armory
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Wrath will bring new forum icons
Tactial mentions on the forums that all of the Rogues (in fact, this is true about almost everyone) are still in Tier 4. When Burning Crusade first came out and we all reached 70, Tier 4 was where it was at -- some people were excited about being in Tier 4, even if they hadn't earned it yet. But nowadays, Tier 4 ain't that great, and yet all of our forum icons shows us in the (now old) armor.Drysc does say that the Armory is a click away from the forum icons, but surely Blizzard could take an afternoon and code a little customization into the icons. It seems like everyone else can render icons out of game -- why can't they? There is some good news for those looking for a forum icon update, though: Drysc says that when we're all level 80, we'll probably have new icons yet again, with shiny T7 on our characters.Which will be great -- until a few big content patches after Wrath, when T9 will be out and we'll all be whining that we're still dressed in T7. Thus goes the circle, the circle of life.
Raid Rx: Analyzing your healers Part 1
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. Holyrizz, a Dwarf Holy Priest on Thrall, sent in this screenie of RoS. You know the best part? The tiny mage peeking out from under all of the raidframes. Click on it for a bigger version. Doing the assignments is the glamorous and most visually apparent part of being a healing lead. Every boss fight you dish out tasks with a hefty side of sage advice like "If it's on the floor, stand in it no more." and my favorite "Ok, one more time with feeling." after some rather nasty wipage. The healers look to you for guidance and the ability to use each class to their fullest potential. Well, in order to do that last part, you need to be serious about the real purpose of you position: setting the bar for performance expectations and helping every healer reach or exceed them. This isn't an easy task by any means, but it's definitely something that needs to be done to maintain the well-oiled machine that is your healer group. In this series, I'm going over how to analyze your healing team, including various tools and techniques, plus how to relay that information back in a way that motivates a healer to change. Note that I didn't say it'll motivate them to like you and bake you cookies. If that's what you're going for, you need to switch to Guild Nice Person and save yourself the heartache. Today I'm going to talk about my philosophy when it comes to analyzing classes you haven't played, plus what you need in place to perform a solid, thorough critique of you healers.
Tracking the Tournament Realm rankings from the armory
If you're interested in keeping track of the 3v3 Arena Tournament, You can look at Vhiari's breakdowns, sure, and good ones they are. But there's also another resource that should come in handy: The official ladder listings right on the official Armory. By choosing the Coliseum 1 battlegroup, you can see the rankings for the Tournament Realms. The current top 3v3 team, Outrageously Better Pros, Is a Priest/Rogue/Druid team, although the Druid has no games played. Maybe they used to be Priest Mage Rogue, which is a pretty strong combo these days. It should be fun to watch these rankings as the tournament progresses, both to see what class and spec makeups stay near the top, and to see what outrageous and silly names people can come up with for their teams -- without breaking the naming policy, that is. What's interesting to me is that despite the fact that the Tournament itself is 3v3 only, the 2v2 and 5v5 brackets are still in full swing, with quite a few teams. I suppose this is a sign that people really do like the idea of a good solid PvP only realm to duke it out with high powered characters to prove their worth. I have to wonder if Blizzard is watching those brackets as closely as they're watching the 3v3 bracket, or if this is a sign that they may make these arena practice realms more permanent in the future. Either way, all this activity should be fun to watch. Keep your browser pointed to WoW Inside for all the latest Tournament Realm news, including the escapades of our own WoW Insider Arena Team. Here's some arena page trivia too, while we're on the subject: Mike pointed out to me that the blade that Draenei chick on the arena ladder page is holding is known as The Hungering Cold. Its model was used for the Infamous "Sword of 1,000 Truths" in the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft." It currently drops in Naxxramas, so chances are we'll see it again come Wrath of the Lich King.
