Frostbolt, a World of Warcraft Blog

Today, with Patch 3.1.2, Blizzard finally introduced the Equipment Manager, which basically allows you to change all your gear by having sets, something we’ve seen before with addons like ClosetGnome and Itemrack.

Equipment Manager

• When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).

Before ranting a bit about it, this is not activated by default once you apply the patch, you have to go to Interface > Controls and, at the bottom, you will see an option that says Use Equipment Manager

This feature, compared to the addons before mentioned, is very basic. I was fooling around with it a bit and found out a couple of things:

• To create sets just equip yourself with the items you want on it (including t-shirts and such), then press the button at the top-right corner, press Save, select an icon and write down a name and that’s it.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to change gear like ClosetGnome by using an icon in the minimap. Instead, you would drag the icons to your bars and then, if you feel like it, assign a hotkey to be able to switch. This probably also works with macros, but got no clue about that.
• Once you select a name, and an icon, for your set, you can no longer edit it. If you want to change any of these, you’d have to remake the whole thing again.
• While I was making the sets I left out my t-shirt, I thought it would just leave the space blank, letting me put whatever I wanted there once the set was made, but I was wrong: I equipped the t-shirt and pressed the set again and it took out what I had in the t-shirt slot, so probably you could also make some sort of naked set.
• The sets in the Equipment Manager window (for reference look at the first picture posted) is sorted by creation, not alphabetically or anything like that. So, if you remake your first set, it would end up at the end.

But it’s not bad considering that it’s one less addon that you could use, but then I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it or go back to ClosetGnome.

Something I noticed, and something I did like about this is: all the geared is switched instantly. Before, when I used ClosetGnome, I kept having this problem, which was bugging me, when switching from tanking to DPS gear, since my DPS neck (Favor of the Dragon Queen) has a Dragon’s Eye, it gave me the error that no more than 3 items with Dragon’s Eyes could be equipped so I had to manually change the neck to be able to use it.

But with the Equipment Manager, since everything is swapped instantly, I get no error whatsoever, which is nice.

Keep in mind that this rant is based in just a couple of minutes of using it. I haven’t seen any sort of guide about it that could probably clear up some of the questions I had, but knowing Blizzard there probably won’t be any additional information of how it works (a la Scrolling Combat Text).

I’m also wondering if the Equipment Manager sets are synced (like the macros and such), that would be nice too, I’ll check this tonight when I get home.

Update 1 @ 6:03 PM GMT -5: I just got home and I’m trying to get into the game and guess what?

And after a while

People in vent is saying that Wintergrasp was having a ton of issues… seriously, are patches tested anyway? Go go raiding Tuesdays… /sigh

Update 2 @ 6:31 PM GMT -5: So I found a post that was made like an hour (or so?) ago:

Billtedes:
All realms are live and available for play.

We are currently experiencing some issues with the authentication system that is preventing some players from logging in. We are actively investigating these issues and will provide further updates as soon as we can.

How can the realms be live and available to play while you are having issues with the authentication system?

Now when you try to log you get this error instead.

Update 3 @ 6:42 PM GMT -5: Finally, servers are back up. Going back to the topic, Equipment Manager sets do sync, which is kinda neat if you use different computers to play WoW.

Gahlok
Frostbolt.com

While the loot is being sorted I decided to make a post now instead of waiting for tomorrow. A couple of minutes ago we killed General Vezax (25 man), it was really easy, really.

Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned
Idol of the Corruptor
Grips of the Unbroken

I got the Idol, and that is a damn nice polearm.

Here are a couple of screenshots after General Vezax, there’s no trash and you go straight to the last guy (technically speaking you finish easy mode after killing the next guy, then you do hard modes and unlock Algalon).

I wanted to take a better screenshot of the room, but the boss was triggered by error (and I swear it wasn’t me!)

So we officially catched up and are currently tied #1 alliance in the server (jumping from tied #3 to tied #1), so it’s a nice comeback. But, yet again I’d like to repeat, the real game starts in hard modes and Algalon.

Edit 10:40 pm GMT-5: After rechecking some information, as of now, there are currently four alliance guilds tied #1 in the server; three of us killed General this week.

Gahlok
Frostbolt.com