How to: Be.Imba
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.
My third opinion.
Ok, so now after a long thought process after the release of 3.2, I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I don’t so much mind that Blizzard revamped the Emblem system to make older content more appealing to “geared” players, however I feel the addition of the daily heroic (and soon to be weekly raid) quests are bad for the game.
I don’t want to feel that I must run old content to get current tier gear. I think the addition of EoTriumph’s to the weekly raid heroic was a mistake, and should have just been two extra conquests. If you run one ToC lockout, you get 15 Emblems of Triumph. Doing the daily heroic each day, net’s you 14 EoTs each week.
I think its perfectly reasonable to offer “free access” to the previous tier of gear, having heroic emblems be Conquest and ToC dropping Triumph.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not being elitist. ToC isn’t hard and its pugged several times a day on my realm (I usually pug it 2-3 times a week on my alts), but I don’t feel that a players gear progression should be held to how many heroics he runs each week.
*rant over*
PS – Trying to get up the material for my Tank Grid/UI post, but having started a new job, I’m a little inundated with work right now.
Blizzard’s folly
In WotLK, Blizzard changed their design philosophy regarding gear progression. Items dripping in 5 man heroics, are of equal “quality” as items dropped from ten man raids.
Now granted I see the design conflicts with the way they have set up the Emblems. If heroics and 10 man raids (referred to simply as raids further in this post) dropped differbt quality gear but the same Emblems, one would devaule the other. Either heroics would yield “over budget” Emblems, able to obtain raid quality gear at heroic level of effort, or raids your drop undervalued tokens that would be a waste of time.
However making them both drop equal gear and equal Emblems has it’s own issues. With heroic reset timers being 1 day and raid timers being 7 days, you can start to get a picture of what a new 80 is going to be doing more. Once the heroic gear is obtained, and (under the BC mantra) they are now “raid ready”, they are quickly let down that the raid gear is either a small upgrade at all or simply a side-grade (if at all). This leads to player boredom (I’ll touch on that subject in my already foreshadowed post regarding raid motivations). Once the bosses are killed once or twice the content stagnates and tension arises. Raid live off of progression (mostly).
My solutions to the problem are either:
1) increasing EoH item costs, and additionally rewarding better loot in raids/EoH, while also increasing the number of EoH dropped from raid bosses.
2) implementing a seperate Emblem for heroic content. This option would be more time consuming and isn’t really worth the effort.
To explore option 1 some more. Blizzard is introducing a new Emblem for new tiers of content. This will mostly settle the issue of 10 man raid rewards not competing with existing player gear. While I do think this is a good idea, I do not like having to live through 6 months of a single tier of content with people as frustrated and bored as they are.