Vhiari posts Tournament Realm ratings data
Vhiari has released some interesting stats about the Arena Tournament realm over on his Blogspot site. What he did is take the top 5000 (due to "Armory limitations," he says) personal ratings in each bracket, and then charted them according to classes. Keep in mind that this is the Arena Tournament realm (the live realm data is also available separately), so this is more an indication of what players are doing so far on the tournament realm rather than class viability in day-to-day situations.But keep in mind also that Blizzard is watching the Tournament realm closely for PvP balance, so what we see here could have some hints into the future of Arena changes. Mages especially don't make out too well on the 5v5 chart, and Hunters don't appear to fare much better. Warriors, as you might expect, are off the charts, but comparably on 5v5, Druids aren't at that level. Rogue placement is a surprise, too, but Vhiari just says in the comments that that's more an indication of how many people rolled rogues on the TR rather than a signal that Rogues are rocking 5v5.Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, the data is a little too fuzzy to pull off any serious conclusions (even if Mages aren't getting high ratings, this chart does nearly nothing at all to help us figure out why that might be), but it's an interesting look at what's happening on the TR so far.[via WoR]
Yarrr! There be treasure hidden in them thar data servers!
Have a need to embed Pirates of the Burning Sea information in your website, blog, or toolbar? Then you'll want to read Flying Lab's PotBS developer Brendan Weitzman's latest developer journal. There he talks about the special Crawler server. You can't play on this server -- Crawler's job is to go through all the data on the live servers, figure out what has changed, and copy the changes to itself so that the developers -- and the wider world -- can use this information. What sorts of information Crawler can give you, how much of it you can use and how often -- all these are answered within.Will this info change your life? Well, probably not. But isn't it a nice feeling to know if you did need this information, it would be there for you? See if your server is up without logging in -- or set up email alerts when your port gets thrown into contention. You can make those sorts of apps with this data. And maybe in the future, as they prepare ever more of their data for players to use, you could build something like WoW's Armory. We're just beginning to realize how games will be played in the future. They will be everywhere -- in your browser, on your cell phone, on your iPod.... This is how it starts, with a developer explaining how players can get at their data when they are not in the game.
Inspecting across factions, let's all hold hands now
One of the little things that snuck by in the 2.4 patch notes is the ability to inspect players across factions. Horde can look at Alliance folk's gear, and Alliance can look at Horde people's gear. They can only do this when no one is flagged for PvP, however. This is a really neat feature. My friends and I often times play "guess the gear" on the Horde toons we pass during our PvE adventures. We solve our arguments by looking them up in the armory, but now we'll just be able to right click on the Horde character's portrait and choose "Inspect." Pretty nifty.Now... the real question becomes, where could this lead? For a long time players have been wondering if one day we'll be able to group across factions. Blizzard has obviously been leaning towards cross faction interaction and friendly support for a while now. We had the AQ gates opening, the recent goings on in the Isle of Quel'Danas, and lots of quests where you have to help out a member of the opposing faction.
Dear Blizzard: Am I your police officer?
Dear Blizzard, First of all, I really do have to thank you for changing the name of that guy called Longjohnson. Yeah, He sent us this pretty long rant about how it was unfair his name was changed, but honestly, it was a pretty clear violation of the naming policy against inappropriate references to bodily parts or functions (Sorry Jason, I'm only siding with you to a point here. Your character's name needed to be changed). That said, I'll give him this: It is pretty annoying that he was able to then proceed to the Armory and find 19 characters named Longjohnson and 60 characters named Bigjohnson. If a name is impermissible because of being profane or inappropriate on one server, it should count on them all, right? Every server has the same set of naming rules, except for RP servers, which have the extra "appropriate for an RP server" qualifier, so this shouldn't be a problem. Mike has actually observed that enforcement tends to be a bit lax in the past regarding both the naming policy and RP server policy, but I figured it was worth bringing up again.
Cross-faction inspecting now available on the PTR
Great news for compulsive /inspect-ors from the new patch -- Hortus confirms that in neutral areas and out of combat, players will be able to do a little cross-faction inspecting. No more will you have to wonder what kind of helmet that dirty Human Warrior is wearing around Shattrath -- you'll be able to pull them right up and check out all of their gear.The sky, as you may have noticed, didn't fall when Inspect changed back in patch 2.3 to let anyone see anyone else's gear and talents, and it won't fall again when this change is introduced (trust me). It is interesting to consider how much the Armory has changed the game, though -- odds are that if you'd suggested that we should be able to check the other faction's gear and talents to a developer at the launch of vanilla WoW, they'd have said that, like limiting cross-faction communication, it wasn't right for the feel of the game they wanted to make.But now that the Armory is up and showing off everyone's secret gear of shame, there's no reason to hide it any more in the game either.
