Archive for May, 2007
Most popular Hunter talents

This post represents the first in a series of more in-depth analysis of individual classes, using the data I’ve collected from the World of Warcraft Armory. I’m starting with the Hunter, since my main is a Hunter, and I know this class best. Based on 1135 level 70 Hunters I’ve generated a list of the most popular talents.
Read on for the details…
Most popular World of Warcraft builds
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…
Crawling the World of Warcraft Armory
I play World of Warcraft, and I’ve always been fascinated by the meta-universe that exists outside the game, on the web. Blizzard’s launch of the World of Warcraft Armory makes available all of the character information for everyone that plays the game. Every character’s class, race, gender, equipment, skills, talents, statistics, faction reputation, guild, and more is available to anyone on the web in an easily searchable form.
Zyph of Maelstrom recently posted some interesting results of mining the Armory to the World of Warcraft forums. He pulled the talent specs for around 6000 level 70 characters from the Armory to see what patterns he could find. WoW Insider has a good write up here.
This inspired me to do the same thing on a larger scale.
Meta
Meta
Used to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept.
I finally gave in to the lure of blogging. I hope this is occasionally going to be interesting.
- Llew

