Like this imbeddable 3-D representation of your character. What’s not to love about this? I can blow kisses on my shadow priest all day long. Alas, I can’t figure out how to shrink this enough to cram it into a sidebar here on the site, or else I would.
This was the most immediately visible of the changes they released to the armory this past week. One of the other fun toys that I may try to incorporate here is a customizable RSS feed of up to five of your characters’ recent activities. You can show their recent achievements, boss kills, and gear upgrades. The gear upgrades and achievements allow you some fine tuning so you can show only epic gear obtained for instance, and show only specific categories of achievements.
The activity feed keeps a running tally of how many times you’ve killed each raid boss, or heroic final boss, and adds it to your daily activity stream each time you kill them again. But what I really like is how it shows you if a person is wearing that shiny new piece of gear they obtained or not, thanks to the handy [equipped] notation that follows the items they are actually using.
Yes, we all bank gear from time-to-time, especially if we are juggling hit, but it’s always nice when you have a nagging feeling someone has already looted that item before to be able to check. I had one former guildie who had “accidentally DEd” an item then felt entitled to taking the item again the next time it dropped (raid said um, no.) And the guildie who would forget they already had the same item in the bank, the guy who won the BOE bracers in MC (that he already was wearing and felt entitled to have a second pair to sell, under his own name, in the AH.) I could go on and on but I think the utility speaks for itself.
The new feature that got a lot of folks in my guild excited, however, was the calendar feed you can import into the calendaring tool of your choice (i.e. Google calendar, Outlook, iCalendar or whatever it is that you use to keep yourself on time.) As with the other feeds, you can choose to show data from up to five of your characters. Back when I was actively raiding on two characters on two different servers, it would have been awesome to see their schedules together.
During the twitter developer chat last night, I added in a few questions regarding some future enhancements I would love to see. They didn’t answer them, but I am posting them here, because I bet you have some similar things you’d like to see too:
- Will we see recipes learned added to the armory pre-Cataclysm?
- Will we see more professions tracking improvements, such as recipes we have not yet learned, come to the UI?
- Any chance you will partner with blog platforms like typepad on creating modules that pull from armory feeds?
I know that if I were able to sneak a project onto the armory development team’s to do list it would definitely be adding professions tracking data to my character feed. Being able to see, at a glance, while offline, everything I can make and what recipes I am missing (and how to obtain them) would make me a happy camper. I used CraftList2 in game to help me with the not-buying-multiples-of-the-same-recipes portion of that equation, but it was still not as scannable as something web-based could be.
How about you? What would you like to see in future armory releases? And what do you think of these new toys?