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Friday, January 27, 2006
WoW warrior blues
I had the impression that the class mix on a typical WoW server is changing with time. To test this theory, I logged onto old and new servers, and ran Censusplus on each of them, and there is a clear trend: Classes which are most sought-after for forming groups are increasing with time, while classes which have problems getting a group invite decrease with time.
The most striking examples are priests, which double their population with server age. For example on the relatively young Bronzebeard server only 5% of players play a priest, while on the much older Runetotem server the number went up to 10%. At the same time the hunter population went down from 21% to 14%. At first I thought that this is simply an equalizing effect, making all classes equally popular in the long run. But the numbers for warriors disprove that, going up from 19% to 21%.
Unfortunately that makes warriors the most popular class, one in five players in playing a warrior. Every group wants to have a warrior, but they usually don't want to have two of them. On our last 15-man guild raid, 5 players had a warrior. That is not only inefficient, but also means that any warrior loot is highly contested. You end up with a class that is often superfluous, heavily dependant on gear, and at the same time having the most difficulties to improve its gear.
In spite of the number of priest rising quickly, there are still only half as many of them around as there are warriors, which makes them clearly the better choice for getting invited into groups and raids. And priests are less dependant on the quality of their equipment. Another good choice is mage, which due to crowd control by sheeping and AoE spells are often needed in groups. If you want to go off the beaten track, the least popular class is Warlock, and due to teleports and soulstones, plus some AoE, they are good for groups as well.
Me, I'm having the warrior blues with Raslebol, and am thinking of semi-retiring him again, to concentrate on getting my priest to level 60. But currently I'm playing both about half of the time. That has clear advantages of giving the priest more rest bonus xp for faster leveling, more variety of play styles, and the opportunity of gaining stuff with the higher-level that can be handed down to the lower level one. It just is frustrating sometimes when you can't get into a group because there are too many warriors already, or you do get in but are clearly superfluous.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 AM Permanent Link
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I retired my paladin months ago, because there were too many around, they are also very very gear-dependent, while it was very difficult to get said gear as it drops less and there are always multiple paladins rolling for it. I also felt like I wasn't really contributing my fair share to groups, and I confirmed this when I went into the same instances with my undead mage, and realized how much more fun these instances were when I wasn't playing the gimpadin, and how much more I felt like I made a difference (not to mention how much cool gear I got - it took me 3 ST runs to get all but one drops relevant to a mage. My paladin never got any loot on any of his ST runs).
If starting a new character, I would recommend to anybody who will concentrate on PvE to roll a cloth wearer or a druid, and avoid hunter/warrior/paladin.
If starting a new character, I would recommend to anybody who will concentrate on PvE to roll a cloth wearer or a druid, and avoid hunter/warrior/paladin.
I don't imagine the Censusplus results came as any surprise though. This is typical of linear Diku-spinoffs. As they mature, people migrate in three directions: soloable (for those who never hit the endgame or love alt'ing), pure group (for raiding), and hybrid (those who play for fun but aren't counted upon for dedicated anything).
It's basically the pure groupies that get the attention because they're the ones consuming every last erg of content. And they need to be grouped to do it, so to achieve max efficiency, they go with what's best.
Hence, the whole "Needed" lists people use to poke holes in the arguments of devs. This has dated back to much early even than Fire of Heaven's "Looking for" list that had been used as a benchmark for new class character creation in EQ1.
It doesn't mean people are sheep. It just means they're rising to expectation. In WoW, if a Warlock can do the few things a Mage can do on a Raid plus more, then Mages aren't as sought. Or vice versa. Or whatever. Some larger guilds follow the lead of the largest/most-dedicated. Others follow the strateg guides, which may have been written by those most-dedicated guilds. Everyone else either struggles or comes to the same best strategy on their own.
Eventually, classes on the edge of usefulness are replaced by those who are purely. It's easy to grasp Tank/Healer/Support, and even though games try to design around that paradigm in terms of class, their encounters are still built around it. Eventually, everything goes back to that.
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It's basically the pure groupies that get the attention because they're the ones consuming every last erg of content. And they need to be grouped to do it, so to achieve max efficiency, they go with what's best.
Hence, the whole "Needed" lists people use to poke holes in the arguments of devs. This has dated back to much early even than Fire of Heaven's "Looking for" list that had been used as a benchmark for new class character creation in EQ1.
It doesn't mean people are sheep. It just means they're rising to expectation. In WoW, if a Warlock can do the few things a Mage can do on a Raid plus more, then Mages aren't as sought. Or vice versa. Or whatever. Some larger guilds follow the lead of the largest/most-dedicated. Others follow the strateg guides, which may have been written by those most-dedicated guilds. Everyone else either struggles or comes to the same best strategy on their own.
Eventually, classes on the edge of usefulness are replaced by those who are purely. It's easy to grasp Tank/Healer/Support, and even though games try to design around that paradigm in terms of class, their encounters are still built around it. Eventually, everything goes back to that.
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