the first rule of fight club

Thanks to Epicsnakehips who left a comment on my last post (about class popularity) to the effect that the less popular classes like rogues and hunters don’t seem so unpopular in PvP. No, indeed they don’t; your basic rogue may be passé in PvE, but spend just a bit of time in a level 19 battleground and you’ll have rogues up to your armpits.

That comment has inspired me to improve my reports on class distribution. You can find two new tables over at my Google App Engine site, which show the class breakdown across PvE and PvP realms. As well, I’m working on a table that shows the same data for x9 BG twinks (where you’ll find that rogues, warlocks and hunters are all popular choices at many of the x9 levels).

Here’s the breakdown on PvP and RPPvP realms:

Class	Popularity	Tree One	Tree Two	Tree Three
Paladin	15.7%	Holy: 4.4%	Protection: 4.8%	Retribution: 6.5%
Death Knight	13.6%	Blood: 5.8%	Frost: 3.6%	Unholy: 4.2%
Druid	11.5%	Balance: 2.7%	Feral Combat: 4.1%	Restoration: 4.6%
Priest	9.7%	Discipline: 3.0%	Holy: 3.2%	Shadow: 3.6%
Warrior	9.2%	Arms: 3.0%	Fury: 2.5%	Protection: 3.7%
Mage	8.6%	Arcane: 4.0%	Fire: 1.9%	Frost: 2.7%
Shaman	8.5%	Elemental: 2.9%	Enhancement: 2.0%	Restoration: 3.5%
Rogue	8.5%	Assassination: 5.2%	Combat: 2.8%	Subtlety: 0.5%
Hunter	7.4%	Beast Mastery: 1.5%	Marksmanship: 2.2%	Survival: 3.6%
Warlock	7.4%	Affliction: 2.2%	Demonology: 1.1%	Destruction: 4.1%

It is interesting that the basic popularity of the classes doesn’t change all that much between PvE and PvP realms. I was expecting rogues and hunters especially to move way up in ranking.

The basic issue seems clear enough – classes like rogues and warlocks are near the bottom because they have only one tree that PvPers want to use. The destruction warlock at 4.1% and the assassination rogue at 5.2% seem competitive with DK and paladin builds, but DKs and paladins have all three trees as competitive in world PvP.

What surprises me is that the hunter is not more popular on PvP realms. They certainly are popular and effective in battleground PvP.

appetite for destruction

… seems to be running at about 4%. But more on that in a second. I’ve updated my Google App Engine site for patch 3.3. Some of the twink reports are a bit iffy because of the small sample size so I’ll refresh them again next week when I’ve got more data. Not a lot of people playing level 59 twink Shaman, it would seem.

Meanwhile, I’ve added a couple of new general reports, including the ever-popular class distribution table. This time, I’ve added a view of the overall popularity of the 3 talent trees within each class. Note that the percentages for each tree are based on the total level 80 population and not on the count of the class. Destruction warlocks are 3.9%, which means 3.9% of all level 80 toons are destruction warlocks. And the query is based on the active spec, where the toon has dual specs. I’m hoping that, statistically speaking, the sample is playing with their preferred spec.

Class	Popularity	Tree 1	Tree 2	Tree 3
Paladin	15.4%	Holy: 4.2%	Protection: 4.8%	Retribution: 6.3%
Death Knight	14.0%	Blood: 6.1%	Frost: 3.9%	Unholy: 4.1%
Druid	11.5%	Balance: 2.9%	Feral Combat: 4.1%	Restoration: 4.5%
Priest	9.8%	Discipline: 2.7%	Holy: 3.4%	Shadow: 3.7%
Warrior	9.4%	Arms: 2.9%	Fury: 2.6%	Protection: 3.9%
Mage	8.7%	Arcane: 4.0%	Fire: 2.2%	Frost: 2.5%
Shaman	8.4%	Elemental: 2.9%	Enhancement: 2.0%	Restoration: 3.5%
Hunter	8.1%	Beast Mastery: 2.1%	Marksmanship: 2.2%	Survival: 3.7%
Rogue	7.4%	Assassination: 4.1%	Combat: 2.8%	Subtlety: 0.5%
Warlock	7.4%	Affliction: 2.1%	Demonology: 1.4%	Destruction: 3.9%

So we have the retribution pally as the most popular at 6.3% down to the subtlety rogue the least popular at 0.5%.

