After several more days of crawling the World of Warcraft Armory, I now have data collected on 31043 individual characters from 308 guilds spread across 151 realms. Of those 31043 characters, 10025 are level 70. At this point, I’m going to move onto some analysis. I’m planning on updating my data again a few weeks after 2.1.0 comes out. In particular, the talents are changing enough that there’ll be a significant number of players that try a new build.

To start with, here are some observations about character builds:

• The most popular build is the Holy Paladin, with 77.3% of Paladins spec’d Holy, closely followed by the Marksmanship Hunter at 73.4%.
• The least popular build is the Survival Hunter, with only 5.8% of Hunters spec’d Survival. Other unpopular builds include Retribution Paladins, Discipline Priests, Balance Druids, Protection Paladins, and Fury Warriors.
• Mages have the most balanced set of trees, with 38.9% of characters spec’d Arcane, 33.3% spec’d Fire, and 27.7% spec’d Frost.
• Paladins have the least balanced set of trees, with 77.3% of characters spec’d Holy, 12.7% spec’d Protection, and 9.6% spec’d Retribution.

Read on for the details…

The table below shows the popularity of different builds for level 70 characters. The first three columns represent the percentage of characters that spend at least 31 points in each of the three trees respectively. The fourth column, labelled ‘Mixed’, represents the percentage of characters that don’t spend more than 30 points in any tree. The ‘Total’ column shows the number of characters in my data set.