Armory data: Popular and unpopular specs
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
May 3rd 2007 at 11:05AM
Finally, someone has done something worthwhile with the Armory other than make fun of people's gear and complain about invasions of privacy. Zyph of Maelstrom wrote a program that pulled random names of level 70 characters off of Allakhazam and inputted them into the Armory, and then compared their specs. He ended up with the spec information of over six thousand players.
Zyph wanted to find out three things from his study. First off, he wanted to know what percentage of a class was specialized (31 points or more) in one tree. Then he wanted to see how many people who were specialized in a tree skipped the 31- and 41-point talents of that tree, and how many took them. The results of his survey can be found beyond the cut.
Man, that's a lot of data, and you have no idea how long it took me to turn it into a table. But it's nice to have it like this, because we can compare some of the most and least popular builds and talents in WoW.
Most Popular Builds:
- Marksmanship Hunter
- Holy Paladin
- Feral Druid
Least Popular Builds:
- Survival Hunter
- Ret Pally
- Discipline Priest
Most Evenly Balanced Trees:
- Mages
- Shamans
- Warlocks
Most Popular 31-Point Talents:
- Shadowform (Shadow Priest)
- Trueshot Aura (Marks Hunter)
- Mortal Strike (Arms Warrior)
- Ice Barrier (Frost Mage)
Least Popular 31-Point Talents:
- Lightwell (Holy Priest)
- Wyvern Sting (Survival Hunter)
- Power Infusion (Discipline Priest)
- Dark Pact (Affliction Warlock)
Most Popular 41-Point Talents:
- Earth Shield (Resto Shaman)
- Mangle (Feral Druid)
- Vampiric Touch (Shadow Priest)
- Devastate (Prot Warrior)
Least Popular 41-Point Talents:
- Circle of Healing (Holy Priest)
- Pain Suppression (Discipline Priest)
- Slow (Arcane Mage)
- Readiness (Survival Hunter)
So what conclusions can we draw from this? I'm somewhat shocked that only one offspec/PVP spec is the most popular spec for its class -- feral druids. For most other classes, the most popular spec is the classic raid spec (except for mages, and their optimal raid spec really changes from dungeon to dungeon.) Particularly surprising is that there's more prot pallies than ret pallies at 70 -- from browsing the pally forums, you'd expect quite the opposite.
Talentwise, it looks like healing priests aren't just complaining on the forums about the worthlessness of their 31- and 41-point talents. Very few priests have even taken the 31- and 41- point Holy and Discipline talents. Part of that might be because 40-21 builds are more popular, and because the shadow tree in particular is very strong right now. Survival hunters are also lacking, both in overall popularity and in their high-level talents. And despite the problems shamans have been having lately, their 41-point talent is still the most popular of all who specialized in a build, and they're very evenly balanced between their three trees.
What do you think about this data?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Talents
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Uryuu May 3rd 2007 11:15AM
Eh, Trueshot Aura is a 31-point in the Marksmanship tree.
Brus May 3rd 2007 11:15AM
Wow, grat post Elizabeth. Thanks for the good read.
Bradley Nash May 3rd 2007 11:20AM
I'm absolutely shocked to see Dark Pact on the most unpopular 31 pt talent. That is absolutetly crucial for an affliction lock. I also think it's interesting to see how the mage specs are all about the same. I thought that arcane mages were extremely rare, guess I was wrong.
Talitha May 3rd 2007 11:26AM
WOW, nice post. Most evenly specced: Locks, mages, and Shammies.. Hmmm makes you wonder. Locks and mages (the 2 most OP classes) are also two of the most balanced classes. Maybe shamans should do a little less QQ'ing, at least they have 3 viable trees (unlike hunters). Good thoughts to chew on.
Ana May 3rd 2007 11:26AM
Fabulous post! Interesting data, great analysis, and a handy chart. What more could we ask for? :)
Dahlaine May 3rd 2007 11:30AM
The most useful part of this data is the least popular 31 and 41 pt. talents. All of these are drastically underpowered and make their talent trees less desirable because of it.
