f13.net

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/?#index.xml

Just made CTProfiles obsolete.

Edit: Bah @ Flash Player 8+ and being at work.

Double Edit: lol @ 400+ entries for "Legolas", I'm fairly certain this only searchs active accounts.

Buggy as fuck. Needs a lot more work.

yep, i cant seem to get it to show any kind of user profile on my machine,  Just loads an empty page with some logo's at the top

Their XML is borked.  Probably works ok in some version of IE 6 or something.

Could be, on the Mac I get nowhere with Firefox at all. Safari works until you select a guild, character or whatever, then returns a page that says "You have encountered an error." On the PC, both Firefox and IE return a page with a blank 'wood effect' panel.

I can search for a character of name X, but I can't specify the server?  What the shit?

At least it gives you a relevance rating. Which is to say that higher level people are more relevant than you.

I am the most relevant Rasix... with a wood panel.

I was kinda hoping to see how good their interface was, because this sounded like a great way to show gear layouts/talent builds (as well as how they effect your stats). Got a blank panel for my toon and all the others I tried on various servers. Too bad, maybe the service is getting hammered?

My two characters are the most relevant Nonentitys.

Funny how this comes right on the heels of Rupture's unveiling.

That's what I'm figuring.  It's on the login window right now, and probably the main wow page.  That's a lot of hits, as we saw with the talent calculators every time they were released.

Worked for me.  Pretty neat.

I want to be able to opt out of this, no one needs to know that I like to pick all the pretty flowers, my darkest secrets are now exposed.

Hmmm (http://armory.wow-europe.com/?#character-sheet.xml?r=Earthen+Ring&n=Silnakh)


Worked for me too.  Nice.

The thing works for me, but it reroutes me to the German version by default.


German translations piss me off.

Hrm.  My 25 druid isn't in the DB.  I can log into WoW and see her, but not in the Armory.


Try adjusting preferred language settings in your browser to put en-us above de.

--
Alkiera

Wow.. made the mistake of going to the official forums to see if anything was being said about the inability to access certain pages. (Like all my character's sheets don't show.)

Instead there's an assult of "OMG BLIZZ INVADED MY PRIVACY BY SHOWING MY ITEMS" posts.  wtf?

Yeah.  Except, it's not 'their' items... it's their character's items, and their character is still property of Blizzard.  Blizaard can do whatever they want with their own data.

--
Alkiera

I'm running IE7 on my pc at work.
I queried my mage, got the error page.
Tried again, got a listing of my character and one other with the same name.
In my character's row, I clicked on the name of my guild, got the error page.
Hit the Back button, got the error page.

So it looks like it's working, but it's not up to the task of having millions of data-hungry users hitting it on its launch day.
They'll have to optimize it some ;)

I'm sure that more than one person is annoyed that their little fibs are exposed... like the hunter I spoke to the other day who claimed to have 120 more AP and 2% more crit than his profile is showing. Good times.

who wants to take over / under on the mean time for someone to make a plugin that crawls that site, and checks for names of people you are currently grouped with, so you can tell if they are doing things like rolling on stuff they already have in the instance you are running?

It's pretty interesting, you can look up the spec of the warrior that wants to tank for you and say, can you tank this? They can say yes and you can laugh at them in their Fury spec.  Or ponder the Pali with no first aid skill. Or look up the spec of the person who just destroyed you in PVP. That is where it really shines.

Needless to say, I'm not sure I like it.

Yep, it's gonna be pretty sweet to finally see how many of my big-talking DPSers in raids are completely full of shit. Then, my fun begins.  :evil:

Any guesses on how much advertising revenue will be lost by the fan sites that were serving the same purpose in the past?  I'd think that's where the real story is. 

Nobody actually reads the EULA, so get a lot of uninformed wankers on the forums. Blizzard could decide at any moment to trash your items and put you in a tutu with a message that says "Polly Prissy Pants" should the impulse strike them. You have no rights in the game other than the right not to be harrassed by other players.

