Inspiration

I am an “altoholic”, meaning that rather than focusing solely on one primary character, I divide my attention among many alternate characters, or alts. Each new World of Warcraft expansion raises the maximum attainable character level, or level cap. That means that when a new WoW expansion launches, I spend a lot of time playing my alts to get them to the new level cap.

The spellbook in World of Warcraft is organized in pages, with 12 entries per page. From 2004 to 2010, spells and abilities in WoW were divided into "ranks" by power. Rank 1 was the weakest and cheapest to use. Higher ranks were more powerful and more expensive to use.

Whenever a player reached an even-numbered level on their character, they had to return to an in-game capital city, purchase the new ranks, and place them on their character’s quick-access action bars. Ranks each occupied one spellbook entry, or “slot”. By the time of the second WoW expansion, some spells filled more than an entire page of the spellbook with up to 16 ranks. Tens of spells per class, with multiple ranks each, meant a high-level character’s spellbook was dozens of pages long. This all made finding newly purchased ranks so tedious and error-prone, that players, including myself, would sometimes miss one when learning multiple new ranks at once.

Learning Aid displays a pop-up window every time a character learns something new. The Learning Aid window displays an icon for each newly learned spell or rank, that the player can drag to their action bar without having to open the spellbook. This saves time and frustration, and, when ranks were a thing, made it much less likely that a player would forget to replace old spell ranks with new ones. Learning Aid also has a manual search command, which scans the character’s action bars to catch spells and abilities the player previously neglected to add, or failed to upgrade to higher ranks.

Learning Aid is equally useful when learning new non-combat profession abilities, like fishing, cooking, blacksmithing or tailoring.