More fun with Wowhead

Are you getting tired of hearing me talk about Wowhead yet?  I just find it such an easy site to get information from and drill down into different item classifications.

Like this search.  This lists all the idols available for us Druids.  There are definitely some fun idols in there, and something to look forward to while adventuring in Outland.

Idol of the Wild is the first Idol I’ve picked up in Outland.  I wasn’t too hard to get.  It’s a quest reward that you can pick up at that little Cenarion Expedition outpost just west of the temple, next to the main road.  It was instantly equipped in Outfitter for both Bear and Cat forms and has been performing great.  I’m getting Mangle crits now of 1000+, which is very nice.

Looking at the idol search results on Wowhead though, I’m struck by the fact that this Idol is the only green one on the list, meaning they will just get better as we adventure further into Outland.  Looking through the list there are plenty of different idols there to satisfy every kind of Druid; from casters, to healers to ferals.

 It’s always seemed to me that most of the Idols I had seen were for Bear form and not for Cat.  Maybe the thinking was that Cat form had combo points and did enough damage already?  Well, here’s one ot the Idols that I’ll be looking to pick up for my Cat form.  A nice bump to every tick of damage for your Rip finishing move, especially if you’re combo points are maxed.

For you Healers out there, there is a nice epic Idol called Idol of the Avian Heart.  That’s a nice increase coming just from an Idol slot.

So there’s my pick of the crop of the Idols I researched via Wowhead.  Some good stuff to look forward to throughout Outland.  I’ll keep digging around in Wowhead and be sure to give you shots of other stuff I come across.

Wowhead feedback already

I’m happy to say that the Wowhead folks responded to my bug report already.  That was pretty quick and tells me there’s good support for the site.  Here’s what they said on the profession filtering “bug”:

“The ‘Requires a profession specialization’ is used to find items with a profession specialization such as Master Swordsmith, Goblin Engineering, Elemental Leatherworking. 

For instance if you choose: Requires a profession specialization: Blacksmith, it will returns all items that requires either Master Swordsmith, Master Axesmith or Master Hammersmith.

I know this is pretty confusing right now as the “Requires a profession” filter is missing. We’re looking forward to adding a filter that will return all items with a specific profession requirement ( e.g. Alchemy).”

Seems to me to be a little backwards to enable filtering on profession specialization before straight professions, but it sounds like that should be coming.

Come quick – I need help!

So after I wrote the last post I kept playing around on Wowhead and was checking out the Cenarion Expedition faction rewards.  Anyone used one of these Expedition Flares?  What kind of “help” shows up???

Help with Factions

Based on how you all are finding my blog, it appears that information on factions and their rewards is a very popular topic.  There appears to be two over-riding questions:

1. How do I improve my reputation with the faction, and
2. What rewards do I get from the faction?

I hope to post some resources to answer #1 shortly, but I have a great resource for you to help with question #2.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I’m really starting to like Wowhead.  They have a nice clean interface and lots of easy to understand search options.  Maybe it’s because not a lot of people haven’t found the site yet, but it doesn’t seem as cluttered as say Thotbott or Allakhazam.  So the other night as I was researching some factions,I thought I’d give Wowhead a try.

I really like how easy it is to get faction information quickly on Wowhead.  Right from the home page you can click the Browse icon to get a drop down of all the items within Wowhead you can look at.  You’ll notice that Factions are in the list.  If you click Factions, this is the page you get.  If you click on one of the factions, The Sporeggar’s for example, you get this page.  Scroll down just a tad and under “Related” you’ll see a bunch of tabs related to this faction.  “Items” is the first tab displayed so you can easily see what items are available from the faction.  You can either click on the item for a detailed page, or hover over the picture for the wow-like tooltip (which includes faction rep requirements).  Additional tabs for factions include NPCs, Quests, Comments and Screenshots.  Each tab has a similar simple list with much more information available to you if you click through.

You might not even notice one of the best features of Wowhead.  Right below the Items tab is a link that says “Create a filter’.  This link is on virtually all Wowhead pages that list multiple results (gems, armor, items, factions, etc.).  If you click the Create a filter link, you can filter your results in any number of ways.  There is a huge number of filters you can apply, from “requires a profession” to particular stats to spell characteristics to “has a tagline”.  You can also combine filters to narrow down what you are looking for.  It is a very powerful, yet easy to use filter engine.

One note: In researching this entry, I did come across a bug with Wowhead’s filters.  I selected the Sporeggar faction.  From the item list, I clicked “Create a filter”.  The existing filter of “Requires reputation with a faction” = “Sporeggar” was automatically created.  I then created a second filter of “Requires specialization in a profession” = “Alchemy”.  There are two alchemy recipies available as Sporeggar faction rep rewards, although they did not show up in the new list when both filters were applied.  I could be using the filters wrong, but this seems like a bug to me.  I’ve submitted a bug report to Wowhead and I’ll let you know what they say.

Verdict: Wowhead is a clean, simple resource for researching all kinds of World of Warcraft information.  There is a lot of interest in faction rep rewards out there and Wowhead’s display is the simplest to get at that I’ve seen.  I did find a bug while writing this article, but it isn’t one that would keep you from using Wowhead as your prime faction rep reward research tool, if not your research tool for all other issues.  I heartily recommend Wowhead and suggest you add it to your list of links.  Be sure to try out the filter option for yourself.