The Armory is Your Friend!

[Drafty]

The WoW Armory has been around (and continues to be in beta) for a long time, and everybody knows it as a great database from which you can look up yourself and other people. I use it most often when I hear guildies in an instance complaining about a player not pulling his weight, which is when I "pull the guy's card." There's just a tremendous amount of data on there, particularly in the Statistics section of a player profile (which I refer to as "the card"), and it will tell you how many times the player has downed any of the major bosses in any instance since the launch of Lich King.

But I'm not going to talk about how to read an Armory card, because it's generally self-explanatory. That's the oldest section and the most polished. Today, we'll be talking about the new items in Patch 3.2, and how you can find them all by yourself, without having to sift through the drivel you might find on various websites like MMO Champion, or having to go through the editorial mumbo-jumbo at WowInsider. No, we just want straight information, and we're going to do it without Wowhead.

*It should be noted that this is the only non-Blizzard website you should ever frequent.*

Blizzard gives you all of the information now. It seems they've realized that the WoW data files get mined for information by various websites, and it doesn't make any sense for Blizzard to have people going to non-Blizzard websites. There's no upside for Blizzard to send people to outside sites, since those sites often have giant Adobe Flash ads for competing MMO's, outside of just coding the Armory to do what Wowhead's item database essentially does.

So, what we're going to look at today, as an example, is loot from the new Trial of the Champion. What I tend to do, when I'm searching for potential loot from an instance (in the rare occasion that I run one) is, I start out on the main Armory page, and then I hover my mouse pointer over the Items button, underneath the search box, and I go straight to the bottom of the list for Advanced Item Search, which brings you to this page. At the moment, it's blank, and we're not going to be typing anything in this box, because we don't have to.

Here, we're going to assume that I'm just going to suck it up and attempt to do the normal five-man version of Trial of the Champion, because I'm wholly underqualified to do anything more robust than that.

So, if you click on the Sources button, you'll find a number of options, and we're going to be hitting the Dungeons and Raid Drops choice, which then creates another button below that. We obviously want to choose out of that menu the Trial of the Champion option, but take note of the fact that every instance in the game is listed here. Check out the Molten Core gear sometime for a good laugh.

Anyway, we want to check Trial of the Champion, then All Bosses, since I presumably want to finish the instance, and finally click the button below that to change the option to Normal Only, since I won't be attempting the Heroic difficulty at this time. By clicking the Search button, you should arrive at this screen, and you can start checking it all out.

It should be added that you can, of course, narrow down your search by individual boss, so you can check what drops exclusively off of the Black Knight, which would bring you to this page.

If you start thinking, "Well, that's still a bit much data to sift through," while you're doing your searching, you can tick the Advanced Options on, which is above the Search button, and choose your class from the list, and even your class role. I'll be searching for drops that a Priest might enjoy from the Black Knight on normal mode, and this is what I get. It's only four items, but I didn't have to read anything to find out what my potential loot might be.

Sure, the Armory's a little buggy. I find that I have to re-tick every search field every time I go digging through the system, but that's what we get for free stuff that Blizzard decides to lavish upon us. It always initially starts as something that's only marginally functional, and it gets more polished over time, and I'm sure this section will eventually work at least as well as the Armory cards that I so love to pull for my guildmates.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get myself a Mantle of Inconsolable Fear.

[Tora]

Speaking in terms of looking up gear, Atlas Loot is a very handy add-on. Usually when I'm looking for upgrades, I use Atlas Loot to browse. It can have its downfalls like not being able to view certain items you have not seen. In that case, it is better to use the armory.

I mainly use the armory for looking at people's gear and specs. Besides that when I'm not in game I'll log into the armory to check status on the calendar for raids. I do agree, though, a lot of people over look the helpfulness of it.