paladins behaving badly

A commenter by the name of Tankadin asked me to look at some problems with my Protection Paladin stats page. First off, apologies for the time it has taken to respond to this; I’m always happy to check for errors.

Tankadin asked whether 1.2 was a reasonable minimum mainhand attack speed for prot pallies. That is what the data shows. Level 80 prot pallies come equipped with a variety of weapons in the mainhand slot. In my sample we have this for mainhand speed:

Min	Avg	Max	Weapon Type	Count
1.35	1.633	2.90	One-Handed Swords	14094
1.24	1.95	2.80	One-Handed Maces	2849
1.41	1.76	2.90	One-Handed Axes	1752
2.70	3.31	3.80	Two-Handed Axes	115
1.50	2.76	3.00	Miscellaneous	72
2.66	2.98	3.00	Fishing Poles	67
2.12	3.32	3.80	Two-Handed Maces	62
2.93	3.26	3.80	Two-Handed Swords	34
2.85	3.30	3.50	Polearms	14

The other question was: why do they show any offhand dps, when they should be equipped with shields. The answer to this one is a bit more disturbing. The stats shown in the armoury are all calculated on the server side (presumably to prevent people reverse-engineering the equations involved) and there is no direct connection in the XML between the stats and the items that the character is equipped with.

No doubt, somewhere in the bowels of Blizz’s servers, the stats are being computed by taking into account the bonuses granted by each item, gem, enchant et cetera, but when the data gets to your browser it is just a set of disconnected numbers.

What is happening is that a paladin who has nothing equipped in the offhand slot gets reported as having a non-zero offhand dps. It is a purely theoretical number since there is no weapon in the slot that could attack anybody using that dps. But the number is there in the XML.

So, regrettably, that table is… misunderestimated… There may be other examples of this in some of the stats reports and I’ll try to set aside some time to see if some better sanity checks can be put in place. Unfortunately there are limits to what can be done since I use a lot of pretty generic SQL to do the work.

Tankadin’s final questions were about whether the stats were being influenced by outliers. Well, outliers there certainly are. I found one one level 80 prot pally wielding this in the mainhand slot. If you’re ever tempted to equip it for the next guild raid, you’ll be pleased to know that it has an attack speed of 2.0!

The reason why that doesn’t bother me too much is that the outliers form a relatively small proportion of the sample set. Most characters adopt one or another of a very small subset of items. We might call them the “popular” group. We’ve remarked on this interesting distribution before, but its worth looking at a chart again. Here is a plot of the number of level 80 protection paladins equipped with each distinct item in the mainhand slot:

Mainhand Item Count for Level 80 Prot Paladins

You can see the “long tail” of outliers which stretches to the right hand axis of the chart, but the reality is that there are about 1800 toons in the long tail, compared to 22,000 toons in the popular camp.

hunters now the hunted?

At the moment I’m busy updating the class reports based on my new WotLK scan data. So I haven’t had a great deal of time to poke around inside the data itself.

Still, some differences stand out so clearly that they are hard to ignore. One thing that struck me is the change in class composition between level 70 and level 80.  Here are the numbers:

	Level 80	Level 70	Change
Hunter	8.3%	14.1%	-5.8
Rogue	8.6%	12.8%	-4.2
Warlock	7.7%	11.1%	-3.4
Mage	10.3%	12.2%	-1.9
Priest	9.8%	10.7%	-0.9
Shaman	8.0%	7.8%	0.2
Warrior	12.7%	11.4%	1.3
Druid	11.2%	9.2%	2.0
Paladin	14.5%	9.1%	5.4
Death Knight	8.9%	1.5%	7.4

I’m assuming that what these figures tell us is that players are making particular choices about which of their toons to take to 80 first. Otherwise the class distribution would be much the same at both levels (leaving aside death knights, where there is no pre-existing pool of toons at 70).

To me it looks like hunters and rogues have lost out in the nerf game and the good ol’ pally has become the class du jour in Northrend.

More class stats

Gradually getting them up, one class at a time unfortunately… At least the reports will be much faster to update than they have been to create. There is now data for the 3 Shaman trees, Hunters and Holy Paladins. More to come…