Quick Snapshot of Arena Class Distribution

Following one of these typical forum posts about certain classes being “massively OP” (guess which one we were talking about, here’s a hint, it starts with a “W” and ends with “arlock” *waves to Steptoe who wants Altitis to be mentionning him today*), I made the exercise of going through one Battlegroup’s Hall of Fame from Season 1 and just counting the occurences of the classes in the top 40 teams. Here are the results.

Battlegroup surveyed: Blackout EU. Reason being, it’s the one with EU’s oldest servers which are mostly Full, which means the players in there are seasoned and probably all have several level 70ies to pick for arena.
Note that apparently despite providing last season’s ranking, the armory actually lists today’s arena team composition, so the numbers aren’t totally accurate.

Class representation in 2v2:
1. Priest - 45% of the teams had at least one of them on their roster
2. Warlock 42.5%
3. Rogue 35%
4. Warrior 30%
5. Pallie 25%
6. Shaman 17.5%
7. Druid 15%
8. Mage 7.5%
9. Hunter 2.5%

Worth noting, the first team with a hunter came 13th, the first one with a mage 14th. All the other classes had at least one representative among the top ten.
The most popular duos were Warlock + Priest, followed by warrior + pallie and rogue + priest. A s an additional remark, I started this survey after someone claimed that he was certain locks were in 75% of the top 2v2 teams. Well, they are over-represented, right up there with priests, rogues, warriors and pallies, but don’t stand out as excessively so.

3v3 survey:
1. Pallie 62.5%
1. Priest 62.5%
3. Lock 57.5%
4. Warrior 55%
5. Rogue 45%
5. Shammie 45%
7. Mage 27.5%
8. Druid 22.5%
9. Hunter 7.5%

We again see roughly the same classes among the most successful team combinations, with a notable difference having shammies fare better than in 2v2. The first team with a hunter on the roster scored level 16, all other classes were represented in the top 10.

While far from an exhaustive survey this gives a quick snapshot about arena class viability. Of note: Hunter’s complaints about lack of arena viability certainly appear justified by the numbers, just as druids and mages need a lot of love in there.

Priests and rogues however probably should quit their complaining. They fare extremely well and are right up there with the top classes in the top teams.

Now what I’ve been thinking of was to build an armory crawler which would periodically collect such snapshots, for instance 100 teams at once, and then do some statistical work with it. Ideally the crawler would come with a web front end allowing you to specify, by the 100s, which range you want examined, look up the armory pages, then drill down to the individual teams, count the classes, and then again drill down to each members and count the build types. Only thing is, I’m no coder by any stretch of the imagination. If anyone has experience with doing this kind of stuff, I have a lot of web space available, a MySQL database, PHP provided by my host, and unlimited bandwidth to get such a snapshot crawler to work. If you know how to do it, send me a mail.

On Similar Matters

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