Blizz should use the rogue trees as a good example for others. The 31/41 are not fantastic and could use some tweaking, but they provide an advantage that is obvious and could not be passed up when speccing into that tree. These should be showboating talents, not reasons for ridicule (lightwell).
bonse May 3rd 2007 11:36AM
I am not too surprised that survival hunter is so low, but I am surprised that of those who did spec Survival, so few took Wyvern Sting, watching my partner cc two mobs whilst killing the third made me realise that its not all bad. Speaking as a marksman hunter that uses the talents to make up for the lack of damage attributed to my style of play (stopping runners and redistributing loose mobs to the tank) and equipment load out(Int, spirit and m/5), the marksman's ability to pull a caster into a trap with silence shot is on a par with sleeping it at range, how ever with wyvern sting you can start using it 10 levels earlier, just seems odd of all the talents in survival to skip that one
Megilion May 3rd 2007 11:39AM
@Bradley Nash,
For mages, 40-point Arcane hybrid specs are very popular right now, with 40/21/0 and 40/0/21 builds being very common. As you can see in the table, almost 3/4 of all Arcane specs skip the 41-point talent (Slow), which should suggest that most "Arcane" builds as far as this table is concerned are not necessarily "deep Arcane" as my character is now (44/4/0 at level 57). You're right, "deep Arcane" builds (more than 41 points in Arcane) are far less common than the Arcane hybrids.
Corrodias May 3rd 2007 11:49AM
Indeed, i'm having a hard time deciding whether i want my mage to be arcane/frost or full frost. :/ i think i'm going to try full frost first and see how much i like it, but those arcane tree bonuses are tempting.
Sblaze May 3rd 2007 11:52AM
The lock data doesn't look too evenly balanced to me with a high of 46 and a low of 18. Kinda surprising after having recently re-specced to Destro to see that big a gap from Afflicttion.
Elbows May 3rd 2007 11:54AM
As if us priests needed any more confirmation that our 31/41 holy talents are a joke. No one is going to give up Divine Spirit for COH, sorry.
Nerms May 3rd 2007 11:56AM
Am I the only one who believes this data is skewed in some manner? Rogues aren't even mentioned once in his data and I find that hard to believe that rogues are the absolute average in everything.
Beaverius May 3rd 2007 12:55PM
hell yeah im one of the 5.1% specced survival hunters!
John May 3rd 2007 11:57AM
I feel like rogue talent trees are a little different from most of the mana-based classes - you tend to grab a little from each tree more so than leaving a whole tree out. or maybe that's just me...
Pex May 3rd 2007 12:02PM
And Trueshot Aura is Marksmanship Hunter.
Guernia May 3rd 2007 12:15PM
The list of least popular builds come as no surprise at all. I've played all but the priest/discipline build (mostly because I couldn't see much of a point in trying it out let alone playing it) and they aren't, IMHO, as good as alternative builds for those classes. These would definitely be the trees to buff in future reviews/patches. I'm a little surprised that Wyvern Sting isn't more popular for those people who *do* choose hunter/survival though.
Feral isn't necessarily an offspec/PvP spec. It's also the druid "prot spec". Any bears with an urge to tank will have no choice but to go feral if they want to be as effective as possible. So this comes as no surprise.
I'm not surprised that there are Arcane mages (my ex-GL is one and swears by it) but that so many are arcane major. It's got some great mana efficiency and PvP talents in it, maybe there are a lot more PvP spec mages than I realised. I'm not so surprised that Slow is unpopular though, given most Frost spells ability to snare and root.
@3, even though Dark Pact is on the Most Unpopular list, it's still taken by 90% of Affliction Warlocks, so it's not as bad as it looks there. The other three on that list are real stinkers though, according to the players.
--
Another interesting statistic is that fewer than 1% of each class have a spec that is less than 31 points in their main tree... except rogues. 2.4% of rogues seem to have "hybrid" specs. This would seem to suggest that rogues have some very good early talents in all trees - enough that it would entice players to not go at least 31 points in at least one tree.
cwolf267 May 3rd 2007 12:16PM
I call shenanigans, Druids have THE MOST balanced trees in the game
Flit May 3rd 2007 12:19PM
Since he got the names off of Alla-, could the data be skewed? I'm not sure how Alla- works, but don't you have to put your character in there?
So the subset of people who list there characters on Alla-, this is their preferred builds. The people who list their toon on Alla- could be a different kind of player, players that are deeper into the "reading about what specs work" (since they are utilizing a website to list their characters/get tips).
This is just a question about the data, which could vary the data a bit, but probably not enough to be significant.
It would be better to get a random word generator to generate a word, put that word into the Armory, have a random number generator pick a number between the number of results you get, and use that persons data.
Ahhh, statistics.
Xaintrix May 3rd 2007 12:20PM
"Maybe shamans should do a little less QQ'ing, at least they have 3 viable trees"
They do - NOW. Remove the downranking Windfury (next patch) and bork clearcasting (next patch) - we'll see how "balanced" it will be. I also know some 70 shamans that are getting as much run as enhancement as they can before the patch hits who are fully intent on respeccing once the hammer hits.
I'm also a bit dubious over the sample size. Sure it's 6,000 but how much in each class? That also might help to know in that matrix.
Corrodias May 3rd 2007 12:24PM
>> "Am I the only one who believes this data is skewed in some manner?"
you may be, yes