armory
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Does leveling again mean leveling alone?
With Patch 2.3 coming next week, a number of players are going to turn back to some of the old alts they've always wanted to play, and level them up now faster than ever before. If a group of friends had decided to start over from scratch, then all is well and good, but for many players who already have character spread out at different level ranges, friends used to spending a lot of time together may suddenly find themselves with a large level gap in the alts they're most interested in.Especially considering the new and improved dungeon loot, many players will wish their friends could join them. Of course, their friends could just bring over their level 70s and rush them through, but for a certain kind of player, this is less interesting because it takes away all the real challenge and teamwork of the instance. They may be able to find PUGs at that level, but it likely won't be the same. Douglas at the Elitist Jerks forums has been having this problem for a long time now. He and his friends very much want to play together, but have never been able to make their schedules work out. Before long, their characters inevitably level at different speeds and can no longer level up together. He says he longs for a "mentoring system" like City of Heroes has, where players of different levels can become one another's "sidekicks" and go to dungeons together as if they were at the same level. At first glance it seems like WoW could implement such a system too, to make something like a temporary downgrade or upgrade in ability power and gear quality so that friends could fight together across the level gap. But further discussion reveals some serious problems.
Latest Armory population figures from Okoloth
Okoloth has dropped an update to his Armory analysis, featuring the latest and greatest information on about half of the World of Warcraft's denizens. He surveyed 4.6 million characters on the Armory, and while that sounds like a lot (it sounds like half of WoW's population, except that Blizzard's 9 million figure is supposed to be players, not characters), it's not actually that much of a representative sample. Still, compared to the table scraps that Blizzard gives us, it's something, so let's get what we can from it.He finds that the biggest majority of players are at level 70 compared to the other levels, but there are still only about 40% of the characters there (adding fuel to the fire on both sides of creating midlevel and endgame content). Mages and Warriors are the standouts on the class breakdown at level 70 (with 13.5% and 14.3% respectively-- what tank problem?), while Shaman are the biggest losers-- only about 7% of level 70s he surveyed were Shaman. Sounds about right. Across all levels, Warriors still have the biggest percentage, while Hunters follow them up. And on the low end, it's Druids, Pallys, and at rock bottom, Shamans. People just don't like playing the totem class.He's also got new stats on realm balance, but remember that these numbers are not much more than guesses. They're pretty close, though, even for that. Drysc told us that Agamaggan's Alliance/Horde balance was about 1.1:1, and Oko's figures have it at about 1.09:1 (by my math), which is pretty darn close. Big ups to Oko for putting these numbers together, always interesting to see the figures on how and where people are playing in Azeroth.[ via WoR ]
Inspect changes in 2.3
A few players have noticed a really interesting change hidden way down in the patch 2.3 notes. Inspect has been updated-- the range on it has now been increased to 30 yards, which is fine, and when you inspect a player, you can now see their talent choices. Which is... whoa. So much for privacy-- now you don't even need to alt-tab out to check the Armory to see every talent choice every player has made.I'm not exactly part of the tinfoil hat crowd-- I've already posted my spec here on the site for everyone to see anyway. But it does seem a little strange to allow every other player to see every talent choice in the realms. Whatever happened to the super special seekrit talent build, that perfect setup that only you have that gives you an advantage on the battlegrounds? The reason for having talents in the first place is to customize your character according to how you want to play it, and if everyone else automatically has access to your talents at just a glance, just how custom are you, really? If the "Inspect" function only showed your spec and numbers (not individual talents), that's a little better-- how's it working out there, PTR people?Of course, the fact is that this will make everyone better, eventually-- everyone will have more access to the best talent builds, and they'll just have to take notes and respec as necessary. It also will mean an end, once and for all, to lying about specs (no more fibbing that I'm a DPS Shaman when I have my DPS gear on). Better take this time before 2.3 to make sure your specs are all lined up, because after 2.3, they'll be opened up for all the world to see.Thanks, Prosper on Frostmourne!
