smarter than the average bear
November 23, 2009
Well only just… I’ve got some results from my attempt to divide up the feral druid population into cats and bears. We started from the fact that there is no “form” tag in the armoury XML – no direct way to count the thing we want to count. The only way to get an insight into this is to find a proxy for each of the forms – something that is in the data which can be used to separate the sheep from the goats, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.
Talents seem to be the obvious choice, so long as there is one talent that bears will take and cats not and another talent that is vice versa. Glyphs are the other possibility. Whatever we choose just has to be i) something that players are highly likely to take and ii) something that is orthogonal; something that definitely points in one direction for bears and another for cats.
But the basic problem is that there are a lot of um… how to put this politely… there are a lot of left-of-centre specs out there. Talents and glyphs are both less orthogonal than I was hoping for – many specs look a bit bearish and a bit cattish at the same time. And there is a big group that takes none of the talents or glyphs that we want to use.
That’s why I decided not to make the queries very complex – adding more talents or glyphs into the selection criteria just increases the number of toons that fall into the grey area. Also I’ve counted specs and not toons since the original question was related to the number of druids specced for tanking.
Thanks to the commenters who made suggestions on possible talents and glyphs that might fit these criteria. I’ve run two queries against the data.
The first query counts feral druids who have Natural Reaction versus those who have Predatory Instincts. A druid with some points in Natural Reaction and none at all in Predatory Instincts might be a bear; t’other way round for cats. Those with points in neither are marked as “unknown”; those with some points in both are the “could be either” group.
The second query counts druids who have a Glyph of Maul versus those who have either a Glyph of Shred and/or a Glyph of Rip. Equipping Maul but not Shred or Rip indicates bear; Shred or Rip but no Maul indicates cat. Again we have groups with a mix of these glyphs, and, unfortunately, a huge group with none of them.
Anyway this is what we’ve got:
(Patch 3.2.2 data; sample size 16327 level 80 feral druids with 28970 specs).
Talent-based spec count:
- Bear: 30%
- Cat : 33%
- Could be either: 5%
- Unknown: 31%
Glyph-based spec count:
- Bear: 18%
- Cat: 9%
- Could be either: 15%
- Unknown: 58%
Frankly I’m still not sure how valid these numbers are, but I hope they provide a bit of insight. The talent-based count may at least provide a low-water-mark indication of the number of bearish specs in there.
earth to druids… come in please…
October 30, 2009
There’s a post over at wow.com that has set me a bit of a challenge. The post is about bear tanks, but makes the valid point that we don’t have any clear data on the popularity of the various druid forms. There’s a pretty simple reason for that – the armoury data doesn’t provide any direct way of getting such a count.
Still, we don’t let little obstacles like that get in our way. What we need are some data items that can be used as proxies for what we want to count. Unfortunately I’m far from being a druid expert, so I’m looking for suggestions on what items to use.
What we basically want is a talent, or a glyph (or maybe a gem) that bears will want to equip and cats not. And then something that’s vice versa – something that cats will have and bears not. One talent or glyph, or several… whatever makes the most sense. All suggestions on this are most welcome.
(Thanks to the commenters who have already made suggestions on other threads; I’ll be taking those comments on board.)
If I can get suggestions for both talents and glyphs then I can run more that one query and see how well the numbers match up.
I’d imagine that, with dual specs, players who liked both forms would have a spec for each. In any case, going from specs to forms and getting a count against the total druid population should tell us something interesting.
ebony and ivory
October 16, 2009
Thanks to reader Armagon who asked for a consolidated report on race distribution. This subject is covered by a variety of other sites, but there is some doubt about whether those sites are maintaining a representative sample.
It’s easy enough to produce a couple of simple tables that give us the information we need. (The data is from the patch 3.2 scan.)
| Race | Popularity |
|---|---|
| Human | 20 % |
| Blood Elf | 17 % |
| Night Elf | 16 % |
| Undead | 10 % |
| Draenei | 10 % |
| Tauren | 9 % |
| Orc | 6 % |
| Gnome | 5 % |
| Dwarf | 4 % |
| Troll | 4 % |
That seems to be a reasonable match to the Warcraft Realms data. There will always be some degree of sampling error in this work so everybody’s numbers have to be treated with a bit of caution.
Tables like that always make me shake my head a bit but… the fantasy RPG where everybody wants to roleplay the cute kid next door… Hey, trolls are people too you know!