I would resub to WoW at double the monthly fee if they'd do that to a few loudmouth powergamers every day. 

Yeah I know that and have known it for lord knows how long, probably since the first MUD I ever played and the Admins there laid it out for the players in about the same terms.  I guess it still surprises me when I find out how many people DON'T know that.


Oh yes, that will be incredibly fun.  Well, unless they're like me and use Wardrobe to equip 'city gear' and always log out in a city.  All you'll see on my profiles are little black dresses and base stats.  (I'm a damn dirty closet RPer, search for Sabilene or Ayarae)

Still, it beats what we were doing with it in /guild last night.  Finding out how many other people are using the same name.  (I'm unique!)

Sadly, not only am I not unique -- I'm not even on the first page. There's me (http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/?#character-sheet.xml?r=Argent+Dawn&n=Kalan) -- I haven't logged on in several weeks, so you see...nothing. :)

Yeah I get a "refresh needed" page.

Here is me. (http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Hellscream&n=Gloom)  I am also not a special snowflower, but I did make the middle of the front page.

edit Weird, their links don't take me straight to the character, but the search instead.

edit edit  Ahh it throws a ? in the link before "character-sheet" remove that, and it'll go straight to your profile.

I'm one of three Paelos in Wow. I used to be the only one, but there are two new Dranei's who decided to steal it.

Maybe "Paelos" is "Drizzt" in Draenic.

4 other Grishaks on various servers, but it put me at the top  :-D It says I need a refresh...played last night, for christ's sake. Only 1 Anyaala though, so I am still a unique snowflake.

That's a low blow and you know it. Ass.  :x

PS: I hate elves.

How can there be 400 Legolases (Legolii?).  100 servers = 100 unique names (or maybe one for Horde and one for Alliance so 200).  Probably picking up Legolass, Legolasss, Legolasohyeah, Legolasforealz, etc

Yeah I don't see any of my characters from my cancelled accounts on there.

Edit: reworded

I am 3 of the 4 Alkiera's.  The 4th is a blood elf pally.  Bloody name thief.  8)  I'm also 3 of the 8 Kelner's.

Altaholic?  Who, me?

--
Alkiera

I'm the only Ycef.

On the other point. Whether or not Blizzard CAN show this information is not the point. The point is that a lot of people want the option to keep it private, and WoW is still a subscription service, so Blizzard have some good reasons to listen and keep their customers happy.

It's updated as you log off, so I would imagine that might be why you don't see yourself on there.

I imagine you will start seeing a lot of people logging off only wearing a dress.

This looks really nice, I hope they don't pull an SOE and try to nickel and dime for it.

I can't really understand any practical reason why people wouldn't want their characters shown other than lying about spec or equipment. Am I missing something?

Lying about their spec would be a huge one I would think.

"Group looking for Protection warrior."

Random fury warrior with 5 points in protection says "Prot war here!"

How did you come up with 100 servers? There are currently 222 servers in the North America / Oceanic region.

In PvP, there is a certain value in knowing someone's exact spec.  But WoW PvP is so consequence-free, I think only the drama queens should really care that much.

Yeah, but in things like the arena, being about to pull that up beforehand might help.  Or if you keep running into the same guy while hunting/questing in a contested area.  I can kinda see a desire for some secrecy... but on the other hand, after the first fight or two you can probably tell what their spec is anyway.

I'd guess most of the complaining is the e-peen crowd who doesn't want their actual size posted on the web.

--
Alkiera

Makes for some entertaining new wastes of time too - the latest nerf post:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=79166617&sid=1

Notice Hunter right the fuck there at the bottom? Makes me giggle at all the "NERF HUNTER!" shit from patch 2.0. Every hunter and their mom looked at the 61-70 gear and realized it was fucking downhill from there. (Ironically, overpowered 60 hunters will never be a problem again -- you'd need the 60 PvP set or T1/T2 gear -- not worth getting with the TBC shit right there...)

