A stealth update on the WoW website has enabled a feature Classic WoW players have been asking for years: An official Armory!
New Armory Sections for Classic WoW Versions
With the update, whenever you visit the official WoW Armory website, you can search for characters from all versions of WoW currently available:
- World of Warcraft (Retail)
- World of Warcraft Classic (Classic Era)
- Burning Crusade Classic (Anniversary servers)
- Mists of Pandaria Classic
Classic Era includes characters from every currently available iteration: Classic Era, Hardcore servers, and Season of Discovery. SoD characters even have features like Runes and SoD-exclusive enchants on mouseover.
First Time Classic WoW Has an Official Armory
This is the first time since Classic’s original release in 2019 that Classic characters have an Armory option available. At the time, it was stated that an Armory would not be a feature at launch, as they wanted to maintain the dynamic of physically inspecting players for gear (as the original Armory was released at the end of the Burning Crusade expansion).
Here’s the original quote from the 2019 FAQ:
Q. Will there be an Armory for WoW Classic?
A. There was no Armory for World of Warcraft until the Burning Crusade. If you wanted to know more about a player’s gear before you invited them to your party, you had to meet them in the world and physically inspect them (and you couldn’t inspect players of the opposite faction until 2.4). You couldn’t see their spec or talent builds when you inspected them, either. To maintain that same dynamic, we won’t have an Armory or profile pages for WoW Classic at launch.
Although they left it open to the possibility of an armory in the future, Classic WoW has never seen an Armory, in any of its iterations, until now. To compensate for the lack of an Armory before this, Classic players would use sites such as Warcraft Logs and Ironforge.pro for player verification.
What Could This Mean?
With the growing excitement over the Camelot project and a little over two weeks until BlizzCon, this is likely all happening in preparation for the new WoW version.
Details on what Camelot exactly entails, besides the fact that it exists and is receiving active development, are still very sparse, but having an Armory option from the jump is exciting!