How to Get the Most out of the World of Warcraft Armory: Gear Hunting and Talent Builds.

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Overview

The Armory (wowarmory.com) is an official Blizzard website that maintains a monstrous vault of data on every character that plays World of Warcraft. Selecting a character will show you everything about them. The information garnered here can be put to a multitude of uses.

Gear Hunting

If you don’t have an addon like Atlasloot, you can always find good gear by searching for people you know who have it. Find a character who is wearing the gear you’re looking for. Search for their name, then mouse over their gear. Doing so will give you all the equipment stats, as well as where you can find the item.

Mousing to the side of the item will produce the “Find an Upgrade” button. This takes you to another page with possible upgrades for the item, where to find them, the Item Level, Required Level and how relevant they are (how close of a match they are, based on item stats, armor/damage and several other factors.)

Talent Builds

Viewing the talents of successful players will give you an excellent idea of how to arrange your talents. There is absolutely no shame in copying an expert player’s talent build. Many consider it to be the hallmark of a good player that one is able to utilize a well-known or oft-used talent build to its optimum levels. Ask around your guild for someone of a similar class. Look them up on the armory and see what talents they chose. Analyzing this information can provide you with valuable insights into your own talent builds.

The WoW Armory gives you a complete map of a character’s talents, just as if you were building the talents on a talent calculator. It also includes an “Export Build” function which takes you to the WoW Talent Calculator with the talents you just saw filled in. The URL at the bottom allows you to revisit this page whenever you wish.

Reputation

Highly successful players pick and choose which factions they grind rep for. Let’s face it: grinding reputation for each and every faction is a waste of time. Invariably, there will be some factions which do not offer anything for your character, and can be skipped. Looking at the factions a player you wish to emulate has ground for and which factions they skipped can save you a lot of time.

Achievements and Statistics

Though these are meant for fun, they can tell you a lot about a player if you are willing to sort through them. What kind of achievements a player has earned and their statistics can tell you about their play habits. Do they run a lot of instances? Do they collect epic gear? Do they PvP a lot? Achievements and Statistics can tell you how much they instance, how well they do in PvP and what they like to do with their spare time.

Guilds

If you are shopping for a guild, the information on the Guild tab can help tremendously. It contains information on the classes, races and levels of all guild members. There is also a Guild Statistics page with charts for race and level composition. Guilds with mainly low-level members will probably not help you raid a lot.

The Guild page can also show you the Guild Bank’s contents and who has been accessing it lately. This can be invaluable for people wishing to know if a Guild can help them with what they need or for Guild Leaders looking to keep an eye on their Guild’s investments.

Bottom Line

The WoW Armory allows you to learn just about anything about any character in the WoW Universe. It can help you plan what gear you want to get, find a good talent build, find a guild that’s right for your needs and it can give you ideas about where to take your character in the game. The Armory is a terrific resource that is just waiting to be utilized.