As a follow-up to our last post (thanks in part to Jurandr) we thought it was high time to introduce you to a very useful addon named Ackis.  You can download it here.

As Jurandr mentioned, I found Ackis when I was working on some of the cooking achievements.  It can be a real pain to try to look them all up one at a time on wowhead and then try to figure out how to go grab them all from the vendors without running all over Azeroth.  Ackis is a huge help for things like this.

What it does:

Ackis scans your profession recipes and then gives you a list of all the recipes you don’t have.  It also lists all the places you can find those missing formulae.  Honestly, it can be a little overwhelming.  It’s information overload to some degree, but since it’s not something you will use all the time we can live with it.

In the screenshot above you can see Ackis at work with ATSW (Advanced Trade Skill Windows).  The pop-out to the right of the regular trade skill window contains the list of all of the known recipes that you don’t have.  Clicking on those to open them will reveal all of the vendor or drop locations for each.

When you click on a vendor in the list, it will add a waypoint arrow to your map as a reference.  If you use Ackis in conjunction with TomTom it will give you a taxi arrow that will fly you to every single one of them in the most efficient manner possible, and also make sure you don’t miss one way the heck out in the middle of nowhere (such as Desolace) and then have to go back to get it.

Ackis is primarily useful in finding missing recipes for cooking achievements such as Sous Chef, which requires you to learn 100 cooking recipes.  In the next two shots you can see that we chose two recipes from the list that our intrepid adventurer doesn’t have yet: Scorpid Surprise and Roasted Kodo Meat.  All we have to do is CNTL+Shift click the vendor name and it puts both waypoints on our Kalimdor map along with the TomTom arrow pointing us to them.

Ackis can also remove unwanted things from the list such as recipes from reputation and almost any other sort you can imagine.  That’s where the information overload can come in.  But if you’re only looking for items that you can buy from vendors of your faction, that aren’t event specific (such as the holiday recipes), don’t want to see drop or BoP items and so forth – Ackis can do that for you.

Now, from time to time Ackis can be a little persnickety – especially when you use it with ATSW.  Plus, you’ll just have to fiddle with the settings yourself, since we don’t have time to do anything like a full tutorial for something you may use only once a month.  We actually recommend you keep Ackis turned off until you really need it.

In the end, Ackis is a fantastic tool to use along with ATSW, LilSparky’s and TomTom.  Those three things we always have running and highly recommend as well.  It may not be a mod that you use every day, but it can save you a mountain of time here and there when you’re looking for recipes.  And that makes it pretty Dominating in our book.