Maybe we can get a boost, once they've beaten pallies into bloody submission. (I feel sorry for the poor paladins. Anyone who managed to level one of those fuckers deserves the power. I gave up on mine at level 20.

Surprised to see Druids so low -- I suspect that's a function of their relative popularity. Until 2.0, there weren't a lot druids. Seeing hunters -- one of the most popular classes, prior to TBC -- rated lower than druids after weighting for class population is pretty staggering.

It doesn't actually tell you about their relative worth in PvP directly, but it gives you an idea of their perceived value. Nobody is looking for hunters for (the better) PvP groups, which is somewhat sad, since they sure as hell aren't looking for them for PvE groups either. Although hunters still have useful ranged DPS, it isn't chart topping, and it certainly isn't bursty any more. Their DPS now functions to a very high degree from cast shots, requiring them to stand still, making the dead zone pretty crippling. Running around and firing off weak arcane shots against opponents with huge health pools makes them little more than an annoyance. Its easier to go greater damage while kiting as a mage or warlock. The very high number of hunters, the ease of leveling them without using any of their skills and the comparitive complexity of the class makes it highly likely that any given hunter will be a dribbling idiot unable to properly function.

I'm not sure why druids are so far down the list - they are another comparitively complex class, and one that's had a reasonable population surge (presumably of mostly dribbling idiots who solo feral to 70) due to the perception of  thembeing overpowered. However, they're much more functionally useful in PvP. They may not be as hard to kill while they are healing as a paladin healer is, do the damage of a rogue, but they are very adpatable and can be pretty annoying to kill if they're being played well. Also, having the ability to shape change out of most forms of CC makes them difficult to handle. Must be the dribbling idiot thing. And the fact that most of them are elves.

The stats do have some issues, in that many people seem to disagree with the weighting by world poplation ratios.  In that paladins are only recently available to the horde, so their are relatively few lvl 70's, but most of the horde Arena teams contain one.  That artificially inflates their indexed scores.  Whereas the reverse is true for, say, hunters.  Yes, there are fewer of them in arena teams (dead zone and LoS issues in arenas were both brought up), but there are zillions of them at lvl 70, because they are a very popular PvE class.

That of the top few classes scored by this, the #1 and #3 are classes that only recently became available to both sides, and the #2 class is one that people claim are very hard to find in general. (tho the numbers I pulled don't reflect that about the priest, which is an interesting psych/sociology thing)

So I dropped his data into excel, and derived the class population factors he was using, and unapplied them to the final results.  It was.. interesting.

I think that last column is a more realistic index.  It shows the importance of healing in GvG PvP, without artificially inflating the numbers for pally/shaman.  Ironically, druids went even lower... I think there must be fewer lvl 70 druids than people seem to think, or so the population factor seems to bear out.  Also, in GvG, their versatility is perhaps not perceived as important when compared to their 'not as good as the class they resemble' effect.  Specialization 4tw, or something.

--
Alkiera

Something I've always wondered about arenas...are there any sort of anti-stealth precautions?  Rogue/druid v. Rogue/druid teams could get pretty boring if everyone is invisible and circle strafing to find others.  And if there are measures, it seems that would really really gimp rogues and ferals as that opener is a big part of their arsenal. 

I think I read that after a certain amount of time, a perception buff spawns that lets you see invis.

I'll share here, what I've seen and heard about the top tier pvp (5v5 arena) I also did some research on the forums and on armory the other night so I'm fairly confident in this.  There are basically 4 tiers of 5v5 arena classes.

1st Tier:
Warrior and Pally.

Both of these are on average in every single top group.  Pally is obvious, plate, heals, bubble = 4tw.  Warriors despite many telling me how their gear was weak compared to pre-TBC still are great for damage, also mortal strike is crucial.

2nd Tier:
Mage and Priest.

These are in almost every group, but there are combinations running pally/druid, dual pally or pally/shaman.  Also while dual mage has been showing up sometimes they get dropped by a few teams who are running a class from the next tier instead.  If I was currently playing 5v5 arena I'd plan to face mage/priest/pally/warrior +1 as a general rule of thumb hands down.  It'll be interesting to see what happens after the priest nerfs (which priests I know say are a big pvp deal) but right now they still get lots of pvp love.  Mages have two ice blocks and the best burst dps in the game to thank for their popularity.

3rd Tier:
Shaman, Hunter, Rogue.

Shaman are way more popular then Druids, Hunter and Rogues are interchangeable and in many lineups I saw on armory they are interchanged judging from the numbers.  Not a single group I looked at (most top 5 teams) ran two of any of these classes.  Many of them were not a-team members.

4th Tier:

Warlocks and Druids get about half the love of 3rd tier classes.  Warlocks swear it is because they are always primed and can't survive.  The irony that the two imba classes in everyone's mind dont fit into the early 5v5 metagame is sort of fun.  I'm sort of surprised on the druid front I would expect them to get more play.


Oh also the best 3v3 team imo is:  Warlock, Priest, Rogue.  The difference between 5 and 3 people targeting the first called target are huge according to my Warlock buddy.  In 3v3 its impossible to burn down a good lock before the priest can get off some healing.  If you go for the priest the lock can cast and bring the hurt.  Also rogues are so much more effective in small scale even if they aren't l33t pvp'ers.  Its too bad the 2v2 and 3v3 brackets are such an afterthought as they cater to such different strategies and class builds.  But at the same time the guilds winning 5v5 are winning 3v3 and 2v2 also.

My favorite armory info though is how dominate pvp servers are over their pve counterparts.  Proving that stereotype to be based in fact.  I haven't seen anyone actually compile all the numbers yet but in the battle group I care about most the PvP servers are DOMINATING all but I believe 1 spot of the top 20 5v5 teams.

Also some individual servers are obviously miles past the competition, which is interesting with all the transferring and rerolling guilds have done over the last couple years, it appears that pvp'ers claiming they wanted good competition wasn't entirely bullshit and some people do want a challenge not just sheep to bitchslap around.

Fear not though, there are people winning with some interesting lineups at least at this point.

Er.. proving what stereotype? That PVPers pvp more and are therefore better at it?

The folks who WERE top PvPers on my server haven't bothered with Arenas and don't bother with even the BGs anymore.  PvE players are.. um.. PvEing.  PvP was a distraction/ something to fill the time between raids.  Given that everyone's in "Farm Karazhan and  Heroics" mode, this trend isn't surprising.

About the only PvP I even get see people get involved in anymore is the world stuff.  Great fun fighting the people you know again, rather than the unknown Horde from another server.   

QED your post belongs on the official WoW forums.

Here's a sterotype for someone to track:  Do all night elves suck ass at PVP, or is it just my perception?  I've never been killed by a night elf that wasn't "level ??" to me or who didn't appear as I was fighting a bunch of mobs.  Basically, I'm not very good at PVP but I've never had a night elf win a fight with me that wasn't ludicrously stacked in their favor from the start.

Some days I wonder when, exactly, did the Sinij brain virus infect WUA.

 :-D

Same. I like how Calantus shows up nothing though. I've never ever ever had my name taken since I started using it in the late 90s, it's pretty cool to never have it stolen. Hell, even I don't use it sometimes (and none of my WoW mains were Calantus).


That is actually pretty accurate from what I'm hearing from the PVPers I used to play with too.

