wow-armory
Latest
Wowhead Profiler tool updated with talents, glyphs
The Wowhead Profiler tool has now been updated to list talents and glyphs for characters, both in main and secondary specs. This is in addition to the massive amounts of information it already provides -- mount and pet tracking, transmog information, quest information and much more. I have to admit I hadn't given the Profiler much of a look until today, and I'm shocked at what I've found. Wowhead is known for its massive database of everything under the sun available to be found in World of Warcraft. Quests, achievements, items, NPCs, armor, pets, mounts, you name it -- if it exists in game, Wowhead has it listed. But the Profiler is a little different from Wowhead's usual style of database tracking. Players can look up their character, or other characters, and load them into the Profiler for an in-depth look at what that character has done, and what they've yet to accomplish. So how exactly is that useful? What makes the Profiler, in some cases, a better alternative than the armory?
Official WoW website housecleaning coming our way
Friday afternoon Community Manager Zarhym took to the official WoW forums to let us all know that Blizzard will be removing some of the lesser-used features they track on the official website. The reasoning behind the decision is that these particular features are laborious to maintain, their pages are not well-trafficked, and you can either look up the same information in-game, or there exist fansites that track the same things just as well as the official site. The following pages have been put on the chopping block: Pets & Mounts Gallery Factions Professions Guild Perks and Rewards sections Character Pets & Mounts Character Hunter Pets Character Professions Character Reputation The full blue post is after the break.
WoW Rookie: How to look up your character online
New around here? WoW Rookie has your back! Get all our collected tips, tricks and tactics for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. WoW Rookie is about more than just being new to the game; it's about checking out new classes, new playstyles, and new zones. If you're anything like me, you like to take a moment here and there to check out your character online without actually logging into the game. Maybe you're on a break at work, just doing background research into gear, or otherwise just goofing off on a computer. Essentially, you'd like to look at your character without getting in the middle of the game. The Armory was a common way to share information about your character with other people. All of your official forum posts link automatically to your Armory profile, and it's easy to post to a link to your Armory on unofficial forums and emails. Over its existence, the Armory has continued to become more powerful. It can help you find potential upgrades, find out where gear dropped, and more. Along the way, of course, the Armory also became more complicated. While Blizzard is transitioning away from the classic Armory, most of the functionality still exists just fine on the Battle.net WoW site. Here's a walk-through of some basic things you can use the Battle.net Armory to do.
WoW Armory now displaying mounts and pets
The World of Warcraft Armory/community site has been updated with a useful new feature showing players the mounts and companion pets they have collected so far. You'll be able to see where each pet or mount comes from or who drops them, a picture of each, and even a listing of not-yet-collected pets and mounts, making it easier to be an achievement hunter or collector. The armory has changed drastically from its original interpretation and implementation, adding features over time that give players a more cohesive out-of-game experience. What is most interesting are the potential tie-ins later on with the previously announced WoW APIs coming down the pipe in the near future; we are still unsure of the amount of data that developers will be able to access from the WoW armory. I would not be surprised to see collected pet and mount data also being part of that package. We've got a pretty full-featured armory at this point. What other types of data do you think the armory could or should provide? Perhaps next we'll see a tabard and title tab, showing players' collected tabards and a scroll list of titles earned. The sky is the limit, apparently.
Blizzard improves the WoW community site (again)
Blizzard debuted the new World of Warcraft community site a while back, and it's definitely a huge improvement over the old one, which was really outdated and rarely helpful. The new site has a built-in Armory, better forums, a fairly robust Game Guide, and even regular dev blogs to give some insight on the development process. Apparently the improvements don't stop there, though, as Blizzard recently announced a laundry list of updates for the site, including: Rotatable 3-D models for gear in the item database Boss info pages, loot tables, and ability information Improved, easier-to-read search results And more! Check out the full list of changes and updates after the break.