GoDaddy invades WoW Armory
In one of the most bizarre things I've seen happen to the World of Warcraft in my three years playing, the WoW Armory site today is pointing to a generic GoDaddy.com domain parking page. The screenshot above was taken at 1:08 p.m. CST on March 2nd, 2008. WoW Insider has received numerous reports of this. It seems to be a DNS related issue. The domain name wowarmory.com expires today, and it appears as if a registrant has grabbed the wowarmory.com domain name as soon as it expired.DNS entries for blizzard.com and worldofwarcraft.com point to cerf.net, while the DNS servers for wowarmory.com are currently pointing to domaincontrol.com. While some of you might be seeing wowarmory.com work correctly, others are not. The ISPs of people who are seeing it work have not had their DNS records updated yet, however within the next 48 hours they will see wowarmoy.com go down as well; unless Blizzard fixes this before then (I am sure they are already aware, or becoming aware of it).Stay tuned to WoW Insider for the latest on this story.Thanks to Matthew Rossi and his wife for contributing to the technical sleuthing in this post.Updated 2:34 p.m. EST: You can access the armory using a sub-domain of worldofwarcraft.com by going to http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/Updated 3:03 p.m. EST: http://www.wowarmory.com/ is now working again. It looks like Blizzard really jumped on the issue and fixed it.
Learn how to get imba with Be Imba!
Our good friend (and co-worker) BigBearButt posted this the other day, but it never made it to us (and it's probably because it doesn't seem to be working for US players quite yet). Be Imba! is an awesome little site that purports to do what Dan's new column also does, which is make one character as good as it can be.As I said, US players aren't really working at this point, and the site blames the Armory's instability (one more reason for Blizzard to start breaking out the stats). But I looked up an EU player I know (as you can see above), and the app is pretty cool -- it'll tell you where you're missing sockets, where your gear could be better, what your talents are "meant for," and where to run instances so you can get better gear. Pretty neat.Now, a disclaimer: you should always spec and gear how you like, not how some online application tells you to. But everyone should be interested in making their character better, and a setup like this could be very helpful in figuring out how to get where you want to be going. Hopefully the site's creator (early apologies for sending traffic to the site, but it'll die down after a while) will figure out how to work with the Armory, or Blizzard will get it into their heads that opening up Armory info in XML or other open formats will make this easier for everyone.[Via AA in its slick new location]
Guild Launch signatures are back
One of the more popular dynamically generated signatures out there are provided by guild forum hosting site Guild Launch. For those that don't know about it, they provide nifty signatures to go on the bottom of your guild forum posts, and look just like the one pictured in this post. The signature updates based on the WoW Armory data provided by Blizzard. Pretty handy for showing off your stats. After all, who doesn't want to show off that their warrior has just over 16k HP unbuffed?About two months ago the signatures stopped updating entirely. The major problem was that the Armory, which we are always reminded is still in beta, was experiencing some problems. Last week the Guild Launch signatures stared updating again (thanks to the Armory working again), but with a twist. They now will update automatically every 6 days instead of every day. However, you can still manually recreate the signatures once every 24 hours if you just have to get your stats updated. (Although with that said, I have rarely seen the Armory update right after you equip new gear and log out... still in beta. Yup.)Your old signatures will still work indefinitely, but they won't be updated anymore. To take advantage of the new updated signatures, head over to the announcement page and follow the instructions. Basically all you have to do is change one word in the html line for your signature; find the word "sig.php" and change it to "wsig.php". Poof! You're done. What site do you use to make your graphical signature?
