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How We Find The Most Popular Talent Builds
To find the most popular talent builds, the system scans both the US and EU WoW armory sites to find the talent points, glyphs, gear, enchants, and gems chosen by characters. It then sorts those according class, spec and playstyle and collates the results.
We don’t just look at any old character though! We record just the best players in all parts of the game (according to their gear).
Doesn’t this just show what the masses have chosen, and not what’s best?
Actually, no. Because there are a limited number of choices, the collective mind of all players usually migrates to the best, most accessible option for players. What’s ‘best’ (top tier raid gear, or top arena gear) is not attainable for most players so it is usually shown a little futher down the list. The same goes for enchants and gems. Enchant Weapon – Exceptional Spellpower is the most popular spell power enchant for a weapon, but it is not the best.
The best is Enchant Weapon – Mighty Spellpower. This comes second on the list even though it gives an extra 13 spell power. Why is it not the most popular? Because the mats are relatively expensive compared to it’s cheaper cousin and most people cannot justify the expense for a small gain.
Zardoz from Armory Data Mine explains the reasoning wonderfully in his post about median vs average.
Playstyles
While we’re looking at gear, we also record each character’s playstyle (where most of their gear has come from) because most items (in particular gear, and the talent spec) can change between PvE and PvP. You can use this as a filter to find the most appropriate build for you.
Enjoy!
November 13th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Hey very cool Idea! Good luck!
January 14th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
You can be carried through instances and even current content raids to get gear. Gear doesnt make the player, as a good chunk of the specs I have looked at show. Specs that use useless talents ranking high on the list. The site is an awesome idea but needs a more solid way of tracking ‘top players’ as you call them. Just because its popular doesn’t make the spec a solid build. It just means from your sample size and requirements for your searches that info you are processing is showing this statistic without any in game information.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Great idea for a site, but giving each build a popularity rating measured in arbitrary stars doesn’t communicate anything meaningful to your visitors. This would be much more interesting and useful if it showed what percentage of players of each class use that build.
Other than that, keep up the good work.
March 31st, 2009 at 7:03 pm
This site is awesome!! im pretty much invincible now that im discipline specc
October 24th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I read the comments and i agree though the starts do represent the percentage it’s a good idea for the more skilled players if next to stars you actually list the number percentage… on another note….
If you complain about oh this builds better than that.. then duh.. depending on how you press your buttons and when yeah your going to need to tweak it this is just to help you get started on your talents from there tweak it to your liking .. don t take it as oh my goodness God sent this so it must be final lol. Just take the selection you like best try it out then tweak it one point there or there. Easy. Pro’s love to complain lol. Ignore the comments above and go with your gut feeling .