New Arena Calculator and browser plugins at the Armory
Blizzard has added two new updates to the WoW Armory. One of them is the Search Engine plugin we talked about earlier, though it isn't just for Firefox -- it also includes IE 7 and Opera. They have a very simple installation for adding the Armory search plugin to your browser.They have also added an Arena calculator which is actually three calculators in one. Choose one of the calculators to determine: The number of arena points earned in a week The average rating to get a desired arena reward How long it will take to get that reward If you have pinned your profile, the calculator will automatically fill up with your current arena statistics, as long as you aren't using the Opera or Safari browsers.The Arena Calculator seems to be a good way to get the Season 2 gear before the Season 3 starts with its new rating restrictions for gear. Do you think the new Armory updates are useful?
Armory add-on for Firefox going live soon
CM Drysc announced on the WoW General Forum that they are developing a Firefox add-on for searching the Armory.For those of you who are not familiar with Mozilla's Firefox, it is a browser that can be used on Macs or PCs (even Linux) and has a great dropdown search function for quick lookups on certain sites. Wowhead has one as does WoWwiki and so do we here at WoW Insider (link goes to add-on). You can go to the Firefox Search Engine page to install any of these add-ons onto your version of Firefox. Drysc says to check in at the Armory over the next couple of days for the announcement that the search engine has been completed.
New site tracks guild raid progression
Tracking guild raid progression has always been tricky business. Every realm has to have a dedicated player usually kept an updated thread on their server forum and relied on guilds reporting their most recent activities. If that player stopped playing, then it had to be started all over again.WoW Jutsu has an automated solution. This site tracks raid progression by scouring the Armory for players with equipped raid drops. It accounts for players with raid equipment who move guilds, but can't account for joint raids, yet. Not a perfect system, but a usable one for automating an otherwise time-consuming process.The site is well designed with a clean look (important for an information site.) On it, you can track by realm or see game-wide statistics. The owner also provided a well-written FAQ explaining how the rankings are compiled and what to do if you feel your guild's listing is inaccurate.WoW Justu is also good for seeing how much raid content has been finished world wide. For example, less than 2% of the guilds tracked have entered the Black Temple, but almost 66% have finished Karazhan. It will be interesting to see how much raid content is finished before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion goes live and another set of content becomes obsolete.
Battle of the Armory comparison sites
Want to find a quick way to see the stats of the players on your server in the same class? Two sites aim to provide you with just that: comparison of every attribute pulled from and linked to the Armory.Wow Metrics is in beta and only covers Mages, Warlocks, Warriors, Rogues and Priests. You select the class, server and stat to compare and it gives you back the list. A very long list. You can click on anyone in the list to go to their Armory page and see how exactly they got those numbers. Gankbang does the same thing, but covers all classes and gives more information in the listing. Being a Balance druid, I'm always looking for ways to improve my equipment selection. I love that I can easily find a list of other druids with high spell damage and spell crit. And I can go straight to their Armory profile to see how they accomplished that. And from the Armory listing I can check out their talent spec.Are there any other sites you know of that make good use of the Armory? Let us know.
Blue Notes: Fear ward for all, and a faster Armory
Apparently, Fear Ward is going to be a spell for all priests as of Wrath of the Lich King. This is indirectly confirmed by Nethaera. In response to a post translated from German that implies a universal Fear Ward, the candle said:This is true that we plan to spread Fear Ward around, but don't expect it until most likely the expansion. There's a bit of a difference between "spread it around" and "for all races," but still, I'm betting on every race getting it just to end the debate. And it looks like the URL change is not the only refreshing the Armory is getting today; the "first phase" (ooh, there's more?) of Armory optimizations has gone live: Smarter, faster results pages: The Armory's various search results pages respond more quickly when changing pages or sorting within the results. The Armory's right hand panel also takes advantage of this new speed and now remembers what page you were last viewing as well. Faster item tooltips: The tooltips that appear when mousing over items in a character profile or an item search results page are now much more responsive. Open Armory links in new windows/tabs: Now you can open links from the Armory in their own tabs or windows for quick comparisons between profiles, items, search results, and more. New advanced item search button: This button takes you to the Armory's powerful advanced item search options and is located in a prominent, convenient location under the main search field. And much more: Many more specific improvements have been implemented, the details of which can be found on the Updates page. In addition, general performance has been greatly improved in the areas of response time, loading time, and memory usage. Neat. The Armory is an indispensible tool, and making it faster is a big plus. The item tooltips still don't work in Camino, my browser of choice, but I'm told that's a Camino bug and not really Blizz's fault.