WoW Mobile Armory gets 3-D model viewer, activity feeds and more
The newest version of the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory has been released on iTunes, featuring a 3-D model viewer for all characters, activity feeds similar to the ones on the web version of the armory, and optimizations for Apple's iOS 4.0. Included in the update is a cool feature called screenshot mode, allowing you to take cool pictures of your characters in front of lots of backdrops, including the racial capital cities. The screenshot mode will even remove all of the interface elements from the phone, giving you a clean shot. This update could be laying the groundwork for the newly revealed mobile guild chat service available through the armory app, potentially unlocked in the near future for subscribers to Blizzard's Remote Auction House service. Hopefully, more light will be shed on this functionality in the near future. Until then, get updating, because these new features are pretty neat. Previously, I would have had to bookmark the armory's RSS feed for my characters and open them in Safari on the iPhone, but with the new activity feeds built right into the armory app, things have gotten a lot less clunky. %Gallery-103031%
Guild chat coming to the Mobile Armory app
Wrocas (European community manager) announced on the WoW forums moments ago that a guild chat feature will be added to the Mobile Armory that's available on both the iPhone and Android. Players have been asking for this type of feature ever since the armory was introduced. This feature piggybacks off the same service that the remote auction house uses, which requires an additional monthly fee on top of your normal World of Warcraft subscription. One fee to rule them all (and by "all," I mean both the mobile auction house and the guild chat feature). This allows access to guild chat, officer chat (presuming you had access to start with) and whispers. It appears the whispers will only be allowed to and from guild members, at the moment. There is also no news about being able to chat with your Real ID friends. If you don't have a device that the Mobile Armory runs on, Blizzard will soon be adding this feature to the normal armory as well. The full announcement is behind the break.
Massively Mobile: iPhone apps for World of Warcraft
Every two weeks, Massively Mobile brings you the latest news, guides and analysis about MMOs on mobile devices. Covering iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, we're on the lookout for the next generation of MMOs. Today I am going to cover mobile apps for World of Warcraft for the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad. If you own a mobile device that runs a different OS, fear not! I will be covering WoW apps running on Google's Android OS and for the Blackberry in the next column. It must be noted that the official WoW iPhone app is one of the best MMO-related apps out there with the recent addition of in-game auction house access through the app. It has set the bar for other MMO apps that are mere character and/or server look-up services. Seriously, it blows other MMO-related apps out of the water.
Remote Auction House beta testing ends
The Remote Auction House's beta testing has come to a close this evening and is now officially a live, paid-only service. For $2.99 every 30 days, you can buy, sell and trade from anywhere in the world via browser or iPhone. Well, anywhere that you have an internet connection. While non-paying users can still view the auction house, only subscribers can actually do business via the Remote Auction House. Check the official Remote Auction House page for a breakdown of the differences between free and paid users. Do note that this subscription fee is only for the Remote Auction House. Every player can still use the auction house in-game as a part of their usual $15/month. If you're interested in ponying up the $2.99/month but didn't get a chance to try out the app during the testing phase, you can check out our galleries below for a little preview of the service. %Gallery-93251% %Gallery-93255%
WoW Armory Remote Auction House beta is live
