I'm really impressed with BG Hero. We take a look at these stats sites pretty often, but I have never seen a site targeted strictly at PvP data like this one, and with such a clean and interesting view. Unfortunately, it's still getting off the ground, so we're probably going to give the server a run for its money with this link, but give it a few days and head back there when they've smoothed things out.

It'll track your plays and wins in each BG, obviously, but you can also get a whole bunch of graphs and numbers about how you're doing each time you play, including HKs per BG, and killing blows per battleground that you play. The app also tracks your totals daily and weekly, so if you get your character in there and let it update over a period of time, you can see just how you're doing. Pretty amazing stuff if you've been playing a lot of battlegrounds lately (and with the extra XP in there, why wouldn't you?). We're told the site is still being worked on, so expect more updates soon (and Phood is keeping info flowing on his blog), but in the meantime, it looks like a great way to look at your BG progress in more detail.

While we were all wildin' out at BlizzCon last week, reader Peter G. sent us a little note about a Facebook app he's been working on called Achieved that will take your achievements and insert them into your various Facebook feeds however you like. If you want to go the whole nine yards and have your wall plastered with a story whenever you ding an achievement, you can do that, or if you just want to leave it as a small box on your profile page, you can do that as well. The app allows you to leave your actual character name out of the post (if for some reason you're not comfortable with sharing it with all your friends), and there's even a paid option: if you can throw in at least $.99 Canadian, the app will update straight from the Armory without any help from you to refresh (normally, I guess, you've got to log in to Facebook to get updates).

I like the app's minimalism more than anything else -- it doesn't show character information or any flashy graphics, just updates people on what you're doing with achievements. The app has a really active changelog, too (Peter is working hard on updating it pretty often, it seems), so if you have a request, you can always throw it in the pot and you might even get it granted. It's not quite as comprehensive as some of the other WoW Facebook apps out there, but if you want a quick way of showing Facebook friends what you're up to in game without excessively spamming them on every little ding or gear upgrade, give it a look for sure.

I installed the new Armory app on my beloved iPhone a few mornings ago and I love it. Seriously, it had to be the best app yet. Now if only there was one which would let you send in-game mail/work the AH without logging in but that's for another Breakfast Topic. Today's is all about alts, specifically how many you have and whether it is possible to have too many.

Loading up the app, I was distracted not by the cool sound effects or the sparklyness of the app but by the number of alts I have lying around. By that I don't mean active alts, I generally focus my attention on my main Serisa, but I do have a lot scattered around numerous European servers. It's quite odd to have an app tied to my account which shows all my alts, rather than ones I select (as with previous non-Blizzard iPhone apps).

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine. He seems to have a thousand alts, so many that he didn't have a precise number. I asked if he had any idea of the cap for such and he guessed it had to be about fifty. He assured me if there was a cap, he hadn't hit it yet. But looking at the app, I was quite surprised by the sheer number of level 1-10 toons I have lying forgotten on servers I never visit anymore, from days when Daggerspine was down and I wanted to play Horde on another realm (usually Blood Elf females).

So, come on readers, I ask you. Can you have too many alts? If yes, what's your record?

With Hunter pet information recently added to the armory, Data Miner Zardoz has wasted no time getting his hands on the raw Hunter pet data and breaking it down. The data is only for level 80 Hunters, and only 10,000 of those at that, but it still gives a very interesting snapshot of what's going with the Hunter's best friends.

It might not be too big a surprise that Cats are far and away the most popular pet at a count of around 9500, nearly doubling again the amount of Wolves, who come in just under 5000, which are in turn used in numbers over twice as much as the next popular choice, Gorillas, who are just above 2800 in number. Now mind you, this information does take into account pets that are in the stables as well, and there's certainly the possibility that a lot of them have just stayed in the stables for a long time.

Not all of us get to run around with Val'aynr. But for you mace casters out there who aren't first on your guild's Legendary list, here's another sweet mace to hunt down.

