Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Character Tracking Websites

Although I'm still fairly new at blogging, I've done a poor job of trying to keep up on posts every few days. Lots of things have kept me busy both personally, death in my wife's extended family, work stress, and every day family life, and in Azeroth, including guild drama, shooting for 5000g for epic flying mount training, hitting the heroics, and gearing up for raiding.

However, in all this time I've stumbled across a great new website: Be Imba! Chances are you've either seen or heard about this. If you haven't, go check it out now!

Be Imba! is a character auditor for World of Warcraft. The only requirement is the character in question must be level 70. It will then evaluate your gear, enchants, gems, and even to some extent your talents and abilities.

This website is continuously being updated as even in just the last two weeks they have added functionality to include forcing armory updates, using cached reports, etc. One of the new features I really like is the ability to expand your gear score at the bottom to show the percentages each piece of gear contributes to the whole.

The two most useful items on this tool are the Unenchant/Misenchant report and the Gear-o-Meter at the bottom showing you where you stand with regards to heroics and the current popular raids.

If you're anything like me, then when you've upgraded your gear, you've forgotten to enchant certain items. The first time I ran this report I found three items that I had recently upgraded and hadn't enchanted; the thought hadn't even occurred to me. Rather embarrassing really, because even cheap enchants are better than nothing.


Ironically, looking at this as I post this, I just recently upgraded to the Lightsworn Hammer and haven't enchanted...AGAIN!!! See how useful this is? LOL! At least I have an excuse for the rings because my enchanting isn't high enough yet to enchant those.

Now for the other neat feature. If you're like most people tracking your gear score below is a great motivator to pursuing upgrades. Check mine out.


I've been eyeing Tier 4 gear for some time now, but haven't been able to get any. I believe the reason is I have been aiming too high. Every upgrade, however small, is one step closer, but I haven't been satisfied with going after the small upgrades. Be Imba! gives me the motivation to go after even the smallest upgrades.

Watching my gear score go up even one point is kind of a thrill so I look everywhere to find these small upgrades. Doing this has gotten me closer to Tier 4 than anything I have tried in the past. Now a few friends and I are working on helping others upgrade so we can all go to Kara to start our quests for Tier 4 armor.

Maybe some of you out there can't relate to this, but for those of you who play Xbox360...you guys get it! I relate it to the same thrill that those of us playing Xbox360 have when getting Achievements. Achievements are items done within a game that once accomplished gives you a little ding, pop-up, and a few points towards your Gamer Score. A Gamer Score is set up to show off to others and give you bragging rights, but really only serves to show others how little of a personal life you have. It serves it's purpose though and is quite addictive! LOL!

The Gear-o-Meter at the bottom lists the relative difficulty of the different raids and heroics and will give you two colored bars showing you where your character falls. Remeber the red bar shows the approximation of where your gear comes from. For the most part I ignore this bar. For example, looking at my report shows that most of my gear comes from the high end of Karazhan. I have one piece of gear that came from Prince Malchazar in Karazhan. The rest is mostly PvP gear. So take it with a grain of salt.

The blue bar is the bar you'll be interested in. Based on your gear score, this bar tells you approximately how well you can expect to do in any given raid, given that the others with you are of the same level. Remember, being geared for Mt. Hyjal doesn't mean you'll do well in Karazhan if everyone else in your party isn't geared for it.

I hope you find this site useful and thanks to those guys running this site. It has it's problems, mostly resulting from the Armory blocking information requests, but when it works it's fantastic! The other problem is high traffic. I live on the East Coast and the best times I've found are before 8am, when most of the rest of the country is still getting up or asleep.

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