Welcome to the Build Mine!

Like the title says, welcome to the Build Mine. In this blog, I'll be talking about World of Warcraft character builds (initially talents, then getting into gear builds as well) and applying statistical information gleaned from the Armory. I'm in the process of crunching the data, and I currently have 2.0 build information for 81,000 characters of which 16,000 are level 70, and I have about 2.5 million characters to process data for once 2.1 goes live. That's for the US alone. After that I'll be analyzing the European and Asian regions.

Until the Armory came along, everyone discussed talent builds in terms of trees: 41/20/0, 31/20/10, what have you. Now with the ability to see exactly what everyone has selected, we can drill down to the individual talent level, where there is an extreme amount of diversity. For example, I did a quick comparison of the approximately 2,000 (out of 16,000) level 70 hunters in my pre-2.1 data gathering, and out of all those hunters, The most popular build is shared by 6 characters. *6*! And I know BigRedKitty will freak out when he sees that build, since it's 6th on Llew's pass at crunching his data. However, with my sample size only being 0.3% of all the character information I'll have soon, I don't expect that to be the most popular build once all the data is crunched. That crunch will probably happen this weekend, as I suspect a fair number of players will be respeccing after 2.1 goes in, which is expected for tomorrow.

Who am I? a 41/10/0 level 60 hunter with 3 level 60 and a level 64 alt. I haven't had nearly as much time to play in the past year as the year before, as my son was born just over a year ago. That has pretty much precluded me from raiding or pretty much running any instance at all. I'm not casual by any stretch of the word, but I'm far from hardcore. I'm interested in game mechanics and social design, not only in the game itself but in the choices players make with respect to the game. In the end, I want this blog (and the forthcoming website) to be a discussion area for character builds and the rationale behind them. I'm not an expert, but I want to encourage this discussion, across all aspects of the game, be it class, intended goal or anything else that comes to mind. Again, welcome to the mine. We'll be digging deep.