The World of Warcraft Armory is now beta testing a long-awaited feature for the iPhone and iPod touch -- the remote auction house. During the beta test, all features -- including premium features like buying and selling items and collecting gold are available for testing and free to use. After the beta test ends, a subscription to World of Warcraft Remote will be required to access these features -- for now though, it's all free. Check out the full F.A.Q on the auction house system, and download the tool for testing from the Armory website. If you do not have an iPhone or iPod touch, the web version of the Remote Auction House is also in beta testing -- players with characters on the servers available for testing can access the Auction House for their realm via the Armory website. The full list of servers available for beta testing is after the break. Update: A gallery for the web feature has been added. %Gallery-93251% %Gallery-93255%
WoW.com's April Fools Round-up
April Fools! Or at least it was yesterday. Some love the pranks, some find the pranks boring, some wish to see the pranks fall down a dark, dark hole, never to return, possibly to be eaten by a grue. Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, we've gathered a short list of Blizzard and WoW-related pranks across the web: Blizzard Pranks World of Warcraft EPEEN: New from Blizzard, the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number system! WoW Armory Tuskarr Invasion: Folks checking out the armory may have noticed their characters transformed to tuskarr, their achievements reported as 'cheesed,' and a whole lot of gear ninjaed and summarily vendored Battle.net Matchmaking Service: Battle.net decides to play eHarmony and place lonely gamers with suitable partners Battle.net Neural Interface: New from the Blizzard Store, the Neural Interface promises a lifelike gaming experience Blizzard Mobile Games: Up for 2010 from Blizzard Mobile Games are Blackthorne 2: Thorne Harder, and Queen's Quest! Diablo Gamer Blanket and Body Pillow: Wave goodbye to the cold as best as you can while swaddled in this Diablo 'gamer blanket!' Diablo Deckard Cain GPS System: Now you can listen to Deckard drone while you drive! Other WoW-related sites El's Extreme Anglin': El reports on the latest Cataclysm feature: Aquariums! MMO-Champion/Paragon/Premonition: MMO-Champion breaks the news that Paragon will be moving to US servers come Cataclysm and merging with the US Guild Premonition. Sponsored by AXE! Nihilum: Nihilum breaks some rules and brings us screens and video from the Cataclysm alpha Wowhead: Wowhead, er, TACOhead brings news of a new in-game item, the Hellfire Kickin' Taco Supreme! Tankspot: Tankspot announces their change to Farmspot Warcraft Pets: Breanni fills us in on some new non-combat pet... er... features coming out in Cataclysm World of Raids: World of Raids reports on the new Observation Deck and Spectate features coming in Cataclysm The Guild: The Guild proudly announces its new foray into the world of animation! Curse.com: Curse.com fills us in on Cataclysm -- exclusively available for the IPad WoW.com: And of course, there's us. Our day was filled with takeover after takeover, from Twilight to Muscle March to Saturn Six -- we've decided to return to WoW news. For now... Love them or hate them, at least they're done for the year, right? Now we can all breathe a sigh of relief and start believing what we see again. Did you laugh? Did you see a clever prank we missed? Or did you hide indoors all day and fervently wait for it to all be over? Let us know -- and check out the gallery below for screenshots from the various sites listed above! %Gallery-89602%
The Daily Grind: How do you like side applications?
If you're playing World of Warcraft, increasingly, you have options available to keep you playing the game even if you're logged off. With several apps running off the Armory and the recent announcement of a planned Auction House access feature as a premium, there's almost no reason to log in at all. Unless you want to level up, quest, roleplay, raid, PvP, explore... okay, there's plenty of reason to log in, but there are more options than ever to let you handle matters inside the game while not even close to your computer. It's not unprecedented by any means, as both Fallen Earth (coming soon) and Champions Online also offer applications for the iPhone to help take care of the game's management functions while you're away from your computer. With the continued advent of more functional mobile devices and more robust web environments through services such as Facebook, games can offload many of the more tedious bits of gameplay into applications players just run through quickly on a break at their day job. What do you think of the increasing trend? Are you happy to have the option to take care of administrative tasks when not near your computer, or do you see it as intrusive and unnecessary?
