The World of Warcraft Armory site has not been updating for many members of my guild recently. Sometimes the information is out of date and sometimes there is no information at all. Blizzard has confirmed an issue with the Armory data and states that an upcoming maintenance to the servers this week should fix it.
I was asked question on how to retrieve item information in my World of Warcraft Armory Data Item Update entry and thought I would give a couple of ideas here.
There are a couple of ways that I can see doing this and it really depends on your setup and intent for the data. If you want to mine all the data the item-info.xml takes in one parameter which is i and is an unique integer value for the item. Taking a quick look at my profile the highest value is 33522 and my lowest value is 5976. So you could easily setup a loop to loop from 1 to 40000 and should get the majority of items. The thing to note is this will get you every item including vendor trash.
Another approach would be to only retrieve item data for items that you are using in your dataset. For instance a small guild site where the web host might limit the size of a database. To pull this information, I would use the character profiles of the guild. Items appear in several places on the character-sheet.xml. Specifically they are in the item node under the attributes gem0Id, gem1Id, gem2Id and id. Building off of the character sheet will reduce the total size of the item inventory. This method does require a little more maintenance. For instance patches that change items or when players stop equipping items that have already been recorded. So wiping the dataset periodically would not be a bad idea.
I hit a milestone this week on my Paladin. Last night we dropped Nightbane and for my first time since we have been clearing Karazhan for 6 months now, the breastplate drops. The irony is badge 74 and 75 dropped off him. So I passed to our warrior who had also been waiting a long time for it too. I picked up the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian in town and gemmed it with the gems I had on reserve. The upgraded moved me from 14.9k health to 15.3k. I still have to get the 150 health enchant and that will take me to 15.5k health unbuffed. My next focus will be to add a little more spell damage to help with threat.
The World of Warcraft Armory has gotten a shortened URL. You can now use http://www.wowarmory.com/ instead of the longer http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com. With the update they also improved on the size of some the XML files and made some structure changes to the XML.
Had a fun night tonight. I tanked several bosses in our cleanup run of Karazhan tonight. They included Prince Malchezaar, Terestian Illhoof, Maiden of Virtue and Attumen the Huntsman.
Now most people would say that is great, every warrior does that. Will that is where this is different. I am a tankadin or protection spec paladin. The other neat thing is I did all the tanking solo without the help of a second tank.
We wiped the first time on prince as we got boxed in on a couple of unlucky infernal drops but the second time went smooth. Maiden of Virtue was a pain because of the silence but I managed to stay ahead on the threat meter. Attumen and Midnight were fun as I got to tank both bosses while they were separated.
Overall a fun evening and very challenging but also nice to show the guild a tankadin can MT just fine.
Patch 2.2 is now up on the PTR and two of the most notable updates from a paladin standpoint is:
If you are a paladin, how long have you been waiting for an update like that? That is just awesome and will save some silver not having to buy reagents as often.
Check out more of the patch 2.2 notes on WoWInsider.
WoWRoster.net has one of the best free World of Warcraft guild management systems. I was actually trying to get it setup for my guild before the Armory data became available. One of the important pieces of WoWRoster is the image pack that relates to the items in a character's profile. Check out their image pack download for use with your custom Armory data pages.
This is a follow-up to one of my previous entries about World of Warcraft Armory Data. In this entry I will focus on the newly added Item pages which add a wealth of information about the items in game with the ability to even search for upgrades.
Been having fun soloing the first two bosses in Ramparts and the first boss in Blood Furnace. Being a protection paladin does have some advantages. The only other classes I have seen to solo parts of Ramparts are feral druids and hunters. I have seen feral druids and warlocks solo up to the first boss in Blood Furnace. With tons of armor, defense and stamina it is pretty easy to seal/judge light and outlast. Going to try the final boss in Ramparts this weekend.
Of course screen shots or it didn't happen:
Ramparts: Boss 1 Boss 2 Blood Furnace: Boss 1
Nerf Pallies!
The World of Warcraft Armory site has been updated this week with several cool enhancements. My favorite is the ability to look for upgrades to existing equipment. Simply hover over an equipment slot and a little arrow will show up and when you hover over the arrow a box will expand with a link to search for upgrades. The page you get lists all the equipment that would be an upgrade for that particular item. Playing a paladin, I did notice a mix of gear but the majority and highest ranking gear was based on my talent choices which is pretty cool. The listing also shows where you can get the gear which makes it a lot easier to plan ahead.
The other addition that is noteworthy is the ability to compare profiles. Clicking on the push pin in the "Profile Selected" box in the upper right hand corner will store the currently selected player's profile. When you go to another profile and hover of their gear, you will see their gear plus the selected profiles gear.
I will detail out these new pages in an upcoming entry in my blog along with some of the PVP pages so stay tuned.
