A New Favorite Data Blog

While navigating the great interwebs of blogs and fansites I came accross this little gem. Simply put, it is a data mining site for WoW. I love data, and in our grand world of MMO secrecy, more data is always good. Since it is straight from the Armory you would have to believe it carries with it some statistical accuracy, and the author typically points out on his various posts where shortcomings may be.

Data makes me drool. More drooling after the break.

My favorite post there so far is this one: A breakdown of the number of each class. Let’s look at what he has found.

Hubba Hubba! Juicy Data Morsels! What does this all mean? (Now comes the fun part when you can completely make off the wall observations!)

  1. 48% of the WoW playerbase at 80 has the capability to tank (no more LF Tank?) – However deeper Data Mines into various builds show only 13% are specced to do so.
  2. 42% of the WoW playerbase at 80 has the capability to heal – However only 17.69% are specced to do so.

30.69% of the Playerbase are specced to to fill up 2/3 of the almighty holy trinity. Guess tanks are still harder to find than healers. ~70% of the WoW playerbase is specced for damage. Probably not too much of a surprise there.

The biggest surprise for me is that Paladins top the chart as the most “popular” class. We couldn’t buy Paladins in BC. Now “it’s raining Paladins” – Hallelujiah! While the high Death Knight total doesn’t surprise me as much, I really thought they would be #1. The druid creeping up in popularity (used to share the bottom of the totem pole with Shaman back in the day) is a surprise, and if you don’t read the WoW main forums Warlocks taking the cake as the least popular class in WoW right now is a gigantic surprise. They were considered so “OP” for so long. Hunters and Rogues taking the two biggest percentage downgrades from 70-80, two of the most popular WoW classes in all of time, is also quite the shocker.

Couple quick other crazy observations:

1) Dual Specs is going to kill pure DPS classes even more, unless they get significant buffs. When you have 6 out of the 10 classes that can perform two roles perfectly well, people are going to naturally gravitate towards being “more useful”. Blizzard has spent a lot of time and energy ensuring Hybrids can perform at equal levels down a spec path as their single purpose brethren. Dual Specs, in the purpose of PVE, is going to exaggerate that difference even further (all Hybrid classes had “gains” in popularity – or at least stayed even. All single serving classes lost popularity.) Unless you PVP, there isn’t much benefit gained from speccing primary DPS and secondary DPS.

2) The next “Hero” class should be a hybrid healer/tank. I know that sounds silly in implementation, but currently with these stat breakdowns, we have 30.69% Healer/Tank, 34.66% Ranged DPS, and 34.22% Melee DPS (99.57% – Account that to some rounding errors in laziness)

Go check out the site and have fun playing with the data. I could do it all day, if I didn’t have to work.

5 comments / Add your comment below

  1. I once played a Warlock. I also played a Paladin, in times where they were belittled as bubble boys.

    Ghostcrawler destroyed pure classes, good job, so much about “bring the player, not the class”.

  2. @Longasc: Surprising part is, wasn’t Ghost the anti-hybrid guy? (or was that Tigole Bitties?). Now Hybrids are the dream, and single serving classes are just that. Why bring a rogue for melee DPS to a raid, when you can bring a Feral Druid (who can dual spec into tanking for some encounters), a Warrior (who can spec DPS or tanking), heck, even an Enhance Shaman (who can also spec for healing.) The buff the Rogues give can also be found elsewhere (another homogenization with the raid wide buffs)…

    I guess the sad part is, changing WoW to “bring the player, not the class” and with Dual Specs has now just encouraged people to bring the class, not the player. It’s confuddling, for sure.

  3. Tigole / Jeff Kaplan was the hybrid-hater, yes. But even before Ghostcrawler Druids got buffed more and more. Kalgan is Tom Chilton, and Ghostcrawler is a totally new guy on the block that is rumored to have issues with old Tigole. Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler was first believed to be a woman, because he was so chatty, hehe! 🙂 I think he makes a GREAT community manager, but all his ideas as a developer make me despair. Good intentions, poor executions. He should work at ArenaNet, they usually do that with their great ideas in Guild Wars… oh, I am so sarcastic today. 🙁

  4. I think the Druid buffs back in the day were warranted. Besides innervate, they didn’t really have a lot going for them. Of course the possibility of them “going to far” is valid.

    I enjoy reading GC’s comments on the main boards – both for the insights of the captain of the cruise ship, but also those cringe-worthy moments in disbelief.. “did he just say that? publically? on the WOW boards?!?”

    I am tempted to level my rogue up to 80 now (sitting firmly at 70) as I am curious if they will give some bonuses or incentives to the single serving classes before their pop numbers drop even further.

Leave a Reply to LongascCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: