Putrice Firstkill Class Distribution - GC Comments on Mages

[Karius]

This was inspired by this post (to give credit where credit is due): http://forums.worldo...748797321&sid=1

What you have before you gentlemen is the Top 100 Guild Kills of Professor Putricide, a list broken down by class and spec. I believe the data can stand on its own, but my subsequent post will explain a little analysis and how the data was gotten (long, and painstakingly).


For your viewing pleasure, this list is organized from most played, to least played:

(Out of a possible 2500 players, 25 per raid, 100 raids)

Paladin ----- 338 (14%)
Holy ----- 152
Protection ----- 80
Retribution ----- 106

Druid ----- 315 (13%)
Balance ----- 69
Feral Combat ----- 110
Restoration ----- 136

Priest ----- 305 (12%)
Disc ----- 54
Holy ----- 106
Shadow ----- 145

Shaman ----- 273 (11%)
Elemental ----- 97
Enhancement ----- 94
Restoration ----- 82

Rogue ----- 233 (9%)
Assassination ----- 157
Combat ----- 75
Subtlety ----- 1

Warrior ----- 217 (9%)
Arms ----- 8
Fury ----- 105
Protection ----- 104

Mage ----- 215 (9%)
Arcane ----- 205
Fire ----- 10
Frost ----- 0

Death Knight ----- 212 (8%)
Blood ----- 38
Frost ----- 16
Unholy ----- 158

Hunter ----- 196 (8%)
Beast Mastery ----- 0
Marksmanship ----- 161
Survival ----- 35

Warlock ----- 196 (8%)
Affliction ----- 117
Demonology ----- 66
Destruction ----- 13


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR takeaways:

Most Represented Tank: Protection Warrior
Most Represented Healer: Holy Paladin
Most Represented DPS: Arcane Mage

Top 5 Least Represented Specs:
1. Tie: Frost Mage & Beast Mastery Hunter (0)
2. Subtlety Rogue (1)
3. Arms Warrior (8)
4. Fire Mage (10)
5. Destruction Warlock (13)

========================================

Some of you Fire mages are having too much fun ranting in this thread instead of focusing on what I was actually saying.

Is Arcane generally above Fire? Yes. The difference may only be 10% though, and Fire is still above many damage specs. Is Arcane so much higher than Fire than Marks is to Survival? Not really. Yet we see more Survival hunters (in this particular data set on one boss) than we do Fire mages. Clearly more is going on that players just gravitating towards whichever spec does the most damage. (The key word is "just." Players definitely like specs that deliver the most damage, but that does not appear to be the sole governing concern in this case.)

There are a lot of things contributing to Arcane beating other mages. Incanter's Absorption is probably way too good in conjunction with kind Disc priests. Arcane benefits a lot on movement fights like PP. Arcane benefits a lot from using those Innervates that the Fire mage can't really use and the healers (for the moment at least) don't really need. As Lhivera points out, Frost can do decent (not stellar) given the chance, but fights like Marrowgar really exploit (in a bad way) Frost's relative lack of pushback resistance.

We'd like to get the mages closer together, and that's something we're still going to work on. ("Wait until Cataclysm" is something snarky players like to say more than we do.) What we don't want to do is suddenly catapult Frost up ahead of Arcane such that every mage feels like they have to change... again. Close, without going over, is kind of the mantra at this stage.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer


http://blue.mmo-cham...ls-by-spec.html