Armory changes URLs
Just a quick note: the Armory, which used to be located at armory.worldofwarcraft.com (and still is, actually), can now be found at wowarmory.com. Neth confirms that it's not a bug or a hack or a spammer or anything-- apparently Blizzard just wanted to simplify the URL.Well, that, and "wowarmory.com" is a lot closer to "wow.com." And we all know that's what you think of when you want to find your favorite information about World of Warcraft, right?
WoWDigger adds wishlists, quest and faction tracking
Since we last profiled the database site, WoWDigger.com, it has evolved into more than just a WoWHead clone. I found new functions that were helpful in planning my online activities.Using their downloadable client, you can create an Armory-like page of your character on the site. Then you can create a Wishlist duplicate template of your equipped gear and swap in pieces that you want to acquire to see exactly how it affects your stats, resists, damage ratios, mp5, crit chance, defense, etc. Great for planning on how to get that last bit of resilience to hit the cap or balancing your +heal and +spell damage.Another function I like is the personalized quest page. You now have an offline list of all the quests in your quest log. Plan your next step to complete the quest and read up on any strats you'll need to know beforehand. Also, the site tracks all your reputation gains so you'll know how close you are to the next rep level for every faction in the game.If you're like me and enjoy extensive planning and researching offline, I recommend checking out the latest improvements to WoWDigger. With CTProfiles down for now, its a great alternative. If anyone knows of other sites that provide similar services, feel free to list them in the comments.
Liquidor's rep calculator works for US realms, too
Ask and you shall be given-- the other day we posted about Liquidor's rep calculator, and lamented that it was EU only, and now only a few days later, he's updated it to not only include US realms, but he's completely revamped the design.Sure enough, I punched in my character from the US realms, and I got the nice readout of where I'm at for all my reputations, and one click access to what exactly I need to do to move up a level (apparently I need to keep running Shadow Labs, grrr). Seems like it pulls everything directly from the Armory (where else would he get it from?), so all the info is as up to date as it is on Blizzard's official site.There's also a checkbox now for "TBC Reputation only" that when unclicked gives a warning that says "Soon!," so apparently Liquidor is working on including Old World Azeroth rep as well. Just like we said the other day, this is a terrific tool for working on those all important rep grinds. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm LFG Shadow Labs. Anyone? Please?
All the armory information you'll ever need
For those of you who enjoy thoroughly analyzing World of Warcraft's class composition through armory data, do we have the site for you! Okoloth has started his own armory database -- he queries the armory for characters and then feeds the information back in to a local database where he can compile statistics on the overall playerbase. The downside to the project is that it's difficult to get a comprehensive list of all players -- Okoloth gets his player list by first checking all players on Arena teams and then querying every player in those players' guilds. So this data isn't 100% accurate simply because it's not pulling 100% of character information -- however, I'd say the 40,000 character profiles queried gives us a reasonable slice of the overall population.Okoloth gives us percentage breakdowns of talent spec, all stats, professions, Aldor/Scryer reputation, and gear. Keep reading for a class/talent breakdown, and be sure to check Okoloth's site for all of the armory data you'll ever need.[via Severkill's Blog]
Embed your Armory info
Ever looked at your Armory page and thought "this is nice, but I wish I could put it on another web page"? Well, now you can! MMO Guildsites has created a widget that can be embedded anywhere you like (guild rosters, maybe?), and consists of an iframe linking to a script that runs on their servers (so you don't need any server-side script support on your own site). The output is rather pretty, as you can see at right; in fact, I like it better than the actual Armory in many ways.It does have a few shortcomings -- you can't see how much +damage you have in various schools, for instance -- but I still like it as a way to put live Armory data anywhere you want it. (It can show PvP data too, by the way, but I turned mine off for the screenshot since my numbers are downright shameful.) If you're interested, click over to their site, put in your server and character name, and it'll generate a preview and HTML for you to paste wherever you want it.
