Hi folks! Be.imba is a site that can be used to look up some information about people you’re considering group or raiding with. We’ve all seen people saying “bored 550 imba arms warrior looking for naxx group” or some such. What they’re refering to, of course, is their gear score on the website be.imba.hu. The two questions I will endeavor to answer here are why and how to use this tool.

Why?

If you’re in a guild large enough that you never need to play with people from outside of it, and you know that everyone is geared and skilled enough for anything you’d ever want to do with them, then you would not need this site. If, however, you want to get some information about someone without knowing them, this site can help. Anyone can look someone up on the official armory, but the information you get there is very dry, and unless you know a lot about the class and spec of the person you’re looking into, you might not be able to parse out useful data (is he a hunter enchanting strength?).

Be.imba knows enough about every class and spec that it can tell you what enchants are acceptable, sometimes whether the spec is appropriate, and generally how good the player’s gear and setup are. It has limitations of course. The most serious is that it obviously can’t tell you how skilled a player is. Anyone will tell you that skill is the most important factor in an individual’s performance. I’ve seen well geared terrible players and terribly geared amazing players, and I’d happily group with the latter.

Also, it doesn’t always know whether a spec is correct, and whether the person is using their gem slots wisely. In addition, some people are capable of gaming the site to look better than they really are.

This said, it’s a valuable tool and another data point. Having a high imba score means that the person you’re looking at is more likely to be better geared than not, and this could mean that they’re the right person for your pug or guild.

How?

Be.imba.hu is easy to use. Enter the zone, realm, and character you want to search, and click “query report”. Note that you can switch to a cached version search if the armory is down.

You’ll be sent to the results page. I looked myself up to generate this, and please note that it can take a while. The top half of the page shows a summary of any issues the search finds. In my case, you can see that it suggests I upgrade my paltry +8 to stats to the much more powerful and awe-inspiring +10 to stats. You can also see that I run 3 hit rating below cap.

The second half of the page shows us my current and highest gear score (in case you caught me in pvp gear), as well as a handy dandy little graph that claims to be able to predict where I need my upgrades from and what content I can be expected to handle myself in. In my case, imba can’t tell you if I’ve specced properly because they don’t know about marks hunters to tell one way or another.

Now, as I said earlier, this report might only be telling you how much I paid for my account, and I might be the worst huntard you’ve ever had the misfortune to run with. Alas, there’s no database for suck. Yet. I’ll be the first to break the news when it’s released, don’t you worry 🙂

The resource site spotlight (aka wiki tiki utility posts) should happen every week, is written by Euripides from outdps.com, and endeavors to fill your favorites bar with an unmanageably large quantity of WOW resource sites. So much knowledge that it hurts. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.