Updates 22/12/25 Archived

🔧 EpicForge Update – Expansion Support, Smarter Comparisons, and Major Backend Forging

Forgers, the anvils haven’t cooled for a moment. Over the last month, EpicForge.au has seen some of its biggest structural improvements yet — laying the groundwork for multi-expansion support, faster character data, and a smoother overall experience.

Here’s what’s new.

🔥 Expansion & Mode Support (Era vs Anniversary)

We’ve done a deep rebuild of how EpicForge handles expansions:

• Proper support for Era and Anniversary modes across the site

• Expansion selection now persists correctly through:

  • Character lookup

  • Character comparison

  • Permalinks & recent searches

• Clean separation of expansion logic for:

  • Blizzard API namespaces

  • Database reads/writes

  • Talent data and progression handling

This sets the foundation for future expansion growth without breaking existing data.

⚔️ Character Comparison – Major Reforging

The Character Compare page received a serious overhaul:

• Comparison now behaves identically to Character Lookup

• Expansion mode is respected end-to-end (no more mismatches)

• Gear, stats, talents, and logs load consistently for both characters

• Added proper permalink support (including expansion mode)

• Improved loading flow to prevent partial or failed comparisons

In short: comparisons are now reliable, predictable, and fast.

🧠 Smarter Data Refresh & Queue Handling

Behind the scenes, we’ve tightened up how character data refreshes:

• Improved refresh queue logic to prevent infinite reload loops

• Better handling for:

  • Characters under level cap

  • Missing or partial logs data

• Safer JSON handling to avoid hard failures during refresh

• Cleaner separation between “load cached data” vs “refresh from API”

This dramatically improves stability during heavy usage.

🎨 UI & UX Polish

A lot of small but important refinements landed across the site:

• More consistent loading spinners and “forging” indicators

• Improved tab behaviour and state persistence

• Cleaner handling of recent searches and comparisons

• Better mobile and desktop layout consistency

Everything should now feel tighter and more intentional.

🛠️ Codebase Cleanup & Stability Improvements

We also put in the unglamorous (but critical) work:

• Reduced duplicated logic between major pages

• Improved character name encoding (special characters now resolve correctly)

• Safer API error handling and fallbacks

• General backend clean-up and performance tuning

The result: fewer edge-case failures and easier future development.

⚙️ What’s Next

With the foundations now solid:

• Expansion-specific features (buffs, raid sizes, progression logic) are next

• Further performance improvements are planned

• More visual polish and quality-of-life upgrades are on the way

As always, this work is about making EpicForge faster, more reliable, and ready for what Classic throws at it next.

Thanks for forging with us 🔥
If you spot anything odd, broken, or have a feature idea — hit us up. The anvil’s still hot.