Everyone knows about the Armory, but all it does is give you the same data you see in game. What if there was a website that could take all that, look over it for you, and give you tips and tricks on ways to improve your character? ZOMG! It exists! In this post I’m going to be going over a recent audit of my Druid* and my Paladin to show you how to understand the website: Be.Imba.hu.

*Ignore the fact that he’s in two different sets of gear, these screenshots were taken over a short period of time.

Upon visiting the site you’ll see a form to input your region, realm, and character data. If you want to register for an account (its free) you can get a few extra benefits including guild and group reports, as well as forcing an update from the armory (avoiding cached data). After you’ve got your character in there, hit the Query Report button and it’ll fetch your character and process its (currently equipped) gear.

After the site has fetched your character, and “had its way with it”, it will display a quick summary of the gear and enchants near the top of the page. This will contain a quick overview of issues with the character, and the gear they are wearing. Right below that information is a list of the enchants, and any suggestions or upgrades that might be available.

By clicking on the “accepted”, “missing”, or (hope not) “improper” enchants heading, you can reveal a list of all the non-ideal enchants on your character, and by clicking the “…” after an enchant that needs improvement, you will be given options for upgrades. Please look at this information with a smart mind, sometimes they aren’t always good choices (particularly for weapon enchants). One particular thing to watch out for is Titanium Weapon Chain. While it does offer hit rating, disarm reduction obviously isn’t useful at all in PvE, therefore if you need the hit Accuracy is a much better option, however Berserking or Mighty Spellpower are usually better options (for dps or healing).

Right below that section you’ll see the gem breakdown, this will let you know what stats you’ve gemmed for, any missed socket bonuses (that you may or may not care about), low quality (“green”) gems in your gear, and finally and empty sockets that you have.

Now to move on to the Gear-O-Meter (which I have conveniently switched characters for). In this shot you’ll see what instances are “recommended” for you character in your current set up. This again should be taken with a bit of leniency, as what instances a person can run is largely dependent on the rest of the group. However this will give you a good idea of where your upgrades are going to be available from.

Finally is the characters raid history. This section provides a few pie charts (mmm pie) of your characters raiding history. I find this section more useful when I’m looking at new recruits for my guild, as I can see where they’ve been, how far they’ve gotten, and how many times they’ve done that.

When you hover over a raid instance, you get the breakdown of all the bosses, as well as how many kills your character has for those.

They haven’t added 3.3 support yet, so hopefully we’ll see that soon.

I’ll be posting a followup to this soon with an addon that has some what similar functionality, I’m just not at a computer with WoW installed at the moment.

We’ve got a few patches headed our way. Tomorrow, we are supposedly getting patch 3.0.9. This brings about a few class changes, some spell changes, and a few other minor things.

Now me being a paladin, I am greatly looking forward to 30-minute seals. I don’t know why this wasn’t changed back when shaman weapon imbues were lengthened.

When this came up, it made me think, why haven’t they made Righteous Fury undispellable? I think the largest reason is the position of Improved Righteous Fury in the protection talent tree. Its way too low for the benefit it gives. Making this undispellable would allow ret to have a permanent 6% damage reduction, since they will already be deep in prot for Imp HoJ.

The next patch to head our way, will likely be 3.1. Dev’s have already started releasing information about this patch. Lots of class changes, some bigger things have been announced. Replenishment has been given to more classes. I agree with Josh about the effects this has on raids. In my opinion, if Blizzard makes a buff “mandatory”, it should just be scrapped and baked in, like Blessing of Salvation was, and hopefully with 3.1 Blessing of Sanctuary. If I’m throwing together a 10 man for Ulduar, and I somehow, don’t have one of the 4 classes that give Replenishment in my optimal set up, I’m going to have to bench one of my good raiders simply to fill a buff slot. This goes against Blizzard’s “bring the player, not the class” mentality of Wrath of the Lich King.

Additionally in 3.1, Blizzard has announced Dual Specializations will be delivered. From what has been said by dev’s this will give you two talent specs that are your “permanent specs” and you can switch between these freely, in town and more than likely in the “prep time” for PvP matches. Now they have said it won’t be free out of town, but not prohibitively expensive, since people could just port/summon out of the instance and back to town.

Blizz has states they don’t want any mandatory classes in a raid. They have supported this with overlapping buffs from different classes as well as reworks of a few mechanics.

Tanking was the “sort of” focal point of the mechanics changes in WotLK. Crushing blows were removed, Deathknights were added, (protection) Paladins were completely reworked, among other things. Any time there are drastic changes, habits and patterns often get opened up to change. However, peoples choices are not always 100% pure and unbiased. Many people still hold what was true in The Burning Crusade, and even back to Original content as true today. Paladins and Druids have gained huge buffs since those days, and some people are beginning to accept some of what new information is out there, while others cling to old concepts and refuse to open an eye to see what’s out there.

In Wrath of the Lich King there are four tanking classes, Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Deathknights. Now that crushing blows have been removed, the line between the classes has been blurred to a certain degree. Paladins and Warriors can use shields, while the other two tanks cannot. In WotLK Block Value has shot through the roof. At the peak of my (boss) gear, I might have been a bit over 300 BV in TBC. Now in Wrath I am just shy of 1,400 BV completely unbuffed, and in a raid setting I can reach up to 2,000 BV. Additionally, WotLK did not bring with it a “huge” stamina jump like we saw in The Burning Crusade. Therefore boss damage numbers haven’t scaled quite as fast, and blocking a hit can significantly up your overall damage mitigation.

Druids compensate for this with very large health pools, and larger than normal armor ratings. Bringing their mitigation almost up to a Warrior or Paladin. However their high HP pool is there simply because they take much less consistent damage. They have dodge, miss, or full-hit on their incoming combat table. Deathknights have a similar situation, however they add parry to the list.

Paladins and Warriors can shave off another 1-2.5k from those hits. Warriors can also get a “critical block” for two times their block value (albeit not very frequently). Paladis are the only class that can (with a little raid gear) consistently block every I coming hit (that isn’t avoided). This brings their (physical) mitigation to the smoothest of all tanks.

People that raided pre-BC still have it stuck in their minds that Warriors are the end-all tank. However I feel the playing field is much more even, if not slightly leaning towards paladin MT’ing. I’ve gotten into several raids and been designated to OT duty (damn pugs), until the warrior (who has less health and avoidance) gets smashed by the boss.

Wrapping up, anybody reading this, please try to educate people that the scene has changed and sometimes there is a better choice than what worked in the past.

PS – maybe “Bring the player, not the class” is true, and I am just that leet. LOL!

One of the original posts I wanted to write for this blog was a discussion about the different kinds of people that make up particular classes.

I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.

In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.

This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.