Must have World of Warcraft sites
Thu, Jul 9, 2009I wish I’d have know about all of these websites five years ago. But below is a list of some handy World of Warcraft reference, information, and community sites.
Token blogger Armory link for credibility.
WoW General Reference Sites:
Wowhead – The mainstay of WoW websites. Everything from quest help, item information, spell descriptions, professions info, forums, and talent calculators. This is the first stop when you need some quick WoW info. They’ve recently added a cool little tool to compare item stats, too.
WowDB – Curse Gaming’s own attempt at a WoW information site along the lines of Wowhead, Allakhazam, and Thotbott. Not too bad. This is my second choice if Wowhead is down.
Allakhazam – Similar to Wowhead, if not quite as popular, and I daresay, harder to spell.
Thotbott – This is the site that started this type of website for World of Warcraft. It has since faded into memory, a bit. I believe this may partially be because it hasn’t changed in five years and mildly resembles a website hosted on Geocities. Thotbott was once a verb in the vocabulary of WoWnerds rivaling that of Google. “I can’t figure out this quest. Let me Thotbott it!”
MaxDPS – MaxDPS has a configurable listing of gear listed and ranked by character class. If you play a warrior and want to know what the best belt in the game is, or if X chest is better than Y chest, check out MaxDPS.
Boss Killers – Contains a plethora of guides submitted by top raiding guild detailing specific strategies for every raid boss in the game. A must-have for guilds learning new encounters.
Player Gear Lookup:
World of Warcraft Armory – Blizzard’s official listing of player profiles. Profiles are automatically updated when a player, above level 10, logs out of the game. It includes what gear the character was last wearing, talent spec, reputation, guild information, arena teams, etc. If you need to look someone up – The Armory is where you do it.
Quick Armory – A light verison of the official Blizzard Armory. There is also a nifty Stats tool which shows you the percentage of players parsed which have each specific talent selected in their builds.
WoW-Heroes – I recently stumbled on this site, and am quite impressed. It’s a rough rating of someone’s gear, and can provide some quick and easy information for rating what level of PvE content someone can be cabable of participating in. It willgive the player looked up a gear score, and will show a graph of what raids are green/yellow/red difficulty according to gear score. This is especially nice if you’re the type that likes to form pick up group raids. You can quickly look up people’s gear that would like to come, to determine if they have the stats recommended.
ArmoryCraft – Ranks players by a specific statistic. The guy Jayrox used to play on my server got this site going. It can be a little out-dated and not entirely accurate, but it’s cool to see where you rank among other people that have been parsed from your server.
Community Info/Forum Sites:
forums.worldofwarcraft.com – The best place to stay in touch with the WoW community. I’m particularly fond of the Realm Forums, where you can communicate (read: talk smack) with other players on your server. The Class Forums can sometimes contain helpful information, or at least link to external sites that do.
Elitist Jerks Forums – The nerds of the nerds. Elitist Jerks is one of the top guilds in the world. They’re the guys with the pocket protectors that poke fun at spelling/grammar, and create spreadsheets detailing the miniscule details of the best way to play/gear/spec your specific character. It also includes fairly educated community discussion pertaining to said detail. When someone asks me what piece of gear is better than the other, what spell is best to use when, or what type of gems they should be using, I’ll direct them to Elitist Jerks every single time.
WoWWiki – Similar to Wikipedia… except for WoW. You can lookup basic class descriptions, lore/storyline info, quests, and more.
Guild Ranking:
WoW Jutsu – WowJutsu contains a listing of guilds based on their progression in clearing raid dungeons in World of Warcraft. It tracks who killed what boss first, and ranks them accordingly. You can sort by best in world, or best in realm. It’s nice for tracking which guild is better than the other. Has, of late, become a little out-dated.
WoW Progress – Similar to WowJutsu. Personally, I think it’s a little clunkier. But it’s not out-of-date, so it actually works right now.
News:
MMO-Champion – Along with WorldofRaids, MMO-Champion is a website updated daily with information about upcoming patches, changes to the game, or other WoW headlines. Also contains a forum with general, class-specific, PvE, and PvP sections.
World Of Raids – Almost exactly like MMO-Champion. It’s a personal preference thing. I think the WoR website looks nicer, but I like the MMO-Champion content better.
WoW Insider – This is like… the Lifehacker of World of Warcraft. Fun and/or useful articles about various WoW topics. God only knows what they paid for this domain name when they recently switched over to it.
Misc.:
Mibbit – Formerly known as Irc@Work. A web brower IRC interface which allows you to join IRC channels to chat. Our WoW server has a specific channel when members of both Horde and Alliance go to chat. Very nice for “Anyone from Horde online in that can tell me where so-and-so located so I can go kill them?”
WoWWiki Patch Mirrors – Various mirrors to download patches when new ones are released. This is nice to have on major content patch Tuesdays so you don’t have to wait 7-48 hours for the official download to finish. You can hit up a mirror site and get it in 15 minutes.
Addons:
A few different websites to get World of Warcraft interface addons. The Curse Client has been overhauled recently, and is now actually… pretty decent. It’s nice for keeping track of, and automatically updating addons.
Curse (and Curse Client)