Blizzard launches Facebook Armory app
Earlier this evening we received a tip (thanks, Taylor) that Blizzard has launched a WoW Armory Facebook application. It promises to publish data about your WoW characters to all your Facebook buddies in real time. I figured I'd give it a spin, not so much because I want to spam my friends with it as because I'm curious what they've come up with. You can see the results in the gallery below. Here are my brief impressions: It's a bit scary that it asks you to log in with your Battle.net account, but if you look at the URL of the popup window it is in fact from us.battle.net, one of the legitimate domains. Still, I'm not sure it's good training for users for Blizzard to ask us to log in within random popups. The login form does not ask for your authenticator. It doesn't tell you this in the brief description, but you choose up to five characters for the app to report to your followers. It doesn't just indiscriminately report the progress of your latest bank alt. By default, it publishes updates on your characters to your Facebook feed, but that box is easily unchecked (fortunately). It also by default posts to your feed that you've installed the app, which is something I can't forgive a Facebook (or Twitter) developer for. If I really want to tell all my friends I'm using your app, I'll tell them. Don't do it for me. At least this too is an option that can be unchecked. After choosing your characters and what you want to show, you may be worried that it's not working, but just give it a minute - it doesn't populate immediately. Mine started showing data in about ten minutes. Overall, assuming they manage to make it work, if you want your Facebook friends to know about your WoW characters, this is the app for you. If not, why are you still reading this post? Anyway, I'm glad to see Blizzard following through on some of the promise the Armory has always showed, even if I don't approve of all their methods. Innovation is always welcome. %Gallery-84420%
The best of WoW.com: January 14th-20th
This week on WoW.com saw World of Warcraft in the news yet again, when a man from Clearwater, Florida was arrested for fraud after he sold his WoW account and failed to hand over the goods. On the gameplay side of things, Lead Systems Designer Greg Street and Lead Producer J. Allen Brack hit Twitter to answer numerous questions about patch 3.3, Icecrown Citadel, and the upcoming expansion, Cataclysm. For all of this and much more, keep reading to see the best of WoW.com from the last week.
Is Blizzard on Team Conan?
Everyone seems to be weighing in on the new late night wars between Conan and Leno -- I'm firmly on Team Conan. Leno and his chin have had their time in the spotlight, they can take themselves elsewhere. And according to the launcher screen Blizzard might be siding with Conan, too. Sit at the launcher for a few minutes and let a few features flash by. You'll eventually see the above advertisement for the new character feeds in the armory, with the character name of "Coco" clearly visible. There is some speculation that this timely reference is a nod to the "I'm with Coco" portrait by Mike Mitchell that's become the picture of Conan resistance. So is Blizzard weighing in and saying Carson's legacy should sit in the hands of Conan? If for no better reason than my own tin-foil hat attitude, I'm going to say yes. Yes they are. [Thanks to Ryan Holt for the tip!]
Beware of WoW Armory phishing scams [Updated]
First things first: the correct address for the WoW Armory is wowarmory.com. Bookmark it. Memorize it. But don't ever, ever search for it again. We've talked before about how misspelling searches can get you into trouble. But even if you spell WoW Armory correctly when Googling, the first sponsored site that shows up is a phishing site -- and it's a really good one. Update 1:10pm: Google seems to have removed the site from their sponsored listing in the short time since I wrote this post. Kudos! Nonetheless, there are and will be more sites using the same technique, so the warning remains valid. Do not go to the following site: armory-worldofwarcnaft.com/wowarmory/, it is evil. Notice the n in warcnaft? You may not when you are clicking on it in your search page or when it shows up in your address bar. And that's what they are counting on. Because the rest of the site looks authentic. When you type in what you want to search for, you get asked for your Battle.net info. Then, no matter what you type in, it gives you a password error. (I typed in profanity. It was fun.) They have stolen all of the elements of the actual Blizzard pages, so that if you want your login page in other languages, just a click of the button will get you there. But don't. It's evil.
Armory gets updated with a model viewer
The World of Warcraft armory page has just been updated with new features and tools! As stated on their updates page: Every character profile now has a 3D model viewer that displays the character in his or her currently equipped gear, and accurately displays the character's physical features, hairstyle, and helm/cloak display as they appear in-game. Mousing over the character model window brings up a control panel with the following controls Camera controls: To rotate the camera around a character, click and hold the left mouse button while moving the mouse left and right, or click the arrow buttons in the top left of the window. To zoom in and out, use the mouse wheel while hovering over the character window, or click the zoom buttons in the top left of the window. To move the character within the frame, right-click and drag the character in the window (or on the small square in the bottom left corner of the window). Animations: Each character has a selection of animations that they can perform. Use the arrows next to the animation's name to cycle through them. The available animations are determined by the character's class and currently equipped weapons. Capture pose: If you are logged in, you can set the default pose of any character on your account. Use the camera and animation controls to create a pose, then click the save icon to set it as the default. All visitors to the character's profile will then see the character in that pose. Play controls: The rewind, pause, and fast forward buttons allow you to fine-tune a pose for a character. Fullscreen mode: You can view the character in a fullscreen display against a selection of backgrounds. All controls will continue to function in fullscreen mode. Embed: You can embed a standalone, interactive version of the character's model viewer in a compatible website, such as a social networking site, guild website, or forum. Options: Extra options include selecting a background in fullscreen mode and toggling the display of a character's helm, cloak, or tabard. That's freakin' cool! I like the ability to embed the model viewer and the ability to stick a preset pose for people looking up your character is a plus.
