For a while, one of my World of Warcraft characters kept showing a pop-up saying, “You have a new Herbalism specialization to unlock” every time I logged in. The thing was, I hadn’t actually unlocked anything.

After a bit of research, I discovered there was no built-in way to clear it. I had already tried every file, macro, and reset trick that works for active professions, but the message persisted. The reason? It was coming from an unlearned profession:

• The client internally keeps a “new specialization tab” flag for each skill line ID in memory, even if the profession is no longer learned.
• The saved variables file Blizzard_Professions.lua only handles active professions, so flags for old or unlearned professions cannot be cleared via macros or file deletion.
• The surprising part is that the message defaults to Herbalism because it’s the first profession loaded, even if the real culprit is another long-gone profession.

I figured there wasn’t much I could do, since this issue has apparently been around since Dragonflight (and I doubt it’s high on the dev team’s bug-fix list).

Since I had Midnight and TWW Herbalism sorted, it had to be Dragonflight. I ported back to Valdrakken, and lo and behold, I had unlearned Herbalism at some point during that expansion. After re-learning it, I was finally presented with the option to unlock Bountiful Harvests! I probably just neglected this when unlearning the profession (which is completely understandable).

Lessons learned:

1. WoW still tracks these unlocks for unlearned professions and doesn’t provide a way to clear the flags.
2. It’s best practice to unlock profession tabs as they become available.
3. Even though it’s purely cosmetic, the notification can still drive a person (me) nuts.