WoWPopular tracks the most popular Talent Builds, Glyphs, Gear, Enchants and Gems used by players in World of Warcraft.

This site started in October 2008 as TalentChic.com with the release of the Lich King talent builds in patch 3.0. With the large revamping of talent builds, I wanted to know the most popular talent builds for the Warcraft classes I play. Rather than search the Internet for information on these classes, I decided to create a site that found the most popular talent points from the best characters on the Warcraft Armory and rank them according to popularity. TalentChic was born!

A few months later, Blizzard released Patch 3.1 and with it came Dual Specs and information on a character’s glyphs in the armory. I quickly set to scanning these too and GlyphChic.com was born.

As the scanner already needed to scan a player’s gear to find their play style (Raider, PvPer or casual Quest or Crafted gear holder), I found I had created a large database of the most popular gear, enchants and gems players used.

So I merged TalentChic and GlyphChic into a new site called WoWPopular.com and added new data for Enchants, Gear and Gems. I plan this site to be a one-stop-shop for not only players who don’t have the time to fully research what talents, enchants, glyphs, gems or gear to work on next – but also for players with lots of alts who, like me, just want to know how to improve their alt without reading lots of theorycrafting.

I hope you get as much use from this data as I do!

Oh – I’m an active Warcraft Player myself. If you are on the US-Ravencrest realm, send me a whisper on my main raiding char – Trail.

David Peterson
Creator, WoWPopular

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!

It’s easy to use this site!

1. Click on your class on the left sidebar
2. A list of the most popular talent builds, glyphs, gear, enchants and gems for your class is shown.
3. Click on one of the headings to see more information on a section you are interested in.

You can customize your search to show only a specific spec by clicking on the spec on the left of the page. You can also customize to your playstyle; see below.

Playstyles

As well as scanning talents from the armory, the system also checks the character’s gear and chooses an appropriate playstyle.

• “Raid” indicates most gear has come from raiding either 10 or 25 man dungeons.
• “PvP” indicates most gear has been attained from honor or marks in Arenas or Battlegrounds.
• “Instances” indicates most gear obtained has dropped from an instance mob or boss.
• The “Quest” playstyle means most gear has come from completing quests
• “Crafted” indicates most gear has been crafted from professions. This link is most useful for finding what crafted gear you can create for your character before heading into raids.

Playstyles are split in the system because PvE specs are usually different from PvP specs. Click on the playstyle that matches your preference to see the most popular builds for that playstyle. If no playstyles are checked, all are shown.

Seeing More Information

Some categories (like gear, gems and enchants) have an additional filter for either a gear slot, or a gem color. Click on those extra links that appear to filter your search further, like to find the popular Blue Epic gems for your Fire Mage.

Talent Builds

To see the specific talents for a build, click on Talents at the top of the page. A list of popular talent builds for your chosen class and spec are displayed. Click on the [Spec] link in the Build column to see the full talent spec.

The “Differences” column shows the talent differences between similar builds. Using this column, you can quickly see the differences between two builds. If the column contains the word Build with a number, the build is a core build used to compare with other builds. If the column shows a build number with plus and minus signs and icons, it is showing the talent changes between the build on this row, and the core build with that number. For instance:

Any icons with a blue background and a plus to the left are new talent points added to this build that were not in the core build. Icons on a red backgound and a minus sign are talent points that were removed from the core build to create this build.

In the example, this build has replaced one point of Piercing Ice and two points of the Piercing Chill talents of Build 1 with 3 points in Burning Soul. To find the names, hold your mouse over the icon to see a tooltip. You can click into the icon to find more information about what that talent does. The number of points added or removed can be found by looking at the Rank in the tooltip. For example, in the image below, 2 points were removed from Piercing Blow.

Glyphs

Click on the Glyphs link on the top left of the page to show the popular prime, major and minor glyphs chosen for your character.

Gear, Enchants and Gems

Similarly, click on either the Gear, Enchants or Gems links at the top left of the page to show the most popular gear for each slot, enchants for each slot, and gems per color. All lists change according to playstyle (PvPers usually show resistance gear and gems with little Hit stats) and spec (Healers don’t use hit, while rogues don’t use Spell Power).

Reforges

Finally, the reforges link shows the most popular spec changes made by reforging.

If you have any questions about this site, please feel free to leave a comment below and we will create a FAQ.