Posts with tag popular

MMO-Champion recently released an incredibly interesting set of data about the most popular items used in weapon transmogrification, finding out that 62% of the top five transmog weapons across all classes are from The Burning Crusade. Only 20% of the top five items are from the classic WoW world, with 18% of the weapons coming from Wrath of the Lich King. 0% of the top five items are from the most recent Cataclysm expansion.

The Burning Crusade is heralded as the golden age of World of Warcraft, a time when the genre that WoW perfected hit a beautiful peak, a wonderful balance between difficulty and accessibility, that appealed to the hardcore MMO veterans who dominated the genre until the Wrath of the Lich King days. Others hated it entirely. No matter which way you lean, it's clear that The Burning Crusade had strong art direction, with otherworldly weapons and armor juxtaposed against traditional fantasy tropes. The fact that Burning Crusade items are the most popular right now does not surprise me in the least.

Check out all of the statistics, as well as each class' top five transmogged weapons, over at MMO-Champion.

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Once upon a time, way back in vanilla WoW, it was common knowledge that rogues and hunters were the most common classes. Raids would regularly refuse to take more of them, and it was almost assumed that all hunters were noobs. Well, at least on my realm, half of that is true: hunters are still extremely popular. However, there's hardly a rogue to be found; it seems that druids (of all classes) have taken their place. My guild, for instance, has zero level 80 rogues.

Druids were once one of the least played classes, but I see them all over the place now. I also see quite a few death knights, of course, and more shamans than I would expect (given that I play Alliance). I've also never been able to swing a stick on my realm without hitting a paladin. Warlocks are probably the next rarest class I see, after rogues. I'm aware that this varies realm-to-realm, though - what's the least popular class on your realm, according to your experience?

Since the patch hit, we've been flooded with requests for cookie-cutter builds for various classes, specs, and roles. We're working on it, but our bloggers only have so many hours in the day (if only haste rating worked in real life). However, I do have a new site to tell you about that might help with these types of questions. TalentChic is a web site that aims to determine what the most popular talent builds are for all nine classes, and it's very well made, in my opinion.

The site makes use of Armory data, so it stays relatively up-to-date. Builds are organized by class and by primary tree, and you can also filter for playstyle (Raid/PvP for instance). Playstyle is determined by what kind of gear the player was raiding when their data was cached, so it's not foolproof (a raider could have been wearing their PvP gear and thus counted as PvP), but it's about as good as can be done with Armory data.

As far as the information displayed goes, it seems reasonable to me. I'm a little surprised that Combat is still so dominant with Rogues, given that I've heard Mutilate got significantly buffed. And I'm very surprised that 0/61/0 is the most popular Holy Priest build; I haven't seen people talk about that one very much, and I certainly wouldn't want to be without Meditation. It does drop to only second most popular if I look at raiding Holy Priests. Are your own talent builds popular? Does TalentChic give you any ideas on how to spec?