Comparing this to what we had last time, the most notable thing is the decline of the hunter. Paladins and DKs continue to rule. And not a lot of love for the rogue or the warlock.

smarter than the average bear

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…

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

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.

working class orc

Thanks to blog reader Grant, who asked for a report on races and professions. And voilà…

The numbers are percentages of the total race counts for toons that have at least one profession. So, to take the first number, 4.9% of all Blood Elves who have at least one profession have Alchemy as one of those professions.

	Alchemy	Blacksmithing	Enchanting	Engineering	Herbalism
Blood Elf	4.9	5.9	11.2	7.9	10.8
Draenei	6	5.4	6.2	6.4	12.3
Dwarf	4.1	10.7	5.7	13.7	8.2
Gnome	5.5	3.3	10.4	20.9	10.1
Human	6.8	10.3	11.6	7.5	12.1
Night Elf	9.1	3.7	6.9	8	15.4
Orc	5.1	9.2	5.4	11.8	10.3
Tauren	9	6.4	4.8	5.7	16.8
Troll	7.7	3.5	7.5	11.3	13.2
Undead	7.9	3.8	13	10.6	13.6

	Inscription	Jewelcrafting	Leatherworking	Mining	Skinning	Tailoring
Blood Elf	4	8.2	4.7	23.1	10.8	8.6
Draenei	4.1	14	4.6	26.4	9.9	4.8
Dwarf	2.3	2.6	7.2	28.4	13.2	3.8
Gnome	3	2.7	2.3	22.7	7	12
Human	3.7	3.4	2.9	21.8	8.4	11.4
Night Elf	3.2	2.6	13.3	14.7	19.5	3.6
Orc	3	3.8	7.6	26.8	14.3	2.8
Tauren	3.7	3.3	12.6	17.7	18.8	1.2
Troll	3.1	3.1	9.3	19.1	15.6	6.5
Undead	3.3	3.6	3.7	17.1	9.2	14.2

Race, class and profession aren’t independent variables – class influence profession because of the different types of gear that can be worn, and race influences class because not every race can take up every class. Differences in playstyle (for example selecting a race for PvP) come into it as well. But there is more variation there than I was expecting, and I’m not sure I understand everything in those tables.

runed scarlet rubies are a girl’s best friend

I see I’ve got a lot of visitors over the last day or so from here. The author of that post has come up with a simple but interesting datamining idea – producing a consolidated list of the most popular gems to aid people playing the AH.

Unfortunately it isn’t really correct to add the percentage values in my tables since they are relative measures designed to show what is popular by spec. But the population in each class/spec combination varies wildly which make it impossible to go from that to a general count.

However, your humble dataminer stands ready to help with questions like this. I ran a query on gems across the overall sample and came up with the following list. The numbers are the total count of each gem and for comparison’s sake there are 171,148 characters in this sample who have at least one gem. I’ve chopped the table off at 5000, but the list goes all the way down to various cuts of shattered and opaque Dark Jade which are worn by one toon only in the sample.

Be aware that this is not a random sample – it is biased with a lot of higher level twinks, who could be expected to be gemmed up to the gills. But since twinking players are ones most happy to splash the cash, maybe that is no bad thing.