I'm hearing that there's basically 2 types of teams: 2 healers and 3 healers. In both cases the healer base is the paladin and priest combo, with a third healer generally being a shaman or a 2nd paladin. The main 2 offence characters are the warrior and the mage, with the groups tending to be made around one of the other, or both. If the warrior is the focus, the group tends to be 3 healers and another melee (rogue/warrior) to emphasise the staying power of non-mana offence. If the mage is the focus the group tends to be 2 healers to allow more offence to burn quickly before mana runs out, with the 2 other offence being some combination of mage/warrior/warlock (the warlock mostly existing to tank so the real offence is free to go off). The hybrid mage/warrior tends to go control by adding another mage or warlock.

Druids and hunters don't factor in unless you know really good people who play that class. Warlocks and rogues tend to go in as compliments to the real offence classes.

It's not surprising though. In most of the 5v5 games that used to exist before arenas the star line-up was priest+(paladin/shaman)+warrior+mage+(warlock/warrior) and anybody who did different was experimenting or had to settle with what they had.


He's right though. I know lots of people who rolled on PVP servers and dislike open PVP, but rolled PVP because they expected to have more/better competition and fellow PVP advocates to play with. I know I did. Infact I had this conversation a month or so before BC with someone I used to PVP with who was thinking of rerolling PVE but was worried he wouldn't have enough good and enthusiastic PVPers to play with. It's just simple fact, people who really want to PVP and compete tend to roll PVP servers because that's what they're for. PVEers aren't as good on average because they just don't want to be (on average).

My guess is most druids you see in the Arena's are Feral DPS/Cyclone bots, I'm half certain paladins can't bubble out of cyclone, have to test that myself on day.

Druid healing isn't very keen for PvP. It is either too slow or too inefficient, so your heal never lands or you are oom too fast. Also while in heal mode, you are as squishy as a priest, if not more so. Have no idea how Tree of Life fares in the arena but my guess is not so good.

There simply aren't very many druids to begin with really.

I wonder how many 5v5 teams include an affliction warlock to mess up paladins. Out of all the classes [save maybe priest mass dispel], they have the best tools to deal with them... of course they're soooo squishy it might not be worth it (hi mr. undead mutilate rogue with COS!).


-- Z.

Warlocks (esp affliction) are like this in the arena:

The longer the fight, the more powerful.

Thus.

They all get killed first.

Thus.

They are pretty much not wanted in 5v5.

I 2v2 with a mage. 15second fight he does 15k damage I do 1-5k. And longer and I catch up then overtake him. I had one fight where I did 60k damage (against a holy and shadow priest team)

I know, my main is an affliction warlock. :P (37/3/21, gimp pve spec)
I duo with a feral druid, and it's not really an effective group makeup. Sure, we wreck unusual setups like mage+mage or mage+warlock [and even rough up druid+rogue groups... paranoia + druid gloves stealth detection buff = love], but any group with a rogue/hunter/warrior in it just takes me out of the picture too damn fast. Warrior-paladin groups otoh would be very beatable, if I respecced to 41 affliction. (we can almost beat them now, but dispelling roots, fear, and my dots means they win the efficiency race in the end). But we are just playing a few matches whenever the mood strikes me, don't want to get into the 2000+ bracket or anything. I'll say though, for all the crying about overpowered warlocks, they certainly don't seem to do too hot in a group situation when compared to others.

Anyway, 2v2 tends to be very gimmicky, and a lot of matches are determined by the matchup itself (that same 2 frost mage group that didn't pose a problem for us would annihilate a 2-rogue group, which in turn would kick our ass, etc.). I imagine the same is true of 3v3 to a lesser extent [those groups will probably have a healer... a lot of 2v2 groups don't].


-- Z.

Addons can't interact with outside sources of data. The addon can't interactively take a name from in-game and look it up in the armory. Now you could compile the data beforehand and then load that up when you load WoW. So when you click on "Arrowgorn" who says he's a protection warrior, you can see at least when you last compiled the data that he was a fury warrior.

My guild uses www.rpgoutfitter.com because it includes what characters have which crafting recipes and it also shows what is in the guild's vault character's banks.

A compiled list would work since you could just do L70's on yer server.