Armory Light updated, renamed "Armory Heavy"
by Eliah Hecht 
Jun 5th 2009 at 8:00PM
Armory alternative Armory Light (not to be confused with Armory Lite) has just passed its first birthday, and to celebrate, the site is relaunching with a bevy of new features.
- Pages for each item, with information on where it comes from, what it disenchants into, and how to link it in game. All the same info from the official Armory, basically.
- 3D models for some items. Not as good as Wowhead's, but nice if you're already on the site, I guess.
- A desktop app, built in Adobe Air (and hence cross-platform) to show 3D models of items. Not really sure what the point of this is, but somebody probably likes it.
- Heirloom calculator: Now this is cool. It lets you take any heirloom item and see how its stats scale at any level. Not many sites have this.
- A talent calculator. It's slow, jittery, and not particularly attractive, but they do have a talent calculator.
A "powered by Armory Light" JavaScript to include on your own site, which gives you not only item tooltips (which a few other sites do), but also character tooltips, like the one at right (an example character, not one of mine). Seriously cool. I can definitely see myself using this feature; it's a great way to get a thumbnail sketch of a character.
A mixed bag overall; some cool novel features, some knock-offs of other sites. And although the title was in jest, this new version does take almost as long to load for me as the official Armory does, and it feels nearly as heavy, sort of defeating the "Light" part of the site's name. It also assumed my feral druid was DPS (instead of tank), thus making completely wrong conclusions about the suitability of my enchantments. Minus points for appropriating the Mac OS X installer icon; it looks silly and out-of-place. Still, I'll probably use the site from time to time, at least for the character tooltips and heirloom scaling.
And whatever my opinions, I'm glad to see people continuing to develop innovative sites to use Armory data. Using Get Satisfaction for user feedback is also a great idea; I haven't seen anyone doing it on a WoW site before.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dart Jun 5th 2009 8:43PM
Looks alright, that sums it up.
dan Jun 5th 2009 9:21PM
just checked it out. amazing. good improvement.
Andrige Jun 5th 2009 9:33PM
Yay, I thought the website would never come up ^^
Those guys commissioned me for the logo so was a bit curious what the result would be, but I'm liking what I see here :)
Mep Jun 6th 2009 12:31AM
FUCK!... I'm working on the same kind of tooltip for wow-achievements.com ... lol
artifex Jun 6th 2009 3:22AM
Love your site, Mep, and had a question for you: When I was guildless for the last couple of weeks, I managed to go from guild rank #4 to guild rank #1. Does that mean #1 achievement ranking for all guildless players on the server, or just the characters you've been asked to index directly? Or is it just a spurious number, when I'm not in a guild?
artifex Jun 6th 2009 3:08AM
It would be really awesome if these sites could recognize when characters are caught in PvP gear, and start making recommendations for PvP, instead of PvE. (When I'm under 800 resilience, telling me my resilience enchants are "outdated" and that I should be doing +spell power just seems to not work.) Also, telling me I should have +63 spell power on Seth's Graphite Fishing Pole instead of the fishing line giving +3 fishing is pretty funny. (What I really want to know is, is there a better fishing enchant? Probably. But I have to look it up) Still, I do appreciate the obvious time and effort people put into these sites, and I'm glad we have multiple ones to choose from -- I have a couple of sites I use most of the time, but I do look at others whenever I get major new gear.
The Claw Jun 6th 2009 4:46AM
You can get a +5 fishing enchant from the Northrend fishing dailies goodie-bag.
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=19971#contained-in-item
Alexander Graf Jun 6th 2009 3:35AM
I just upgraded the servers to twice the memory. I hope armory-light.com is faster now.
Alexander Graf Jun 6th 2009 4:03AM
A little addition to the article
# 3D models for some items. Not as good as Wowhead's, but nice if you're already on the site, I guess.
Actually, our viewer is better than wowhead for the items it's able to show. Take for example the Apostle of Argus (http://www.armory-light.com/items/30908/) Our viewer doesn't convert any of the models from Blizzard, it's able to directly read all original game files from WoW. This means it's able to interpret things like color transformations better than the Wowhead or buffed.de viewer. On the Apostle of Argus, you can see that the glow has the right color and the handle isn't colored. This isn't true for the Wowhead viewer.
Also, we will be adding NPCs and the rest of the items in a few weeks.
# A desktop app, built in Adobe Air (and hence cross-platform) to show 3D models of items. Not really sure what the point of this is, but somebody probably likes it.
We built it because we have seen numerous requests for this on several websites (even in the Wowhead forums). Since Wowhead didn't do it, we did :)
# Minus points for appropriating the Mac OS X installer icon; it looks silly and out-of-place.
Thanks for that. I added it to our issue tracker and it will be replaced shortly!
Please note that we're just 3 people doing this in what little spare time we have. Building and maintaining a site like this along with a flash 3d model viewer isn't something that you can do in a few days, it takes a long time. But thank you for the article and the kind words!
The Claw Jun 6th 2009 4:48AM
Heirloom Calculator is epic win, big thanks for that Alexander! I have been looking for such a thing but never seen one before.
Emophia Jun 6th 2009 7:47AM
First time I've heard of/uused Armory light and I quit like it.
Emophia Jun 6th 2009 9:55AM
never heard of/uused it before*and quite*
Fairlane Jun 6th 2009 10:13AM
Too bad they run gold ads. I won't be using their site, and I'll be steering guildmates and friends away from it as well.
Alexander Graf Jun 6th 2009 11:41AM
Actually we're not "running gold ads". We are running Google Adsense and do not endorse the RTM ads. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no other way of offsetting the costs. And the website isn't exactly cheap to run.
We are in negotiations with several advertisement providers though, so hopefully we can get rid of the RTM ads soon.
Fairlane Jun 7th 2009 1:23PM
http://www.google.com/adsense/urlfilter
Carlo Zottmann Jun 6th 2009 11:44AM
Fairlane, they use Google AdSense — the gold ads come with AdSense, unfortunately.
Re "I'm glad to see people continuing to develop innovative sites to use Armory data. Using Get Satisfaction for user feedback is also a great idea; I haven't seen anyone doing it on a WoW site before.":
I've submitted my own WoW character-centric site, CharPool (http://charpool.net), to your news bin a few months ago and haven't heard back from you guys. CharPool both makes use of Armory data and GetSatisfaction myself. Just saying. ;)
Cheers from Germany,
Carlo
Mep Jun 6th 2009 5:59PM
In that case it would mean you were #1 of the guildless characters.
tredsaw Jun 8th 2009 8:32AM
Has anybody had any luck getting the character tooltip to work on a live site (works fine on a localhost but have to accept security warnings)? I seem to be having security issues referencing the data so the tooltip simply stays on "loading". Having this problem both in ie and firefox however the example on the site works fine.
Alexander Graf Jun 15th 2009 10:03AM
Character tooltips have been fixed and should now work for everyone!