Name: Constellus (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)Type: Epic Main Hand Mace
Damage/Speed: 93-298 / 1.80 (108.8 DPS)
Attributes:

• +55 Stamina, +54 Intellect
• Blue socket with a +5 Spell Power bonus
• Improves crit strike rating by 29, restores 19 mana per five seconds, and improves spell power by 587

We've posted about the WoW TCG Lifecounter app for the iPhone before, and now the official WoW TCG site has spotlighted that one and another Upper Deck-related app for Apple's little handheld devices. WM Match Tracker is a free application on the App Store that will keep track of everything you need during WoW minis matches, including lifepoints for every character in play, the master clock of the entire game, and even each characters' clock (if you've played the game, you'll know that will tell you when each player can come back into play after using a certain ability). Sounds pretty useful, and the price is great, too: completely free. Of course, you don't need the app -- you can use pen and paper (and each board for the game usually has a clock on it), but if you've got an iPhone or iPod touch, it could come in handy.

It's interesting -- Blizzard's been putting the kibosh on lots of Armory-based apps, but both of these apps are not only untouched, but they're actually being spotlighted on the official Upper Deck site. It could just be that Blizzard at large hasn't heard about them yet, or maybe they're specifically targeting apps that focus on the core game, not on the licensed products. Or, it could be that Blizzard is going after just Armory apps -- I can't think of any non-Armory apps that involve Warcraft in some way, but if Blizzard is planning an official Armory app, that would definitely be a reason to clear the App Store of unofficial apps first. Unfortunately, repeated queries to them from us about this have gone unanswered so far.

But at any rate, WM Match Tracker seems like an excellent app, and if you spend any amount of time playing the award-winning WoW minis game, it seems helpful.

Wowhead has been promising a profiler system for quite some time (it's been under development for over two years, according to the site), and now it's finally here.

Wowhead's profiler has pretty much every feature you might want from a modern profiling site, and fits right in to the excellent Wowhead interface. Armory import, 3D character view, gear sets, gear scores, upgrade search - it's all there. You can save your characters however you want, link them to your friends, check puggies, and so forth.

It's just gone public, so bugs are to be expected. Report them to Wowhead if you find them; the Wowhead team is very responsive. New features are also in development, such as embeddable 3D widgets of your characters, or automatic comparison between items in the site database and a profile of your choice.

I'm not sure how well this will scale, but it's an interesting idea: while it's certainly possible to just create a Twitter account for your World of Warcraft characters (so anyone interested can always see what you're up to), the folks behind a new site called wowTwitter have gone a step further, and recreated Twitter's functionality specifically for Azeroth's virtual denizens. It's very barebones right now, but basically, after you register, you can punch in any of your characters, "verify" them by changing something about them in the Armory (like unequipping the piece of gear on your wrist), and then you can send and receive messages on that character, with special channels created for the guild, your realm, and so on. I thought it used Twitter somehow, but it seems completely separate: they're running their own database and servers, so while the two work the same way (there are "@" replies and hashtags), they don't interact at all.

Which means they'll also have all of the problems that Twitter has had -- when only a few people are using your database, it runs fine, but if it starts to scale up at all, then you run into lots of "Fail Whale" downtime. And I'm not sure we need a whole other system just for WoW characters (though this one does have the nice bonus of "claiming" your character so it can't get impersonated). At any rate, they're in beta right now, and actually hosting a cash money prize contest for the most characters verified and tweets posted, so a link from us will probably show them how ready their system is. If it's your thing, go forth and wowTweet!

Armory alternative Armory Light (not to be confused with Armory Lite) has just passed its first birthday, and to celebrate, the site is relaunching with a bevy of new features.

• Pages for each item, with information on where it comes from, what it disenchants into, and how to link it in game. All the same info from the official Armory, basically.
• 3D models for some items. Not as good as Wowhead's, but nice if you're already on the site, I guess.
• A desktop app, built in Adobe Air (and hence cross-platform) to show 3D models of items. Not really sure what the point of this is, but somebody probably likes it.
• Heirloom calculator: Now this is cool. It lets you take any heirloom item and see how its stats scale at any level. Not many sites have this.
• A talent calculator. It's slow, jittery, and not particularly attractive, but they do have a talent calculator.
• A "powered by Armory Light" JavaScript to include on your own site, which gives you not only item tooltips (which a few other sites do), but also character tooltips, like the one at right (an example character, not one of mine). Seriously cool. I can definitely see myself using this feature; it's a great way to get a thumbnail sketch of a character.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I'm not much of a Jazz person, so when I set out to counter the John Coltrane that Adam used in The Queue yesterday, I was a little worried. Fortunately, while digging through my music collection to find something useful, I remembered that I had a trump card up my sleeves. Old Betty Boop cartoons, some of the most disturbing things you will ever see in your life. All of the best ones come packed with some incredibly old school Jazz. Now, some candy for your eyes and ears: Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher in a Betty Boop cartoon.

