Class Balance: Is there a problem?
Posted January 12, 2009 at 12:31 PM by Warpy
Tags classes, statistics
Things must be pretty bad for warlocks if even Bigredkitty feels sorry for us! BRK can be funny about everything, but many of the unhappy warlocks and the trolls on the other side (some of whom used to play warlocks) really aren’t as much fun to read.
One test would be to see how many players have abandoned their warlocks for death knights. Warcraftrealms.com collects data on World of Warcraft characters using an add-on and the in-game “who” command and can answer that question. Fortunately, I wrote an entry about that site in July, 2008, and so I have an old census that I can compare to today’s. The July, 2008 data I’ve got are from the Alliance side of a typical server (I checked that), so I’m comparing them to Jan. 2009 data from the Alliance-side averages of all the servers.
Before: The Burning Crusade - Patch 4
After: Wrath of the Lich King, Patch 3.04
The most obvious change is an increase in Death Knights, already 10% of the level-80 population. Even if the actual numbers of every other class remained the same (every level 70 in the July count had been leveled to 80), their percentages would each decline by 1.1% of the total because of these new Death Knights.
But most classes are roughly the same %age they were before death knights were added, indicating that their numbers have increased slightly.
It could. A lot of the end-game warlocks, rogues, and hunters were there for PvP, which now favors plate-wearers. Enthusiastic PvPers would have serious incentive to reroll, and death knights get to level 80 much faster than new paladins.
However, two of the characters in the July ’08 survey were my alt hunter and my alt rogue, both level 70. It will be a while before either sees level 80. Rogues and hunters make great alts, and are popular with casual players, who aren’t as likely to level as quickly as hard-core raiders and PvPers. Likewise, perhaps many of the July ’08 warlocks were alts and just haven’t leveled yet?
But the January decline might be worse than it looks. Many of the characters in the census are alts, even though the expansion has only been out for a few months. Have people leveled their warlock/hunter/rogue mains to 80, been disappointed in their ability to raid/PvP/whatever they do in-game, and begun rerolling and leveling new mains?
One way to identify mains is by measuring prime-time activity, something Warcraft Realms extracts from census data. Servers are crowded from 6-10 PM, so that’s a good time for raiding, dungeon runs, and PvP; activities one tends to do on one’s main toon.
Changes over time are tough to interpret here, because there was a period when census+ (the mod that collects Warcraftrealms data) was broken. It was fixed Oct. 28th. That second "Dec." should probably be "Jan." There were also important family holidays in November and December that took priority over WoW playtime for many people.
According to Rollie’s concurrency report, WoW total primetime activity increased gradually through October and November (based on 47 days, the ones with good data, I guess, out of 61). However, trends in relative prime-time activity by class are pretty easy to see here.
Back in July of 2008:
In terms of coming changes, players are still leveling, including many that are new and many that have rerolled. Ghostcrawler was right about there being very few level-80s in the total WoW population. As of Jan. 2009, there are about fifty times as many toons leveling between 19 and 80 as there are at level 80!
Wrath of the Lich King
Six months ago, there were almost no toons left to level. Just about everyone and her alt was at level 70 (except for a handful of level 19 twinks, not shown below).
The Burning Crusade, patch 4
So what classes are people leveling? Looks like more hunters (alts or casuals?) and a few more rogues, but fewer shaman and still 7% warlocks. Lots more death knights on the way!
Wrath of the Lich King
Many, probably most of these characters will be abandoned before they reach level 80, but it looks like the gap between the most common classes and the rarer ones is only going to get wider and wider with time.
Possible Causes of Warlock/Shaman/Rogue Population Declines
Why are warlocks and shaman getting rarer? Their are other sources of data available.
For example, people have done tallies of highly ranked WoW arena teams (rating of 2000+) and found that:
How many of the raiders who've cleared Naxx have been warlocks or shaman (and how many times)? Are guilds limiting the number of shaman and warlocks that they're bringing to raids or are guilds with fewer of these classes more successful?
Those data could be worked out from WoWJutsu. Many of the top guilds have about 10% warlocks, but this doesn't encourage me too much, because many of them are the >5% of raiding guilds that actually stacked warlocks and shaman to down Brutallus. So there are a number of legacy shaman/warlocks in Sunwell gear still raiding in the most highly-ranked PvE guilds.
However, Ensidia, the number-one pro-gamer guild that cleared all the Wrath of the Lich King content within a few days was careful to assemble a new guild, not to be constrained by legacy. As of Jan. 2008, they have very few warlocks, 4 enhancement shaman, and 4 resto shaman (0 elemental shaman). Does Ensidia also run small raids for alts? Could be also that personalities are as important as class, but Ensidia is the daughter of the two guilds that made it to the top of the PvE charts by raid stacking.
The deal with getting a high WoWjutsu rating was to get through Naxx (and to a lesser degree, the other two raids) as many times as possible as soon as possible. Leveling to 80 and starting gear would have been more important than class.
If there's a problem with warlocks/shaman getting spots for raids (above and beyond the usual difficulty for any DPS to get a raid spot), the data aren't very clear at the moment. After the release of Ulduar, raid stacking patterns will get clearer. Alternatively, a gear-rating site with good data might be helpful.
Summary
How bad is it really?
One test would be to see how many players have abandoned their warlocks for death knights. Warcraftrealms.com collects data on World of Warcraft characters using an add-on and the in-game “who” command and can answer that question. Fortunately, I wrote an entry about that site in July, 2008, and so I have an old census that I can compare to today’s. The July, 2008 data I’ve got are from the Alliance side of a typical server (I checked that), so I’m comparing them to Jan. 2009 data from the Alliance-side averages of all the servers.
