You knew this was coming, but I'm impressed with how it's done over on WoW-Achievements.com. With points to track and players to compare, it was inevitable that we'd have a site show up to track achievements, and here it is. While the Armory itself doesn't show individual achievements (yet), they've apparently come up with a way to figure out a number per player, and there's a worldwide player list (or at least a list of the 53, 901 characters they surveyed somehow). You can also post a pic of your achievement info, and they'll update it on the site. There's no way to see your individual stats yet, but if and when Blizzard adds that functionality to the Armory, we'll probably see a couple of sites show up like this, that allow you to do more with achievements and tracking them than the official UI does.

Of course, the Xbox 360 is the gold standard for achievements at this point -- while other MMOs and WoW have used the mechanic in their own way, Microsoft has built achievements into Xbox 360 profiles available online to anyone, so that's where most of the great web tools are right now. But the one that stands out for me, that I'd love to see replicated in World of Warcraft, is 360voice.com -- it basically creates a blog of what you've been up to on the Xbox that presents your activity in a readable, fun format. With Achievements build into the Armory, something like that could be easily used to power a timeline of your character, and let your friends see from day to day where you've been and what you've done. Lots of very cool ideas to develop here -- hopefully Blizzard will release Achievement info in an API sooner rather than later.

Since the patch hit, we've been flooded with requests for cookie-cutter builds for various classes, specs, and roles. We're working on it, but our bloggers only have so many hours in the day (if only haste rating worked in real life). However, I do have a new site to tell you about that might help with these types of questions. TalentChic is a web site that aims to determine what the most popular talent builds are for all nine classes, and it's very well made, in my opinion.

The site makes use of Armory data, so it stays relatively up-to-date. Builds are organized by class and by primary tree, and you can also filter for playstyle (Raid/PvP for instance). Playstyle is determined by what kind of gear the player was raiding when their data was cached, so it's not foolproof (a raider could have been wearing their PvP gear and thus counted as PvP), but it's about as good as can be done with Armory data.

As far as the information displayed goes, it seems reasonable to me. I'm a little surprised that Combat is still so dominant with Rogues, given that I've heard Mutilate got significantly buffed. And I'm very surprised that 0/61/0 is the most popular Holy Priest build; I haven't seen people talk about that one very much, and I certainly wouldn't want to be without Meditation. It does drop to only second most popular if I look at raiding Holy Priests. Are your own talent builds popular? Does TalentChic give you any ideas on how to spec?

Wowhead keeps adding new features, I know. But this is a big one. Last night, while most of us were busy watching the vice-presidential debate, they launched a fairly sophisticated tool for comparing items or sets of items. Basically, you can add any item or set in the database, and group them up however you want (by dragging items between groups), and then compare groups against each other to see what stats you gain and lose on.

There are tons of additional features to this tool, and it might be worth reading the instructions to see all of what you can do. Some things I particularly like:

• You can add stat weighting scales, to see (an estimation of) how good the item is overall for your class and spec. Click the scores to toggle the display format; I like the percentage display particularly, which shows the "best" group as 100% and everything else in terms of that.
• The "gains" row shows you in short what's different between your groups, by subtracting out all shared stats.
• All item listings on the site now feature checkboxes that you can use to quickly compare items.
• Each group has an option to view in 3D, so you can now finally use Wowhead as your dressing room: just create a group of items you want to look at, click the little triangle on the top bar of the group, and select "View in 3D."
• You can set one group as your "focus" by clicking the little eye icon, which shows all stats relative to that group.

I will definitely be making use of this in the future; it's much easier than figuring it out in your head or making a spreadsheet.

A full Achievements database is now live on Wowhead's Wrath of the Lich King site. When first I heard about this, I said (as you may be saying to yourselves now) "big deal, other sites have had achievements lists for a few days now." But you owe it to yourself to go check this out. They've taken their time to do it right as only Wowhead can, and it looks great, with complete information on achievement chains, meta achievements, point values, and just about anything you might want. "Shop Smart. Shop Pet... Smart" is a good example – it lists every pet that's valid for the achievement, all 103 of them. Attention to detail for the win.

Blizzard has shown their usual flair in naming these things, too; my favorites include:

• Why? Because It's Red
• The Cake Is Not a Lie
• Bring Me the Head of... Oh Wait
• Make Love, Not Warcraft

The Achievements listing includes Feats of Strength, zero-point achievements that may be unachievable in the current game (like old honor system ranks), or at least unachievable by most people. Among these are several "server firsts", such as being the first on your server to reach level 80 with a given class, or the first to kill a given boss. It's nice to see that this information is going to be memorialized somewhere besides blogs and realm forums.

In other Wowhead news, talent calculators for the new Hunter pet talents are now available. Additionally, new weapons and armors now have 3D models viewable on the site (just click the "View in 3D" button on item pages), so you can check out what we'll all be seeing in a few short months. So far I haven't found anything that looks totally amazing, though I did come across something that looks rather like the walrus hat that Blizz seems to be fond of showing off in Death Knight promo pics.

The gates to Northrend are open – to the lucky few who have gotten invites into the beta. For the rest of us, the best we can do is follow along on sites like, oh, here, as well as WotlkWiki and others. Now there's one more to add to the list: Wowhead has opened their Wrath site, with details on hundreds of items, quests, spells, and more, as well as the talent calculators we've talked about before

One of my particular favorites is the beta patch notes, which are nicely formatted and have links to all relevant spells, abilities, talents, and items mentioned in the notes (super-handy). New data updates are coming in all the time. There are many neat and yet-undiscovered things to be found there, so take a look around, and let us know if you come up with anything interesting.