Docp asked...

"What happened to the Hunter column, Scattered Shots?"

I'm glad you asked! It just made its glorious comeback yesterday, with a brand new writer that some of you may recognize. Go give the latest Scattered Shots a read.

Although most of us, I suspect, prefer guild runs, most of us also have to PuG it up every once in a while. LFG can be a bit of a crap shoot; you can get an Ulduar-geared player doing 3,000 DPS in your heroic, or a fresh 80 who has a thing or two to learn doing 1,000.

Fortunately, we have the Armory to help us separate the good from the bad, or at least the geared from the ungeared. Sites like Be Imba and WoW Heroes have been around for a while to help us more easily check a character's gear level.

Now a new site, PUG Checker, can show you at a glance what bosses a character has killed, and how many times - or rather, what bosses they've been present for a kill of. Above right you can see what it shows for raids on my priest (I don't like Malygos very much). If you click "show bosses," you can see specific raid bosses in raids; otherwise, it just counts kills of the end boss. It uses Armory data, of course, which is pretty accurate, but not always perfect. Like the site says, "don't shoot the messenger" if the numbers aren't quite right.

Like Be Imba and WoW Heroes, this isn't an infallible guide to whether a player is good or not. It does probably correlate to some degree, though. In fact, if PUG Checker just added the average ilvl of the equipped gear of the person I'm checking, it would be my go-to site for checking puggies. It does load data much quicker than either of those equipment sites, which alone is enough that I will probably use it. I also really dig the clean design and the number-circles that look like subway indicators.

[via My Life as a Cartoon]

Yeah, we all know that Oculus kinda sucks, but now we've got some numbers on it -- or, more accurately, Flyv does. One of my feral Druid colleagues has been examining Armory data on completion rates of Wrath heroics (and incidentally took a peek at how long it takes for the average person to go from dinging 80 to a full Naxx clear). The numbers aren't too surprising: heroics that correspond to the earliest Wrath "regular" dungeons -- Violet Hold, Utgarde Keep, and the Nexus -- are far and away the most-completed heroics. Oculus -- and to a lesser extent, Ahn'kahet and Halls of Stone -- languish at 40, 51, and 58% completion rates respectively.

Halls of Stone surprises me somewhat, as I really didn't think it was a difficult heroic (outside of running a Druid tank on the Brann Bronzebeard event), but Ahn'kahet is universally cited amongst tanks and healers for LOS issues and nasty damage. And Oculus...well, we've talked about Oculus here before. I still think the concept of the dungeon itself is fantastic, but the moment that one or two embarrassed people in your group admit that it's their first time on the drakes, you know you're in for a long and ugly run.

I hope Flyv revisits this data at some point, because I'd love to see how the numbers change over the course of Wrath. With achievements introduced only as BC was ending, we don't really have a good look at how dungeon popularity and completion rates evolved there, and I think the numbers say a lot about the content players prioritize when they get a toon (or multiple toons) to the level cap.

Since the new site went live last night, an awful lot of our comments have been from here in the EU. Hundreds of our lovely readers have been having some problems, namely they can't find their characters using the on-site search engine.

There's a simple reason for this. Because so many of the shiny new features are in beta, the search function is currently only taking info out of the US Armory, not the EU one. It will happen at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later. Just hang on in there, you have not been forgotten.

As Liz said in her earlier post this morning:

Please remember, WoW.com Profiles are still in beta -- while we already have lots of ideas for the future, we want to hear from you about what we're doing wrong (or right!) to help us improve it. And before you even start protesting, we're aware that Profiles currently only work with characters in the US armory. (Though, to readers not on US servers, you can certainly create an account and participate on WoW.com Profiles -- you just aren't able to add characters. We're starting small with this beta run, but hope to have the ability for everyone to join us soon!)

Today being BlizzCon ticket sales day, Blizzard is anxious to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. In an attempt to lessen load on their web servers, they've temporarily disabled the Armory. In fact, this has been the case since last night, when I went to check out our main tank's armory after the raid (he had just gotten Shieldwall of the Breaker and I wanted to see what he was upgrading from).

This is going to be inconvenient for those of you attempting to form PuGs, especially PuG raids. Hopefully BlizzCon tickets will sell out relatively quickly, and this madness will be over, and our beloved gear-checking, snobbery-enabling service returned to us. How will you be vetting players in the mean time?