Everything you need to know about the Liquid Armory: our World of Warcraft tools

World of Warcraft is the most successful massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) ever made. In fact, it's one of the most successful games ever, period. The game covers both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment instances. The latter is at the core of raiding in World of Warcraft, which, of course, is the name of the game during the Liquid Guild’s Race to World First. It also lends itself to endless theory-crafting and min-maxing. With that in mind, we've recently launched two tools, the Trinket Tracker and the Seasonal Overview, through the Liquid Armory. 

One of Team Liquid’s missions has always been to be at the forefront of the competitive gaming industry. With the tools that we provide through the Liquid Armory, we help the World of Warcraft raiding community. So how did the idea come about? We asked one of the lead developers, and World of Warcraft specialist extraordinaire Nikolas (Necco) Sadler. “

The idea for Liquid Armory stemmed from the Liquid Guild analytics team," Nikolas explained. "Over the years, they’ve developed many tools and strategies to optimize and boost our raiders to help gain an edge during the race to world first (RWF). They’ve also had to rely on tools that lack some features and/or insights that can make all the difference in an event like the RWF."

“We saw an opportunity to both enhance existing tools for our raiders and give back to the WoW community at the same time”.

So why did we start with a Trinket Tracker? 

Our first tool is the Liquid Armory Trinket Tracker.

“Trinkets are one of the most confusing and impactful gear slots in the game, providing huge dps gains (10-15% overall dps gain per trinket in some cases) and utility that makes all the difference," Nikolas explained. “But there are so many to choose from that it becomes tough to know which ones will perform best in various situations. One trinket might outperform all others in a single target raid boss encounter, while another is far more effective in a multi-target encounter. Some trinkets also perform better for some classes and specs than others, and different talent builds can impact the performance of trinkets. Needless to say, figuring out what trinket works best for different situations is very difficult. Since this is the most ambiguous gear slot, we thought it would be the perfect candidate to start with.”

So, how does the Liquid Armory Trinket Tracker work?

“This is going to be a difficult one for non-World of Warcraft players, but I’ll do my best to explain it as best as I can," Nikolas said. ”The data in the chart is generated using SimulationCraft — a tool used to measure item performance in a controlled environment — and focuses on items from the current season. We use community-generated profiles for simulations when available. If those are not available, or if multiple talent builds are relevant, we fall back on simplified profiles provided by Liquid Guild's simulation expert.

“To fairly assess each trinket's impact, we start with a baseline profile that has no trinkets equipped. From there, we simulate each trinket individually at the most commonly used item levels for the season. This approach isolates their contribution to overall damage output, making the comparisons more meaningful and relevant. We aim to update the data regularly, especially when new patches or updates to SimulationCraft are released. A "last updated" date is provided on the page to indicate the currency of the data.”

So now there is a Trinket Tracker, but I also saw the Seasonal Overview just launched. Is there more in the works?

“We’re thinking both short- and long-term," Nikolas said. "We indeed just launched the Liquid Armory Seasonal Overview, which is a resource to look up seasonal info including dungeons, affixes, upgrade currency, and the equipment item level from different difficulties of raids, mythic+, and delves."

There are also some other ideas the team is actively exploring, including:

• Character-specific cheat sheets: A dashboard of widgets tailored to your own characters to help figure out what talents, gear, and consumables will have the most impact.
• Mythic+ dashboards: Group composition suggestions based on what you like to play; most popular talent builds per dungeon; most popular routes based on dungeon and key level, etc.
• Raid organizer tools: To help plan your raid, work through boss strategies, loot distribution, and composition recommendations.

Nikolas, do you have any personal notes or anything you'd like to leave us with?

“This project has been very exciting for many of us," said Nikolas. "We have some really passionate WoW enthusiasts contributing to this project. I’m a WoW nerd at heart, and getting the chance to work on something that combines gameplay, data, design, and community feedback has been really rewarding."

“We’re also incredibly grateful for the community response so far—it’s been thrilling to see people using and sharing the Trinket Tracker already. If you have feedback or ideas, we’re always listening. This is just the start.”

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