Forums up!

I'm happy to announce that I've put up forums for discussion on the results discovered from datamining the Armory.

Racial Report

I respun the report and added the racial breakdowns. I don't have class numbers by race offhand, but I can run those this weekend. The original reports are there too, but they're the same as before since it's all scripts running against the same data. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be overhauling my schema and collection tools now that I've gone through this exercise once.

First Report

Ok, here's a link to the first "full" report. (I am fully aware that my web design fu is negative. Hopefully CSS will save me someday.) This structure of report should mostly stay the same (I hope). For each class I've generated 4 spec/build reports, one specialized for each talent tree (31 points or more in a given tree is considered specialized) and overall. Each report lists the top 10 specs, and the top 10 builds within each spec. There's way too much information for me to come close to discussing this, so if you find something you want to discuss, blog about it and let me know and I'll mention your blog here.

Shockadins on WoW Insider

Last night WoW Insider posted an article about a Shockadin build for 40/0/21, and is catching a lot of flak for it, saying the author didn't do enough research, etc. Research? That's what we're here for. Let's take a look-see! (Remember this data is not up-to-the-second accurate. This is data obtained a couple of months ago.)

Quick numbers for non-clickers: 1412/69338 level 70 paladins share this spec. That's barely over 2%.

Since I haven't even touched my pally since the BC talent trees came out, I can't comment much.

The top build is shared by 20 people. In the Holy tree, the top build ditches 2/2 Improved Lay on Hands and 3/3 Sanctified Light in favor of 5/5 Improved Seal of Righteousness. Not having ISoR seems to be a common complaint in the article's comments, so that's consistent. As for the Retribution tree, the top build puts 3/3 in Improved Seal of the Crusader, 5/5 Deflection (instead of 3/5), and 3/3 Crusade (instead of 2/3), ditching Conviction and Seal of Command.

The first negative comment seems to be close to the voice of the "majority" of the spec. However, the third build does forgo ISoR....

So? Is there a valid criticism for WoWI not doing their homework? In the end, these types of situations are exactly what I'm trying to address.

Build Results Layout - How do you want to see it?

So after a number of problems over the past month or so, I've got almost 2.5 million characters in the database. Live queries are out of the question, because my server just doesn't have the oomph for it. So for each class, I'm going to run the top 10 overall specs, and the top 10 builds of those specs, but I'm also going to run the top 10 specs (and top 10 builds within those specs) from each tree, to show a little more diversity specwise. This will take a while, but I'll try to have stuff up before the end of the month.

New Build Shop up - Priest 23/38/0

WoW Insider's Build Shop has a new entry: A Priest PvE healing build. I've got a 60 priest waiting in the wings but I suspect he'll be taking advantage of this build after hitting the cap.