Runed Scarlet Ruby	67720
Solid Sky Sapphire	50331
Bold Scarlet Ruby	39622
Rigid Autumn’s Glow	27453
Balanced Twilight Opal	26209
Delicate Scarlet Ruby	20147
Smooth Autumn’s Glow	18689
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond	17878
Bright Scarlet Ruby	16895
Brilliant Autumn’s Glow	14784
Runed Bloodstone	13025
Potent Monarch Topaz	11621
Bold Bloodstone	11099
Sovereign Twilight Opal	10407
Pristine Monarch Topaz	10371
Luminous Monarch Topaz	10257
Sparkling Sky Sapphire	9610
Glowing Twilight Opal	9414
Purified Twilight Opal	8304
Relentless Earthsiege Diamond	8057
Enduring Forest Emerald	8049
Veiled Monarch Topaz	7508
Deadly Monarch Topaz	7491
Vivid Forest Emerald	7483
Runed Dragon’s Eye	7376
Royal Twilight Opal	7337
Thick Autumn’s Glow	7069
Austere Earthsiege Diamond	7066
Solid Chalcedony	6857
Ember Skyflare Diamond	6604
Dazzling Forest Emerald	6482
Glowing Nightseye	6344
Bold Dragon’s Eye	6100
Steady Forest Emerald	6072
Smooth Sun Crystal	5793
Inscribed Monarch Topaz	5724
Jagged Forest Emerald	5701
Perfect Runed Bloodstone	5658
Regal Twilight Opal	5332
Reckless Monarch Topaz	5136
Kharmaa’s Grace	5116

Let me say I’m right with you on questions about the WoW economy. The AH is one of the more inspired minigames in WoW. It’s a sort of non-zero-sum PvP where skill actually counts for something and you can’t twink your way to stardom. Even with Auctioneer, you still have to think about what the data is telling you. So, I’ve added consolidated reports to my to-do list. Anybody with other suggestions for reports that have an economic focus is welcome to leave a comment.

minority report

Once again it’s time for our check on where the latest patches have left class balance. This is the state of play at level 80, post 3.1.1:

Class	Popularity
Death Knights	15.0%
Paladin	14.2%
Druid	10.3%
Warrior	9.7%
Mage	9.6%
Priest	9.5%
Hunter	9.3%
Shaman	7.6%
Rogue	7.3%
Warlock	7.3%

As you can see, the trends we noted last time have not been reversed. The only new thing here is that another class – the rogue – has joined warlocks on the Azeroth endangered species list. This is offset by the rise of the druid as the hybrid class of choice a popular hybrid class and the continued enthusiasm for paladins and DKs.

moar content plz?

Things are progressing nicely here. My scanner is past the 100K character mark – just a bit behind where I’d hoped to be by now. All the new glyph and enchant pages are up. I’ll refresh them at the end of the scan when I have a bigger data set.

And as always, the raw data has interesting things to say. What struck me this time is how many characters are piled up at level 80. Here’s the chart:

You can compare that with the distribution at the beginning of the year. The logjam of level 70s has been cleared, which means people have taken most of their alts to 80. Of course that begs the question – what next when you’ve got all your toons to 8o?

I must admit that this raises a design issue that I have never understood. Why does Blizz downplay the levelling experience so much? Some of my fondest memories in the game are instance runs through some of the mid level content like Blackfathom Deeps. A bit challenging for a leveling character and with plenty of lively, fun fights.  There is so much content in old Azeroth that has been devalued by the changes since BC.

True, a  lot of it is just kill-10-rats quests, but surely it would be easier to beef up that content than create complete new zones. A few creative writers to add new questlines with a bit of variety and challenge must be gazillions of dollars cheaper than the army of artists needed to work up a whole new continent.

Update:

It’s worth saying that this chart puts the dual specs data in a different light too. In my post on that subject, I said that the take-up of dual specs was lower than I was expecting. A commenter pointed out that I didn’t seem to have taken alts into account. Well, I had, sorta… I thought that most alts were still back in the 70-79 range and weren’t being counted in my sample.

LOL! I can see that that assumption was, like, so totally February 2009… It’s clear now that the commenter was quite right. If about 50% of all level 80s have dual specs, as they do, then everybody’s main has them, statistically speaking at least. And a good few alts as well.

the numbers on dual specs

These are the correct figures on dual spec adoption. The mistake in the original post was mine (those left outer joins will get you every time) and not a fault of the armoury. The sample size is small, so the sampling error may be large, but the general pattern  is clear enough from these numbers.

Sample size: 30K level 80s who have been played since 3.1. Choices below 2% are not shown.