Armory updates with model viewer, character and calendar feeds
Blizzard has added some nice new features to the World of Warcraft Armory, including a few players have been asking for in the past. The most exciting change is something that doesn't seem to be working quite correctly yet -- they're including a Flash-based model viewer for characters that will let you see what a toon looks like without ever logging into the game. So says their updates page, but as of this writing, the whole system is going up and down, and we couldn't get it to work correctly on any of our PCs. Should be done soon, though. Other updates include character activity feeds -- there are now RSS buttons all over your profile that will let you track achievements, items, and other specific character information via RSS. And Blizzard has also built in calendar feeds that will let you output guild and player calendars to Outlook, Google Calendar, or other calendar applications. That means your out-of-game calendars will update automatically if your raidleader happens to change up the raiding schedule. And finally, character profiles have been redesigned and streamlined -- they look a little different with all of these new features. The date on all of these changes actually says January 1, 2010, so Blizzard may have implemented them a little early, but sooner or later we'll see these welcome changes all active on the Armory. Thanks to everyone who sent this in! Update: The Armory is offline for maintenance now. These changes were seen in action, so they're real, but as we say above, they're officially dated for January 1st. So they may not be in effect just yet.
Which class gets invited as what?
Veritable Avarice, a new blog on moneymaking in WoW, took a break from financial discussion and looked at class representation in tank, DPS, and healing roles by filtering and comparing data available from WoW Popular. Spec population was then checked against class population data available from Warcraft Realm's census and three live realms. Data differences, according to VA, weren't statistically relevant, and he/she is pretty sure that the numbers are at least a ballpark representation of which class is most likely to be filling a particular role within a group. I play a Druid, so that's really what I feel comfortable commenting on here. While I can't speak to the ultimate accuracy of the numbers, I do a lot of pugging and have to admit that VA's data seems pretty close to what I've seen on my own server. The tank numbers are also consistent with a few things Ghostcrawler's mentioned recently concerning the overwhelming population advantage still held by Warrior tanks, although I wonder whether the Feral statistics are somewhat inflated here by the overlap between Bear and Cat specs. Feral tanks have all but vanished from 5-mans on my server, and it's not uncommon for me to get comments from healers that I'm the first Bear they've healed in months. Less surprising is the representation advantage held by Druid healers. Trees are insanely good in Ulduar, and between this, the rise of the Death Knight, and the de-suckaging of the Protection Warrior spec, that probably accounts for the gradual disappearance of the Bear. Also thought-provoking is just how few Druids hold a share of the DPS pie.I'd love to hear from members of other classes on the data and how closely it dovetails into their own experience. There's a quick note for Warrior players (or anyone interested in the DPS graph) past the cut, as there's a small mistake on the relevant graph.
Mining the armory for Hunter pet statistics
With Hunter pet information recently added to the armory, Data Miner Zardoz has wasted no time getting his hands on the raw Hunter pet data and breaking it down. The data is only for level 80 Hunters, and only 10,000 of those at that, but it still gives a very interesting snapshot of what's going with the Hunter's best friends. It might not be too big a surprise that Cats are far and away the most popular pet at a count of around 9500, nearly doubling again the amount of Wolves, who come in just under 5000, which are in turn used in numbers over twice as much as the next popular choice, Gorillas, who are just above 2800 in number. Now mind you, this information does take into account pets that are in the stables as well, and there's certainly the possibility that a lot of them have just stayed in the stables for a long time.