Anyway, if we want the distribution of race and class then we get this. (Percentages here are based on the total population so the popularity column adds up to 100%.)
| Race | Class | Popularity (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Blood Elf | Paladin | 6.1 |
| Blood Elf | Death Knight | 3.2 |
| Blood Elf | Priest | 1.6 |
| Blood Elf | Mage | 1.6 |
| Blood Elf | Hunter | 1.4 |
| Blood Elf | Warlock | 1.4 |
| Blood Elf | Rogue | 1.3 |
| Draenei | Shaman | 3.9 |
| Draenei | Death Knight | 1.6 |
| Draenei | Paladin | 1.2 |
| Draenei | Priest | 0.8 |
| Draenei | Hunter | 0.7 |
| Draenei | Mage | 0.7 |
| Draenei | Warrior | 0.5 |
| Dwarf | Hunter | 1.3 |
| Dwarf | Paladin | 1.2 |
| Dwarf | Priest | 0.7 |
| Dwarf | Warrior | 0.7 |
| Dwarf | Death Knight | 0.4 |
| Dwarf | Rogue | 0.2 |
| Gnome | Mage | 1.7 |
| Gnome | Warlock | 1.4 |
| Gnome | Rogue | 0.9 |
| Gnome | Death Knight | 0.8 |
| Gnome | Warrior | 0.5 |
| Human | Paladin | 5.3 |
| Human | Death Knight | 3.3 |
| Human | Mage | 2.7 |
| Human | Warlock | 2.5 |
| Human | Warrior | 2.4 |
| Human | Priest | 2.1 |
| Human | Rogue | 1.7 |
| Night Elf | Druid | 6.2 |
| Night Elf | Hunter | 3.3 |
| Night Elf | Death Knight | 2 |
| Night Elf | Rogue | 2 |
| Night Elf | Priest | 1.5 |
| Night Elf | Warrior | 1.3 |
| Orc | Death Knight | 1.5 |
| Orc | Shaman | 1.3 |
| Orc | Warrior | 1.3 |
| Orc | Hunter | 1.1 |
| Orc | Warlock | 0.5 |
| Orc | Rogue | 0.3 |
| Tauren | Druid | 4.1 |
| Tauren | Shaman | 1.4 |
| Tauren | Warrior | 1.4 |
| Tauren | Death Knight | 1 |
| Tauren | Hunter | 0.6 |
| Troll | Shaman | 0.9 |
| Troll | Hunter | 0.8 |
| Troll | Mage | 0.5 |
| Troll | Priest | 0.5 |
| Troll | Rogue | 0.4 |
| Troll | Death Knight | 0.3 |
| Troll | Warrior | 0.2 |
| Undead | Rogue | 2 |
| Undead | Warlock | 1.9 |
| Undead | Priest | 1.9 |
| Undead | Mage | 1.7 |
| Undead | Death Knight | 1.3 |
| Undead | Warrior | 0.9 |
I’ll add this to my set of reports over at my Google site, so that it stays updated with each new scan. But it does seem that the other sites that cover population are doing a reasonable job of reporting what is really going on.
professional opinion
August 18, 2009
There’s a post up over at Wowenomics which speculates about the most profitable crafting professions and how that might have changed between patches. There is no armoury data that helps us relate professions to profits, but the post prompted me to have another look at the distribution of professions in general. This is the current state of play:
| Patch 3.2 | Patch 3.0.8 | |
| Mining | 20% | 20% |
| Herbalism | 12% | 13% |
| Enchanting | 11% | 10% |
| Jewelcrafting | 9% | 5% |
| Skinning | 9% | 13% |
| Tailoring | 8% | 9% |
| Alchemy | 8% | 8% |
| Blacksmithing | 7% | 7% |
| Engineering | 6% | 6% |
| Leatherworking | 6% | 7% |
| Inscription | 4% | 3% |
There’s a lot less change in there than I was expecting, give that professions get worked over with the nerf bat just as classes do. I’ve marked the two most dramatic shifts: jewelcrafting and skinning. Jewelcrafting may indeed genuinely have been buffed to the point where people are more enthusiastic for it. The decline in skinning I’m not so sure about.
There has been a significant decline in some of the leather-wearing classes such as rogues and hunters; perhaps that has affected the crafting demand for hide. Certainly the classes that are flavour of the month want heavy metal and not the skins of small furry animals.
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