Class	Specs	Popularity
Death Knight	Frost and Unholy	10%
Death Knight	Blood and Frost	8%
Death Knight	Blood and Unholy	7%
Death Knight	Two of Frost	3%
Death Knight	Two of Unholy	3%
Death Knight	One Unholy	28%
Death Knight	One Blood	21%
Death Knight	One Frost	17%
Druid	Balance and Restoration	23%
Druid	Feral Combat and Restoration	18%
Druid	Balance and Feral Combat	5%
Druid	Two of Feral Combat	7%
Druid	One Restoration	16%
Druid	One Feral Combat	14%
Druid	One Balance	13%
Hunter	Beast Mastery and Survival	10%
Hunter	Marksmanship and Survival	7%
Hunter	Beast Mastery and Marksmanship	3%
Hunter	Two of Survival	5%
Hunter	One Survival	42%
Hunter	One Beast Mastery	21%
Hunter	One Marksmanship	12%
Mage	Arcane and Fire	11%
Mage	Fire and Frost	11%
Mage	Arcane and Frost	8%
Mage	Two of Fire	3%
Mage	One Fire	29%
Mage	One Arcane	22%
Mage	One Frost	15%
Paladin	Holy and Retribution	19%
Paladin	Protection and Retribution	16%
Paladin	Holy and Protection	11%
Paladin	One Retribution	21%
Paladin	One Holy	16%
Paladin	One Protection	13%
Priest	Holy and Shadow	26%
Priest	Discipline and Holy	12%
Priest	Discipline and Shadow	11%
Priest	One Holy	22%
Priest	One Shadow	16%
Priest	One Discipline	8%
Rogue	Assassination and Combat	15%
Rogue	Combat and Subtlety	5%
Rogue	Two of Assassination	9%
Rogue	One Combat	32%
Rogue	One Assassination	28%
Rogue	One Subtlety	7%
Shaman	Elemental and Restoration	28%
Shaman	Enhancement and Restoration	18%
Shaman	Elemental and Enhancement	4%
Shaman	Two of Restoration	3%
Shaman	One Elemental	15%
Shaman	One Enhancement	15%
Shaman	One Restoration	15%
Warlock	Affliction and Demonology	12%
Warlock	Affliction and Destruction	8%
Warlock	Demonology and Destruction	8%
Warlock	Two of Demonology	3%
Warlock	One Demonology	26%
Warlock	One Affliction	22%
Warlock	One Destruction	16%
Warrior	Arms and Protection	18%
Warrior	Fury and Protection	16%
Warrior	Arms and Fury	6%
Warrior	Two of Arms	3%
Warrior	One Protection	25%
Warrior	One Fury	15%
Warrior	One Arms	14%

Oddly enough, my conclusions are exactly the same as last time despite the different numbers:

• Take-up of dual specs is much lower than I was expecting. I published figures a while back which showed that 30% of level 80s did all three of PvE raiding, BG PvPing and Arena PvPing and the vast majority of level 80s did at least some mixture of PvE and PvP. I would have thought that anybody who did PvE and PvP would want two specs – which basically means everybody.
  Perhaps people are waiting for the talent-resetting patches to stop. Perhaps the need to lay down the one large (in the Tony Soprano sense) is holding people back. Or maybe it is just too early to see where this feature is going to take us.
• The most enthusiastic adopters of dual specs are players who want a DPS-and-support combination, where “support” means tanking or healing. Nothing surprising there. Take-up amongst the pure DPS classes is lower on the whole. So only 25% of hunters have a dual spec but 50% of druids do.
• One limitation of my data is that I can’t yet sort the actual builds into raid and PvP builds. If I could do that, the picture we see here might be a bit different. An interesting question is what pure DPS classes are doing with dual specs. There seems to be two alternatives: a) having the off-spec as a spec-in-test and b) having a PvE and PvP DPS spec. So when we see that a warlock has two demonology builds, that could just mean that they are testing the second build or that they are trying to run as demonology in two different areas of the game. I’m still working on a solution to identifying builds by their intended role so I can get an answer to this question.