Blizzard puts Hall of Fame in the Armory
Well it's not quite a row of statues, but, as Elizabeth mentioned the other day, Blizzard has created an Arena Hall of Fame over at the Armory. They've compiled, from season one, a list of all the teams that finished in the top .5% of their team bracket, and they're all browseable by battlegroup or realm.Unfortunately, they don't show many overall stats-- I'd like to see, for example, the numbers of teams from each battlegroup or realm (checking my own realm shows me that no teams made it, but you'd have to check every single realm to see numbers across the board). Do you think PvP realms turn out more successful Arena teams? I'd also like to see the average rating of the teams that made it-- just a random browse across realms shows that you'd have needed at least a 2200 rating in 5v5 to get in. The highest teams hit around 2500, it looks like, and here's an interesting point: The arena rating is based off of chess' ELO system, and in that system Gary Kasparov, the best player in the world, was the first to break the 2700 rating. So my guess is that we'll see generally higher ratings than these in season two, and so on.Anyway, a nice little tribute to players who were successful in season one. Hopefully, we'll see better insights coming out of these numbers than Blizzard has provided here, but in the meantime if you want to see who on your realm is a heavy hitter, the HoF is the place.
This week in the Arena
Players participating in Arena PvP get more than cool prizes -- the top 0.5% of participating teams are also going to be immortalized in Blizzard's Hall of Fame. And the top teams from season one have just shown up.Also, the second qualifying round for the 2v2 Championship Gaming Series has begun. The live CGS tournament will be taking place at BlizzCon in August -- and everyone here at WoW Insider wishes the competing teams the best of luck.And finally in Arena news for the week, we've got stats on the top 20 US Arena teams compiled by Caster. The data, as always, is interesting (if a bit disheartening for some classes). Here's the basic class breakdown, but for more details on precise numbers of each class and talent spec breakdowns, check the original post.5v5 Arenas Paladin: 18% Warrior: 18% Priest: 14% Shaman: 12% Mage: 12% Warlock: 11% Rogue: 6% Hunter: 5% Druid: 4% 3v3 Arenas Warrior: 16% Priest: 15% Paladin: 15% Warlock: 14% Mage: 13% Rogue: 12% Shaman: 8% Druid: 6% Hunter: 2% 2v2 Arenas Warlock: 21% Priest: 15% Paladin: 15% Warrior: 14% Rogue: 13% Druid: 9% Mage: 5% Shaman: 5% Hunter: 2%
Officers' Quarters: Tips and tricks
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Hello, fellow officers! For a change of pace I'm going to forgo the usual Q&A format this week. Instead, I'm going to share a few random tips that have served me well in the past. Let's jump right in, shall we?1. Use the guild UI to keep track of your members' alts. A lot of serious guilds don't allow alts, or only allow raiding alts. In these cases it's pretty easy to keep track of who's who. But most guilds don't restrict how many alts a player can have on the roster. Eventually you're going to wind up with one of those altaholics who is compelled to roll a character (or two) for every class. It might not seem important to keep track of all those alts, but if that player causes a big problem down the road, you'll want to know exactly which toons he or she plays. Also, it's just handy to see which main characters are available to your party or raid, assuming that player is willing to switch over.Whenever an alt joins your guild, make sure the officer who invites them puts their main character's name in the officer's comments section of the guild UI. Assuming you've set up your ranks properly, you'll be able to see who's playing that level 12 Draenei warrior or which member is leveling up a Blood Elf paladin to help out with raids. And speaking of ranks . . .
