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.