Your WoWJutsu rank
The folks at WoWJutsu provide a great little competitive tool that ranks guilds according to the PvE raid content they've completed. The site is pretty popular, and a lot of guilds use it in their advertising over at the Guild Recruitment Forums. My guild has been known to pay pretty close attention to the number. I have to admit that about once a week I find myself checking our ranking against those of other guilds my friends are in. This got me thinking... what good does basing your progress against other guilds do? Sure, there are the ultra competitive guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum. However they approach the game in a way that leads them to needing to care about how close the guild behind them is doing. For most of us, competing against other guilds is only going to lead to unforeseen frustrations. Most guilds have a boss or two that they get hung up on. Back in the days when BWL was hard, my guild spent a long time defeating Razorgore, and after he was gone the rest of the instance fell within a month. This kind of common hurdle in WoW is not reflected in WoWJutsu; all you get to know is that a guild is stuck on a boss, not that they're going to have amazing progress after it.
Gankbang: For those times you really need an ego boost
While not a new site, Gankbang has recieved a push on a few different realm forums recently and it seems few know about it. A shame!Gankbang pulls character stats from the Armory and compiles them into a fun little searchable tool. It gives you the option of breaking down your search by class, talent spec and specific stats. You can also choose to search by specific realms, factions and battlegroup. You don't have to pick through those things if you don't want to, a WoW-wide search works as well.The most obvious use of this tool is to stroke your ego when you come up in the top ten of a search. I'm pretty sure everyone who's been to Gankbang before has done that at least once. Another good use of the tool is to find the players of your particular class who either know what they're doing, or at least are doing really well in the end-game. As a shadow priest, it was fun to do a few searches(shadow damage, spell haste) to see who's on top, and use their Armory profile to see what's available to me. If you're on a friendly, homely server, those people on top might have some good advice for you too, if you're in need of it.It has a few issues, though. Due to Gankbang's update frequency and that of the Armory, your stats may not always be current if you have multiple sets of gear. In addition, while Gankbang strips most buffs when grabbing character data, there are a few things that slip through. For example, a search for melee crit on warriors has the number one warrior listed with 116% crit.Oh, by the way, if you're not showing up on a search? You can add yourself manually by using the link at the top of the Gankbang website.
Dungeon Runners releases characters in XML
This isn't quite the idea of MMO-to-go yet, but it's the first step towards something really huge in MMO gaming: a character API. An API is an Application Programming Interface-- basically a document or method of how to get computers to talk to each other through different applications. Facebook apps are made with the Facebook API, applications that hook into iTunes use the iTunes API, and so on. With an API, programmers can take information from one source, and do almost anything they want with it in other programs. Players have already done some amazing things with World of Warcraft's Armory (even without an actual API-- I'm pretty sure most of that is just HTML scraping), but now NCSoft's Dungeon Runners has upped the ante-- they've made all the character data in the game available to anyone as an XML file. With just a URL, you can access info on any player in the game, already marked up in XML.What does this mean to you as a player? It means that programmers can create any number of applications using this data-- they can display your DR character's info almost anywhere at any time. And a skilled programmer could even track the info over time-- tell you how fast you leveled, how often you change your armor or gear, or how fast you've earned gold in the last day. And who knows what else people could come up with-- the best part about opening up information like this is that it gets used in all sorts of ways that no one could ever predict.Jeff Freeman's exactly right: "This is really cool... just in case you don't get that." We're just scratching the surface of this stuff, but eventually you'll be able to do things like get text messages on your phone when your WoW auctions sell, or be able to monitor your guild's bank or your PvP team's wins via RSS (which itself can then plug into almost anything) When developers break out data like this for players, the possibilities are endless.
WoW Armory fixed for now
For those whose characters weren't updating or showing up at all, you'll be happy to hear that the promised fix to the Armory has been implemented today. However, CM Eyonix warns that it may take "some time" for all characters to update.It's been interesting to see how this Armory downtime has affected gamers. You'd expect frustration from not being able to check on your toon's equipment, reputation or talent build from outside the game, but there was also all the other ancillary activities that rely on the Armory. Everyone's favorite new gear planner, Warcrafter.net, came to a standstill. It's still not up to speed yet (at least not on my main, which is finally showing up on the Armory.) Many signature generators either stopped updating or broke entirely. And our Raid Healing columnist, Marcie Knox, had to make level 1 alts on different realms to inspect gear of cross-server guild applicants.The tentacles of the Armory spread deeper than we may have thought.
