ceremorphosis

When Blizzard issued the takedown requests for the Armory application on the iTunes App Store, we all knew it was a matter of time before Blizzard released their own application. The wait is over. The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory was released last night and I’ve given it a spin.

If you want the TL;DR version – The application is polished and should be in any WoW-playing iPhone owner’s library.

The Mobile Armory requires that you sign on when launching the application. You are given the opportunity to save your credentials. A quick login screen and you are then at the home page. Pressing the buttons give a nice page flip animation and sound effect.

I checked the news first.

Nothing too exciting, so let’s check out the Characters button. Clicking this presents you with a button for “My Characters” and another for “Bookmarks”.

You can drill down to an individual character from your “My Characters” screen. Blizzard gets kudos on a beautiful presentation of the standard character screen. You can drop down the stats for melee, ranged, spell, and defense. You can click on the items to get the stats including gems and enchants. You can also then drill down into the item details.

You are also given a drop down menu offering the ability to view Talents, Glyphs, Achievements, Calendar events, Arena Team info, and an overall Guild screen. I won’t provide screenshots for each of these, but you get the gist – this is a fully featured app.

On to the guild button. As expected, this brings up the guild roster. Each character in the roster is clickable for the full experience mentioned above.

Next up is the Calendar. This functionality alone is worth the price of the app. The upper portion of the screen displays the month as a whole, and each day with an event is marked. Selecting a day (today is selected by default) presents the day’s events below the monthly presentation. Clicking on the event gives you all the details you need. The best part? You can sign up for an event from your iPhone.

The Leaderboards buttons takes you to your characters where they are sorted by achievement points. You can also drop down and choose your guild, sorted again by achievement points.

The “Browse Items” button is like a portable Wowhead. You are first given a screen where your search can be by type or instance.

Let’s see what Ulduar has to offer. You can sort by name and item level to differentiate between Heroic and Normal (and some of the hard mode items).

Again, any item is clickable and will bring up detailed information.

I have a few guildmates that are enamored of companion pets. The Mobile Armory has that covered as well.

The Talent Calculator is, by nature, the most difficult to present in the iPhone UI. Every class has 3 trees and each tree has 11 tiers. Blizzard utilizes the swipe mechanic to move from tree to tree, which works well. Vertical scrolling is a necessity for tier mapping. Tooltips are presented for each talent choice.

As you can see, a polished app and well worth the download. If you play WoW and own an iPhone it should be right next to the Authenticator.