Feldon 
EQ2Wire sits down with Dedith to talk about his new Data-driven EQ2 site which he launched over the weekend.
Q: What made you want to create Dragons Armory? Is there a history to the name?
Dedith: The reason behind the site was to help those players who may not know or not have the time to find the finer points of optimizing their characters. *grin* My wife insists that I wrote it for her. I did realize while researching the design of this site that everyone plays their characters differently, so I concentrated on making the tools so no matter your play style this would be useful. Even the min-maxer types will find use in the features as it just makes things much clearer and easier to find.
Q: What’s unique about the site? What’s your favorite part of the site?
D: While the site is somewhat similar to your own EQ2U site, it specializes in analyzing the character and making the player aware of points that could be optimized on the character. Some examples of optimizations are warning about missing items, missing adornments, low level gear, sub-expert rank spells, stats over the cap, uncompleted epic quest, etc. My favorite features are the item and adornment upgrade search options. These let one easily look for items and adornments for the class, level, slot, and socket color in question.
Q: What are some features on the site that people might not notice immediately?
D: Most of the site is built around a mouse click or hovering interface. Holding the mouse over any particular stat, item, or adornment will show tooltips and highlight items providing said stat. Once you start playing around with the interface, it becomes fairly easy to use.
Q: Did you have any revelations about EQ2’s data and suggestions about how the data could be improved to improve sites such as yours?
D: Right now, Spell data (including AAs) is based on a placeholder character. I had tried to work on the formulas for calculating weapon, spell, and AA damage based upon character stats, but due to how the data is exported, the end result is already altered. Thus the data we all see from the data feed on all sites (beetny, eq2u, etc) is nowhere near what is shown in the game. Most sites really just want to show the same stats on weapons, spells, and AAs as what shows inside the game for said character, but at present the data doesn’t allow that.
Q: I really like how mousing over Stats highlights which equipment is adding to a stat, and which equipment may not be helping your character. I was also impressed by the Spells and Adornments reporting tools which point out unimproved gear and recommend upgrades. How does your site help people improve their characters?
D: One of the features my testers have mentioned they liked a lot was how they could optimize reforging and adorning be seeing which piece of gear had the closest amount of the stat they want to reforge out of. I have to agree that I found this just as useful while I was testing as well.
Q: What are your plans for the future of the site?
D: If the data ever allows, there are several features I’d love to implement to allow the creation of virtual gear/AA builds. On top of that, I’d love to add support for EQ1, Vanguard, DCUO, Wizardry, and Dragon’s Prophet as their data becomes available. Planetside 2 data feeds are available and I’m looking into what I can do with those now.
Q: What class do you play in EQ2 and do you regularly group or raid these days?
D: In my heart, I love my Guardian, but my Beastlord is the one I tend to play the most these days.
Check out the Dragons Armory at DragonsArmory.com. Dedith has also posted an announcement thread on the EQ2 Forums.
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We’d like to thank Dedith for sitting down with us and giving an interview about his EQ2 Data Feeds-driven website. If you’d like to learn more about the EQ2 Data Feeds, feel free to visit the Data forums or send me an e-mail!
Pretty damn cool…nice job
Very nice!
Holy crap… I’m just having a look at this. It’s really, really cool. Very useful, sweet interface. Grats:::::
this is a very nice tool not just for a player trying to get the most out of their toon. but also for a raid leader to see across the whole raid and see who meets some standards and who needs what.
whoa… 200 soft cap on DPS? im at 492.
While the 200 dps softcap is right you will still get a dps increase from getting more, just on deminishing returns (hence softcap). There are also classes that have dps conversion prestiges so they profit even more from it.
So it isn’t as bad as say reuse speed that has zero value above cap.
Very nice tool.
I tried to submit feedback but apparently feedback fields reset every time you change tab in your browser. I will try again later 😉
Anyway – group overview is not working for me, I created group, I have some toons in there and all I have is loading screen.
Info about specific toons is great. Really nice thing to be able to check stats, adorn and see where can I improve.
Also size of the letters and colour on the page… my eyes are in tears now it is so painful for my eyes 🙂 (Yes, I am old)
Overall I love idea and I will certainly recommend this tool in my Alliance 🙂
Thanks for the all comments!
@Kinya – got your feedback, going to reply in depth there. Colors, font size, and feedback form are all on my todo list. I’ll add to it questions about the toons in your group so we can figure that out.
Wonderful site, thank you for your hard work on this.
very nice site – big thumps up 🙂
wow very nice now I can win some arguments with how to spec out with my fellow raiders, and actually have backup now.
This is awesome. Very very useful for monitoring raid requirements.
Thank you Dedith!
Fantastic!!
Nicely done!
Holy crap, thats awesome! Good job. Now I dont need to build out the rest of my “how are you are doing your character wrong” tools.
Noticed a few bugs/issues, but I’m sure you will get them worked out fast. Even EQ2U had some problems at launch 😛
My only real feedback was the color choices throws you off a bit (like purple for fabled stuff), but that is only cosmetic.
I think I had more fun looking up the rest of my raid buddies then I did my own toons.
@uber – I brought the idea up at SOE live of a site to do this, no one seemed to take it an run with it so I just did it myself. Hope to hang with you guys again in August, was fun! And just send me details of the bugs you found and I’ll look into them.
I really like The Dragon’s Armory.. how often does the feed update from SOE?
SOE’s data updates every time you camp a character. But it’s up to each EQ2 fansite to cache data for X minutes. On EQ2U it’s 5 minutes.
Thanks!
I believe it updates when you log out (and maybe when you zone..)
10 min on Dragon’s Armory
Very nice, could you add some info on block stats ? there is no soft cap ?
We’re having a fun time of getting details on the defensive stats (Feldon and I have both been bugging about this). I’ll try to see if I can get details about any caps on ‘block chance’.
What an amazingly useful site! I have been telling my guild members all about it — and one of them even looked me up while we were in game to give me suggestions on how to fix my character.
Bravo.
Hmmm, maybe I’ve blindspotted this on EQ2U (is it already there? heh…), but now that y’all mention it, I think it would be helpful to clearly note on both sites about the data updates — how and how often.
Otherwise, yeah, I assumed right off that this thing would be bug stomped and design tweaked for awhile but, hell, it’s so good now. This paired with EQ2U….sweet.
I have not been able to connect to the dragon armory for the past few days. Can you reply if there are any issues so we know to just be patient and wait.
Love it, been pulling my own data and just using text for ease of use. This place even makes it look good that way. Thanks!
from what i understand Block Chance Hard caps out at somewhere around 170-250. it depends on what your shield protection value is or if you are a brawler.
I say it hard caps and not soft caps since no raid content (and probably at this point most group content also) checks against the contested Avoidance checks its only the Uncontested checks. contested block also bust Uncontested Block at some ratio and Uncontested Block caps at 70% that is your contested block is somewhere between 170-250%.
this is what i have gathered and understand from different avoidance experts and experience over time.
Yeah, from what I’ve found on the net I agree with Silzin. I’ve place details for block/blockchance with these in mind. However, I do know that the values are rough values, not exact.
Thanks for this – very good indeed.
Adding defensive stats is going to be difficult though since we need to know what we are planning to fight regarding caps. Maybe assuming that a raid boss is Yourlevel+6 and a heroic Yourlevel+3?
EQ2 seems to vary the actual levels though…