base Group just like you can in Classic (or in Retail prior to WoW patch 8.3), allowing for Sniping of items that are not otherwise grouped.
Secondary Realm Market Data
After region-wide trading was introduced in Dragonflight, we have been exploring how we might enable easier arbitrage between realms without overloading the addon with data and consuming all of our bandwidth quotas.
As a first step in this arena we have added the option to display some Price Sources such as Minimum Buyout and Market Value from one other realm that you have added to your TSM Desktop Application in your Tooltip Settings.
We hope this will enable some arbitrage opportunities with a specific realm that you may have gold-making activity on – we understand that discovering and identifying those opportunities is important and we’ll continue to explore supporting that type of analysis outside of the game with our new and improved website suite coming soon.
Scroll Table Improvements
Scrolling tables make up a lot of the UI of TSM, such as the interfaces for Mail, Vendoring, most of the Auction House, and your profession window.
It can take a lot of resources to create and update these tables as new data is loaded or you take actions in the addon, so we’ve spent a lot of time working to significantly improve the performance of these elements across the TSM addon suite.
As well as performance improvements, we’ve added a ton of new functionality to these tables:
Drag Columns to Reorder them
Now you can reorganize the columns in any scrolling data table, such as at the Auctioning House or in your profession window.
Note the ‘item name’ column position cannot be changed, and column positions can be reset in the traffic light menu in the top left of any table.
From this menu you can now also enable to lock the width of columns in the table so that you don’t accidentally resize a column too wide or too narrow. Enabling this option will maintain the current width of all columns in the table.
Create a Group from items showing in a Scrolling Table
Making Groups is often a challenge, over the years we have taken steps to make that easier including the concept of the Base Group which contains any item that you don’t already have inside a Group, even if you don’t currently own the item.
We’re taking that a step further and adding the option to create a Group containing the items that you currently see in the table – whether that is a category selected in your profession window to group items you can craft or a search on the Auction House.
In this example the Auction House Browse tab is filtered by using the Advanced Item Search to look for the category of Tailoring Recipes. I can select ‘Create Groups from Table’ to add all of the items in the table to a new Group. Note that items that are already grouped are not added to the newly created Group.
Adding Prices or Sources as Custom Columns
A very common line of feedback when using TSM is to add more information to the UI in order to be better informed and make it easier to make decisions. We have to strike a balance between what is usable or understandable to someone who may be new to TSM and creating the flexibility to enter ‘data overload’ territory if it’s desired.
With TSM 4.14 we’re pleased to add the option to include any standard price or value source as a new column in any scrolling table, such as your Auctioning and Shopping Scan results, or Sniper Scan results. This is also extended to include any custom sources you have defined as a custom column. Simply select the traffic light menu in the top left of any scrolling table to manage which columns appear in the table.
In this example the number of the item currently owned (NumInventory) is included in the Browse results so I can decide whether I want to purchase more at-a-glance.
Learn more about the available Price Sources and Value Sources out-of-the-box in TSM, and find the perfect combination of information to support your gold-making strategy.
Post From Bags Improvements
The Post From Bags section in the Auctioning tab of the Auction House receives all of the previously mentioned upgrades, including adding Price Sources, and in addition has the new option to add which Group the item is in to the table. It’s easy to see at a glance what might be worth posting if you have limited time or are learning new markets as part of your gold-making strategy!
In this example the DB Recent value and the minimum price from the assigned Auctioning Operation are shown in-context before selecting and posting the items, along with the Group that the items are in.
Scrolling Table settings persistence
All aspects of the scrolling table configuration are now persisted across sessions, including Column Sort Order, Price/Value/Custom Source Columns, and Column Display Order
Import Item IDs from Wowhead
Continuing the theme of creating Groups – historically the Group Maker was a primary middle-man between searching and filtering Wowhead for items you want to import into the addon in-game.
To make this process even more efficient we have added support for copying the IDs of any Item search on Wowhead directly into the addon in-game.
Once you’ve applied your filter, select the Copy button, and then click IDs. In this example the filter is for Bind on Equip drops added in Dragonflight, copying the IDs will include up to 1,000 items returned by Wowhead, and not just the first 50 shown on the page which was a historical limitation of our Group Maker web page.
Once copied, you can import them in-game. Learn more about creating Groups by importing.
Custom Strings in More Operations
Custom Strings are extremely powerful for the main Operation types in TSM such as Auctioning and Crafting – allowing fine-tuning and ultimate control on what you do and why at any time.
We’re empowering more Operations in TSM 4.14 to support Custom Strings including Mailing, Vendoring, and Warehousing.
Previously these operations generally only accepted integers such as sending 20 potions to an alt character without much flexibility. Now you can create a custom string to only send 20 potions if the market value is where you would consider selling them using price sources, or restock a particular vendor item if your personal sale rate is high enough using a logic function.
Learn more about the available Price Sources and Value Sources out-of-the-box in TSM.
Custom Source Formatting
Prior to TSM 4.14 all Custom Sources would be calculated and displayed as a currency. Now there’s an option to show a Custom Source as an integer, a percentage, or as a currency as before.
When creating a new Custom Source you can specify the format and you can modify this setting for each Custom Source at any time. Any Custom Source can be displayed in your tooltips via the Tooltip Settings.
In the following examples these Custom Sources use one of each format, the first being a percentage representing an average of personal and regional sale rate. The second shows a number representing the max stack size for an item (a new value source added to 4.14!), and finally the third is a currency averaging various price sources to provide a general price point.
Lots of Other Minor Changes
Addon Optimizations
Further to the Scrolling Table optimizations mentioned earlier, additional work has been completed to further improve the performance of the addon in general – particularly in the Profession UI and Auction House UI.
You’ll notice that the addon is generally more responsive and snappier as you engage with these pages, and searches or Shopping scans in the Browse tab are also much quicker due to scan time optimizations.
Mail Contact Management
It’s now possible to delete names from the recent contacts list in the Mail UI, get rid of those pesky alts that have been deleted or transferred!
Rescanning
There’s a new button in the Auction House UI to ‘Rescan’ to immediately repeat an Auctioning Post or Cancel Scan.
Help Tooltips
A large number of tooltips have been added across the addon to explain functionality for a particular setting, input, or button. Mousing over the section will display the tooltip with contextual information or a definition.
More documentation for the Addon suite can be found in our Knowledgebase.
Getting Help
Please join our Discord server as per the Get Started instructions, to share your feedback on the 4.14 Beta or report any bugs and issues you encounter.