nineteen with a bullet

My last post on class popularity at level 80 caused a bit of a stir in the WoW-blogosphere. Nibuca over at Mystic Chicanery has an excellent discussion on why Warlocks might be out of favour at the moment. Basically she’s got a mixture of PvE and PvP changes. FWIW, my impression is the PvP changes are the ones that matter, but its just an impression. On a theorycrafting basis alone it’s a bit hard to be certain of what players are reacting to.

That’s put me in mind of some more datamining. It is possible to look at the class distribution in the various endgame activities. If warlocks represented a reasonable proportion of raiders but a very low proportion of BG or arena PvPers, or vice versa, that would suggest where the various patch changes were doing the most damage. I’ve added that to my to-do list.

I also ran a query on class composition at other levels. There is a clear difference between level 80 and the others, which just reinforces my suspicion that players are deliberately taking certain of their toons straight to 80 and leaving the others as alts or leveling slowly through 71-79.

The general popularity of classes in the 10-79 levels looks more-or-less like this:

• Hunter
• Paladin
• Mage and Rogue about equal
• Warrior and Priest about equal
• Druid and Warlock about equal
• Shaman

with DKs in a league of their own basically because everyone has tried one.

I can’t see anything too surprising in this distribution. Shaman are always bringing up the rear end, perhaps just because some of the race types you have to pick to make one are less popular (moo to you too). Hunters have long been known to be the first choice of a lot of players including a lot of gold-selling harvesters.

But I did have a good laugh at the level 19 distribution. Ever been in a low-level BG and got the impression that everybody else was a rogue? Perhaps you weren’t imagining it after all as the figures show…

Rogue	27%
Hunter	18%
Warrior	11%
Paladin	10%
Mage	8%
Priest	8%
Warlock	8%
Druid	6%
Shaman	4%

27% rogues stands out like the proverbial dogs’ um… y’know… There’s no other level that looks anything like this. Aside from anything else, it shows that class popularity at certain levels is driven by the quirks of the game itself – people are just looking for the class that will do a certain job, whatever that job might be.

poo

My attention has been drawn to the existence of this charming item.

You’ll be pleased to know that your chance of encountering anybody actually wearing them is low – only 59 toons out of a sample of nearly 570,000  have them equipped.

That’s gotta be good news!