Armory delays abundant, fix expected
What's up with the Armory lately? I've always had a problem getting in there (the pages load super slowly, although I'm pretty sure that's just all the database pinging they're doing), but lately, players have been reporting lots of character progress missing from The Armory. I spent all day yesterday on my Hunter ploughing through Hellfire Peninsula's big gear giveaway, and none of that new gear shows up on my profile. One of WoW Insider's writers hasn't even seen one of her alts on the Armory-- that's 40+ levels worth of missing info.To be fair, the Armory is more or less an extra service, and Blizzard knows there are problems and is supposed to be working to fix them, so there's not that much to complain about, really. Unsubstantiated rumors being passed around say Blizz is working on updating the code to allow level 80 characters (for the expansion), but the fact is that we don't know what's going on-- they could be adding in even more features that we don't know about (like, say, what the Figureprints folks get, or a nifty little API system). But, as a WoW Insider writer told me, at least there always is one way to see what's up with any character in the game: make an alt, run out to where they are, and /inspect away.Thanks to everyone who sent this in!Update: Looks like we lit a fire under somebody over there-- the Armory is redirecting to a maintenance page at the moment.
Warcrafter does the heavy math on your character's stats
Amanna is the latest blogger to bring up Warcrafter, a nifty little online application that is basically the Armory on speed. It'll not only pull up your character, your gear, and your talents, but it'll use all of that information to calculate everything you'd ever want to know about your stats, including DPS, crit percentage, spellpower, and even where all of those things come from. It'll even go into your spells, and calculate the average heal or average damage of your most-used spells and abilities. Warcrafter tells you everything it can calculate about your character, directly from the numbers pulled out of the Armory. Fascinating to see.There is also a sandbox page, which is everything an aspiring theorycrafter would ever need to make up the character of their dreams. Punch in a class, race, and gear, and then go to town shifting around buffs, weapons, talents, and anything else you'd want to check. Cerberus is an attentive creator, too-- if there's a calculation off or a piece of gear missing, he seems more than happy to add it in. I only hope that we don't crush the site with our exposure.The sandbox page mentions something about "locking" the character, and it would be cool to have a quick permalink setup for created characters (we could have someone show off all the buffs/gear needed to get the Ghost Wolf taming cast time down, or show off the highest possible spellpower available in the game so far). But other than that, Warcrafter is a great piece of web-based software. Very cool way to inspect every single aspect of your character out of game.
Armory updated for Season 3
Recently, Blizzard updated their Armory page with information pertaining to the new arena season. The addition that will likely be most helpful for players is the new listing of personal arena ratings which can be found in both the character and team profiles. The other changes include the listing of the new titles from last arena season. These will appear on character profiles, but only if they have already been selected in game. Additionally, all the new arena and honor loot has been added to the item database. Finally, the update page informs us that the Arena Hall of Fame will soon include the winners from Season 2.If you'd like to check out the full listing of changes for yourself, be sure to click on the "Read" link below.
Armory updated
Earlier today, Blizzard updated their Armory database to support many of the new features that were added to the game in patch 2.3. I've listed a quick summary of the changes below, but the most important one is the addition of guild bank support. Players will now be able to view the contents of their guild bank via the website. You'll have to log into the Armory with your WoW user name and password, so no worries about unguilded people snooping on your hoard. Additionally, a complete bank log will be maintained on the site, which is handy since the in-game log doesn't hold many entries.Check out my summary of the rest of the changes below.
Make your own custom armory signature - Updated
You play MMO's, you chat, you express your invaluable opinion on the forums, and you /dance. Your virtual identity is all about customization, and DKPSystem.com's beta Armory Signature Generator is a quick, easy way to snag yourself a l33t forum signature. After all, you might as well try to save your adoring fans some energy; now they don't even have to look you up before they reply!I love the simplicity of this tool. Although it allows you a fair amount of customization, it allows anyone, regardless of technical expertise, to generate a signature complete with character photo and pertinent information. From choosing which stats will be displayed, to choosing your own background, this is one handy tool that should be in every forum-goer's toolkit.
