Posts with tag tool

Bonkers of Vek'nilash, creator of the very useful Gear Wishlist that we posted about a while back, has sent along a new site he's been working on called Loot Council. Basically, you throw the names of every character in your instance group into the system along with the name of the instance you're running, and you get a quick list of all the loot available from the instance and which character it's best for, according to class, need, and spec. You can use various rankings for the item, but eventually, all you have to do to determine who needs the item is look it up on the list and then see who has the biggest improvement from what they're wearing.

Very useful, though this might not be quite as tough to figure out as getting gear for yourself: in most of my instance runs, it's usually pretty clear who gets/wants what. And if you do happen to be in a PuG where people don't understand why a certain stat is better for one class or spec than another, you're probably not going to get them to open up the webpage and follow what they see there.

But for a quick no-brainer loot solution while instancing with a group of friends (especially in 25mans, where it's often tough to see who really needs an upgrade), it seems helpful and works well. Another great app from Bonkers.

I can't remember if we've posted about the WoW Gem Finder or not, but the last gem list I posted about has gone missing, so if you've never heard of this one, it's new to you. WoW Gem Finder is a quick web tool that you can to quickly find exactly the gem you're looking for -- just choose the colors, attributes, and/or abilities you want from the checklist on the side, and it'll narrow down exactly the gem you want and where to get it. And all the gems link to Wowhead anyway, so even if the little description isn't enough for you, you can go searching for it elsewhere as well.

Pretty great resource for anyone (like me) just starting to pick up epic gear on their latest character and looking into where the gems are coming from. One thing players might still need help with is when to put which gems on which gear (most people wouldn't throw epic gems in gear you get at 61, I'd think, and I personally usually don't bother with anything but vendor gems until I get an actual epic), but that may be all outside the ken of this finder. As a tool to help you find exactly the gem you want, it's a good one.

We've covered sites like this before (Be Imba is probably the one best known), but here's another character comparison/improvement tool for you to use online. WoW Heroes is a site that will look up your character's significant info from the Armory, put it in an easy-to-read format, and then help you check out all your stats, enchants, and gear, and help you find improvements to what you're wearing. It's not as judgemental as Be Imba -- you just get the stats and the facts, not yelled at for not having gems in your sockets (though getting yelled at might be just the motivation you need to get better), but it does provide suggestions in a much gentler way, including what kinds of enchants to use and what kinds of instances to run.

And one fun feature that isn't as easy to do on Be Imba is the comparison tool -- you can put in two characters' names and servers and very easily look at both at the same time, comparing item levels and/or seeing where the gear came from. Neat feature, and very easy to get up and running, no login or signup needed.

There is one drawback -- you can't see any characters in the system that are below level 70, so WoW Heroes is only for people trying to find improvements and options in the endgame -- if you're below 70, you'll have to go elsewhere. But as an endgame character improvement tool, it's another good option to use.

Recently members of my guild have been using a tool called Faster Ping to achieve better ping rates in game. My guild is a West Coast based guild, and attracts a lot of people from Hawaii and Australia, so they naturally have higher ping rates than those of us in the States. Faster Ping seems to be working wonders for them. It is not so much of an addon as it is a tool for Windows (though lots of people mistakingly call it an addon).

My first reaction to this was what thinking this sounded like something out of the mouth of Cliff Clavin. I mean, how can a piece of software impact something that is mainly due to physical limits? Well, after thinking about it for a bit, and reading up on what the tool does, it can.

WARNING! This paragraph will be the only one that contains technical content! Faster Ping works by removing the acknowledgement delay from TCP packets. This delay happens inside the kernel's TCP stack, and is a necessity for a lot of functions that go on inside a TCP stack. The other modification Faster Ping does is to remove delay in sending small packets (think anything less than a dozen or so bytes). These changes, at least theoretically, should not impact system stability if the Windows kernel has proper TCP/IP stack implementation. Okay, end technical content.

Amanna is the latest blogger to bring up Warcrafter, a nifty little online application that is basically the Armory on speed. It'll not only pull up your character, your gear, and your talents, but it'll use all of that information to calculate everything you'd ever want to know about your stats, including DPS, crit percentage, spellpower, and even where all of those things come from. It'll even go into your spells, and calculate the average heal or average damage of your most-used spells and abilities. Warcrafter tells you everything it can calculate about your character, directly from the numbers pulled out of the Armory. Fascinating to see.

There is also a sandbox page, which is everything an aspiring theorycrafter would ever need to make up the character of their dreams. Punch in a class, race, and gear, and then go to town shifting around buffs, weapons, talents, and anything else you'd want to check. Cerberus is an attentive creator, too-- if there's a calculation off or a piece of gear missing, he seems more than happy to add it in. I only hope that we don't crush the site with our exposure.

The sandbox page mentions something about "locking" the character, and it would be cool to have a quick permalink setup for created characters (we could have someone show off all the buffs/gear needed to get the Ghost Wolf taming cast time down, or show off the highest possible spellpower available in the game so far). But other than that, Warcrafter is a great piece of web-based software. Very cool way to inspect every single aspect of your character out of game.

Liquidor posts on the forums about a cool little tool he's put together. His rep calculator is a one-stop shop for everything you need to know about where your character is at in terms of rep, and what you need to rep up. There's just one little catch-- since Liquidor plays on Boulderfist EU, the calculator only works for EU characters at the moment.

So those of us on US realms are out of luck, but maybe if we give Liquidor a little more attention here, he'll be convinced enough to let us Americans in on the fun. As much as rep grinding is required in the game now, it's interesting that there's not a lot in terms of reputation tools out there-- WoW Wiki has those cool charts for each rep and the quests that can be done to level it, but Liquidor's guide is unmatched in terms of utility-- he even tells you mobs that can be killed for rep, and how many are needed of each type to rep up. Hopefully, especially as we move toward the next expansion (where even more factions will likely be introduced), players will get better and better tools like this to help their rep grinding.

I love nifty web tools. Andreas "bds" Thorstensson has created a page that lists the top-rated Arena teams in every bracket, worldwide (or filterable by region). This is nice, but the killer feature for me is the ability to show the top rated players in each class. Using this information, and since everything on this page links to the Armory, I can look into the top 5 players in each class, and see if any trends emerge as far as talent specs.

• Warrior: Arms/Fury, with all five specced exactly or very close to 35/23/3
• Paladin: Holy, with four 41/20/0, one 37/24/0
• Hunter: All Marks, ranging from 42 to 50 in Marks with the rest in Survival
• Rogue: Finally, some variation. Everyone's got at least 25 points in Assassination, but which tree the rest of the points go in varies. Nobody's taken any of the 41-pointers.
• Priest: Four 28/33/0, one 14/0/47
• Shaman: Four 40/0/21, one 0/15/46 -- our first Korean top fiver (careful, the Korean armory loaded very slowly for me; spec mirrored here).
• Mage: Three 33/0/28, two heavy frost (10/0/51 and 4/12/45)
• Warlock: more variation. Three destro, one afflic, one demonology. Everyone has a 41-point talent except one of the destro locks.
• Druid: Everyone has most of their points in Resto, and everyone has at least 11 in Feral. Although three out of five have at least 41 in Resto, only one has Tree of Life.

It's a nice page. Go and compare things!