Putricide & BQL Top 100 kills- tanks by spec

#0 - Jan. 29, 2010, 3:35 p.m.

There was another thread on these forums showing the tank representation for the top 100 Putricide kills. That thread however, did not accuratly represent DKs and Druids becuase they did not break them out by spec. I made a seperate post, so that accurate numbers can be used from the start of the discussion, rather than speculated numbers discussed in the other thread.

I went to WMO, used essentially the same data (Top 100 Putricide kills), and pulled out the tanks. I had to use up to the 104th report, becuase some were duplicats, and one did not grant me access.

The way i determined who was a tank, was i went to the "attack target analysis" page, then went to the bottom and looked at the "hits by mistake" page. This showed me who got the Tanking debuff, and then hit the raid. Since only tanks get the debuff, it was easy to count the tanks. If a DK was listed, i clicked him individually, to find out his spec.

Not all reports made use of 3 tanks. Some actually used 4 tanks. However on average most used 3.

Here are the results for tank representation.

Top 25 kills
War - 25
Pal - 21
Druid - 17
DK (Blood)- 4
DK (Frost) - 2
DK (unholy) - 0

26-50 Kills
War - 29
Pal - 21
Druid - 11
DK (blood) - 5
Dk (frost) - 3
Dk (unholy) - 1

51-75 Kills
War - 31
Druid - 18
Pal - 13
DK (blood) - 7
DK (frost) - 3
DK (unholy) - 1

76-100 Kills
Pal - 26
War - 24
Druid - 12
DK (blood) - 11
Dk (frost) -3
DK (unholy)1

TOTAL representation top 100

Warrior - 109 (37%)
Paladin - 86 (29%)
Druid - 58 (20%)
DK - 41 (14%) [27 Blood, 11 Frost, 3 unholy]

Make of this what you will, however if you wany my opinion, Blizzard has succeeded in making paladins more popular tanks, while at the same time got rid of a lot of Progression tanking DKs.

One point of interest. Out of 100 reports, only ONE GUILD used TWO DK tanks in their kill. Whereas about 147guilds used two warriors, 10 used two paladins,

Could this simply be that not many guilds want DKs as their tanks? Or could it be that becuase DKs have been nerfed to bad that they have swapped them out for better tanks.....

EDITED TO ADD BQL DATA

BQL top 100 kills - Tank representation.

TOP 100

Warrior - 84 (42%)
Paladin - 56 (27%)
Druid - 33 (16.5%)
DK - 27 (13.5%)

I didnt break out DKs by spec becuae it wasnt really needed. They were all tanks in this case.

As you can see, comparing this data, to the PP data, the Percentage of representation is VERY similar in both cases.

Compared to PP
Warriors are up 5%
Paladins down 2%
Druids down 3.5%
Dks down 0.5%

Ghostcrawler

#299 - Feb. 2, 2010, 1:36 a.m.

This is a cool thread.

I hesitated jumping into it for a long time, because I didn't want the participants to just start talking to me instead of trying to interpret the data that the OP (and others) worked hard to generate. Hopefully that won't happen. (And if it does, you'll know why I don't jump into the next cool discussion to come along.)

I wouldn't worry too much about sample sizes and the like. Yes, sample size is important, but it's too easy to just dismiss data as needing a larger sample size. Part of the science of statistics is trying to estimate how large a size you do need before you can interpret anything.

Also remember that players pick their class for a lot of reasons and guilds pick their tank for a lot of reasons. We know that if we buff or nerf too much that we can drive population, but we also know there are plenty of other factors at play. For example, I'm not sure how powerful a tank class would have to be at tanking before you'd see its population jump if it was really frustrating or boring to play or really hard to gear or required a ton of skill to do well or if it was terrible at every other aspect of the game. (I don't think we have any of those classes in the game at the moment -- I'm just pointing out an extreme, contrived case that could affect population.)

The biggest red flag for us will be if raids feel like they have to gravitate towards a certain tank class for the hard fights. (If you swap tanks for a couple of fights, that's not a big deal either, assuming the swap doesn't become too widespread, or you're blocked if you fail to swap.) It's a big deal if a particular tank class just can't cut it, or has to work much harder (or get much luckier) on the same content, assuming the content is challenging. I can't imagine too many guilds replacing their main tank for a different class because they are stalled at current Icecrown progression. Not many of the Icecrown fights really tax the tank, except for perhaps Festergut. That's about to change with LK and the hard modes.