Thursday, August 16, 2007

Report - Spec Breakdown by Realm Type

Ok, I've got all the characters from my first run loaded with updated armory data. This time I store the raw XML, (and much props to Okoloth for a nice method to merge all armory data into a single XML file) then when I want to run a report at a point in time, I export the information I'm interested in to a database for quick searching. After writing insane scripts to generate HTML from the database last time, I've learned my lesson. Now the data is exported in XML and I'm using XSL to transform the data into tables. The first report I've generated is a breakdown of each class' top 20 specs, by realm type.
For each class you'll see the top 20 specs for RP-PvP, PvE, PvP and RP servers. Unfortunately, in order to make sure the output shows up in all browsers properly, I'm not serving raw XML with an XSL stylesheet directly, but using PHP to load the XML and XSL and output the resulting HTML. The raw XML is available here. You will note that the XML also contains the top 10 builds for each spec. I didn't use that data in the HMTL report because I wanted to keep the tables somewhat simple, and by using XSL I can tweak the stylesheet to include that data once I figure out a good way to represent it. (plus I can make it prettier much more easily, if I ever learn how)

Taking a quick look at the data for Hunters, 41/20/0 dominates both PvE and PvP realms, but interestingly enough, a larger percentage of Hunters with that spec are on PvP servers. (7920 vs. 5938, or 7.861% vs. 5.894%) Also, while the first Survival spec on PvP servers is only ranked #9 (0/21/40), the first PvE Survival spec is at #7. Though to be fair, the percentage of the class is higher in the PvP spec. In fact, it's pretty clear that out of the Hunters represented in this table there are more PvP Hunters than PvE.

Please feel free to talk about this report either here or on our forums.

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