I have to change-- I'm logging out
Kayholder found a level 70 character on the Armory (hi, Subdural from Alexstraza) wearing all kinds of junk, and asks how the guy even got to level 50, much less 70. But the answer from another WoW LJer mentioned something I've never heard before either: "logout clothes."No way. I know players were concerned about being spied on in the Armory when it first came out, but are you guys really putting on a logout set before you exit the game? This guy's a shadow priest, but he doesn't have any arena ratings that I can see, and he's Exalted with the AV faction (not that hard), and only Honored with the other two, so who is he hiding his gear from? Does he not want Magtheridon scouring the Armory to see who's coming to get him this weekend?Seriously, do you guys really do this? Is it that important to hide your gear that you have to carry around a completely separate set to put on every time you log out? And even if you do, can't people see your set while you're wearing it? All they'd have to do, I'd think, is wait for you to log on, and then check the Amory to see what you were wearing (or heck, just go find you in game). Do any of you really use "logout clothes"? And for the love of Thrall, why?
Fun and games with the new Armory
Poking around the new and updated Armory, I found a whole new way to obsess about equipment upgrades for my feral druid. The versatility of the new functions is quite mind blowing. Here are few tricks I found to get the most out of this new tool. Say you are heading into Mana Tombs with a pick up group. You can instantly search the boss drops so you know what may be in store for you. Nothing new there, right? But now you can filter the search specifically for your class. Not good enough? Hit the "predefined filters" button and you will see a drop down menu of filters based on your classes available specs. For example, as a druid, my predefined filters are: Druid Tank Druid Melee DPS Druid Caster DPS. Druid Healer If I choose Druid Melee DPS, it brings up advanced filters for Crit Rating, Feral Attack Power and Attack power. I can set the minimum for each of those variables and have it show me what's left. And that's just the PvE options. There are separate choices for PvP specs as well.
CTProfiles is shutting down
WoW Insider reader Rakuen sent us a tip about a posting on the CTProfiles forums from the beginning of the month. It seems that even before this Tuesday's change to the Armory, the writing was on the wall for CTProfiles. In fact, if you try to go to the main site, you're redirected to the forum with this posting.From the post:It has finally got to the point where it's simply too much work to 'fix' things. With several offers of help, only a few minor things were ever completed, and leaving Cide as the only coder was just not enough to get out from the overwhelming load. We're not happy to see things not working, but it just isn't feasible to attempt to fix them. We still feel there is a very viable use for a custom profiling site, even with the armory out. The armory can't help you compare your crafted set to tier4 or 5, nor your arena gear vs. misc. pieces. We've started a very early stage of development for a CTProfiles2.0 project, which is essentially a complete recode, however we won't be releasing it any time soon. Our focus is going to be shifted back to CTMod, and we'll be working on a new unannounced mod that's been in the works for a few weeks, CT_RaidAssist2.0, some fixes and updates to older mods, and we'll continue to go from there. As for development of the CTP2 site, I won't even set an estimate of when we'd be starting work on it again. So, what's your take on CTProfiles shutting down? Did you ever get a chance to use this site? What will you miss, and what are you looking forward to seeing the CT team do next?
The Armory changeth
Recently some new features were added to the Armory section of the World of Warcraft website. These changes were put up yesterday, and there is enough here that it's worth taking a second look at. There are lots of nifty new features that make this site a whole lot more useful to players. I can't say whether or not it is yet a contender to the database sites, but we're definitely getting there. The first thing to notice is that the arena team standards can now be visible when you search for teams via the armory. Not only can you see who you came up against, but you can also see their fearsome (and sometimes comical) emblems. It's also nice to see that rating has been replaced by a relevance column. It seems to make more sense that way, and doesn't leave you wondering what you could possibly do to improve your rating.
