diamonds are a toon’s best friend

I’m experimenting with a gem report for each class. It is easy enough to generate a list of the most popular gem choices. Like a lot of the other player-configurable options in WoW, you get the infamous power law distribution: a few choices that many players make and a long tail of left-of-centre choices each of which is made by only a few players.

For priests (level 70, pre-patch-3.0.2) we get something like this:

Gem	Colour	Popularity
Discipline Builds
Steady Talasite	green	75%
Teardrop Living Ruby	red	64%
Royal Nightseye	purple	54%
Luminous Noble Topaz	orange	45%
Mystic Dawnstone	yellow	39%
Teardrop Blood Garnet	red	32%
Powerful Earthstorm Diamond	meta	28%
Solid Star of Elune	blue	24%
Teardrop Crimson Spinel	red	22%
Insightful Earthstorm Diamond	meta	21%
Holy Builds
Royal Nightseye	purple	80%
Luminous Noble Topaz	orange	76%
Teardrop Living Ruby	red	75%
Purified Shadow Pearl	purple	55%
Purified Shadowsong Amethyst	purple	42%
Teardrop Crimson Spinel	red	35%
Teardrop Blood Garnet	red	34%
Teardrop Crimson Spinel_35489	red	27%
Luminous Pyrestone	orange	24%
Royal Tanzanite	purple	23%
Bracing Earthstorm Diamond	meta	23%
Luminous Flame Spessarite	orange	22%
Shadow Builds
Runed Living Ruby	red	115%
Glowing Nightseye	purple	71%
Runed Crimson Spinel_32196	red	67%
Veiled Noble Topaz	orange	37%
Glowing Shadow Draenite	purple	30%
Runed Blood Garnet	red	29%
Potent Noble Topaz	orange	27%

As usual, the gem names link to Wowhead.

Percentages can be greater than 100 because the same gem can be used in more than one socket per item or per character. That doesn’t matter really. The percentage value just forms a sort of popularity index which can be used to order and rate the options.

It would probably make sense to group the gems by socket colour and/or by the type of stat granted since these are the starting points for deciding what gem to acquire. I’ll add that to the next version of the report.

It is possible to generate other tables that would show:

• popular gem/gear combinations
• popular sets of gems per character

I’m playing with queries for both of these but the data doesn’t seem to show a lot of clear patterns. Any suggestions for other ways of analysing gem useage would be welcome.