Advertisement

Armory Light updated, renamed "Armory Heavy"

Eliah Hecht
Updated ·2 min read

Armory alternative Armory Light (not to be confused with Armory Lite) has just passed its first birthday, and to celebrate, the site is relaunching with a bevy of new features.

  • Pages for each item, with information on where it comes from, what it disenchants into, and how to link it in game. All the same info from the official Armory, basically.

  • 3D models for some items. Not as good as Wowhead's, but nice if you're already on the site, I guess.

  • A desktop app, built in Adobe Air (and hence cross-platform) to show 3D models of items. Not really sure what the point of this is, but somebody probably likes it.

  • Heirloom calculator: Now this is cool. It lets you take any heirloom item and see how its stats scale at any level. Not many sites have this.

  • A talent calculator. It's slow, jittery, and not particularly attractive, but they do have a talent calculator.

  • A "powered by Armory Light" JavaScript to include on your own site, which gives you not only item tooltips (which a few other sites do), but also character tooltips, like the one at right (an example character, not one of mine). Seriously cool. I can definitely see myself using this feature; it's a great way to get a thumbnail sketch of a character.

A mixed bag overall; some cool novel features, some knock-offs of other sites. And although the title was in jest, this new version does take almost as long to load for me as the official Armory does, and it feels nearly as heavy, sort of defeating the "Light" part of the site's name. It also assumed my feral druid was DPS (instead of tank), thus making completely wrong conclusions about the suitability of my enchantments. Minus points for appropriating the Mac OS X installer icon; it looks silly and out-of-place. Still, I'll probably use the site from time to time, at least for the character tooltips and heirloom scaling.

And whatever my opinions, I'm glad to see people continuing to develop innovative sites to use Armory data. Using Get Satisfaction for user feedback is also a great idea; I haven't seen anyone doing it on a WoW site before.