Web scraper? API maybe?

Hi, I've been looking for something fun to do and thought writing a web scraper for the armory might be cool. My end goal is to do some data visualization for player data, and maybe also write a tool to help people pick their next gear purchase (I already have a spreadsheet to calculate RoI on EoT and EoF, but it doesn't connect to the server at all.)

But I know web scrapers have the potential to create a heavy load on the server and I don't want to mess anything up so I thought I'd better coordinate with staff and make sure I'm running it at reasonable rates and intervals.

Alternately, it'd be great to have an API I could just pull the data from, if that's even a thing. I understand if it's not, but I can dream!

We have an API already available for pulling the summary of characters and guilds. A community member wrote up some examples for it over here in the technical section.