Before: The Burning Crusade - Patch 4
After: Wrath of the Lich King, Patch 3.04
The most obvious change is an increase in Death Knights, already 10% of the level-80 population. Even if the actual numbers of every other class remained the same (every level 70 in the July count had been leveled to 80), their percentages would each decline by 1.1% of the total because of these new Death Knights.
But most classes are roughly the same %age they were before death knights were added, indicating that their numbers have increased slightly.
- The paladin population has increased noticeably.
- Warlock numbers are down from 9% to 7%, an impressive decline given their original rarity.
- But, the most impressive declines are in rogue and hunter numbers; those were among the most common classes in the game.
Does these declines indicate a serious problem for warlocks, rogues, and hunters?
It could. A lot of the end-game warlocks, rogues, and hunters were there for PvP, which now favors plate-wearers. Enthusiastic PvPers would have serious incentive to reroll, and death knights get to level 80 much faster than new paladins.
However, two of the characters in the July ’08 survey were my alt hunter and my alt rogue, both level 70. It will be a while before either sees level 80. Rogues and hunters make great alts, and are popular with casual players, who aren’t as likely to level as quickly as hard-core raiders and PvPers. Likewise, perhaps many of the July ’08 warlocks were alts and just haven’t leveled yet?
But the January decline might be worse than it looks. Many of the characters in the census are alts, even though the expansion has only been out for a few months. Have people leveled their warlock/hunter/rogue mains to 80, been disappointed in their ability to raid/PvP/whatever they do in-game, and begun rerolling and leveling new mains?
Identifying Mains vs. Alts
One way to identify mains is by measuring prime-time activity, something Warcraft Realms extracts from census data. Servers are crowded from 6-10 PM, so that’s a good time for raiding, dungeon runs, and PvP; activities one tends to do on one’s main toon.
Changes over time are tough to interpret here, because there was a period when census+ (the mod that collects Warcraftrealms data) was broken. It was fixed Oct. 28th. That second "Dec." should probably be "Jan." There were also important family holidays in November and December that took priority over WoW playtime for many people.
According to Rollie’s concurrency report, WoW total primetime activity increased gradually through October and November (based on 47 days, the ones with good data, I guess, out of 61). However, trends in relative prime-time activity by class are pretty easy to see here.Back in July of 2008:
- Hunters were not only the most common class, they were by far the most active at prime-time, so they more likely to be someone’s main toon than any other class.
- Warriors were second most-active.
- Shamans were the least-active during prime-time.
- Warlocks were the second-rarest on here, even last-summer when we were supposedly Blizzard’s fair-haired child.
- Hunters are still highly active, but they’ve been joined by death knights, warriors, and paladins, all very popular classes. So I’d say there hasn’t been a real decrease in people playing hunters as mains, but manyof the hunters in the July 2008 census were actually alts out there who have not yet leveled, or possibly even been played to be censused.
- The two least-active classes, warlocks and shamans, have become even less active, as have rogues, once highly active.
Which classes are being leveled?
In terms of coming changes, players are still leveling, including many that are new and many that have rerolled. Ghostcrawler was right about there being very few level-80s in the total WoW population. As of Jan. 2009, there are about fifty times as many toons leveling between 19 and 80 as there are at level 80!
Wrath of the Lich King
Six months ago, there were almost no toons left to level. Just about everyone and her alt was at level 70 (except for a handful of level 19 twinks, not shown below).
The Burning Crusade, patch 4
So what classes are people leveling? Looks like more hunters (alts or casuals?) and a few more rogues, but fewer shaman and still 7% warlocks. Lots more death knights on the way!
Wrath of the Lich King
Many, probably most of these characters will be abandoned before they reach level 80, but it looks like the gap between the most common classes and the rarer ones is only going to get wider and wider with time.
- Looks like we’re headed for a player-base dominated by paladins (mostly retribution), warriors, death knights, and hunters.
- Warlocks and shaman, always rare in the past, are getting even more scarce.
- In terms of loot, hard times are ahead for plate-wearing tanks and DPS!
Expect no sympathy here.
Possible Causes of Warlock/Shaman/Rogue Population Declines
Why are warlocks and shaman getting rarer? Their are other sources of data available.
For example, people have done tallies of highly ranked WoW arena teams (rating of 2000+) and found that:
- Warlocks are the least common class in high-end PvP for every team size.
- Shaman tend only to be on successful teams in the 5v5 bracket.
- Rogues are likely to be found on highly-ranked 2v2 and 3v3 teams. This was the case in The Burning Crusade as well, I believe.
How many of the raiders who've cleared Naxx have been warlocks or shaman (and how many times)? Are guilds limiting the number of shaman and warlocks that they're bringing to raids or are guilds with fewer of these classes more successful?
Those data could be worked out from WoWJutsu. Many of the top guilds have about 10% warlocks, but this doesn't encourage me too much, because many of them are the >5% of raiding guilds that actually stacked warlocks and shaman to down Brutallus. So there are a number of legacy shaman/warlocks in Sunwell gear still raiding in the most highly-ranked PvE guilds.
However, Ensidia, the number-one pro-gamer guild that cleared all the Wrath of the Lich King content within a few days was careful to assemble a new guild, not to be constrained by legacy. As of Jan. 2008, they have very few warlocks, 4 enhancement shaman, and 4 resto shaman (0 elemental shaman). Does Ensidia also run small raids for alts? Could be also that personalities are as important as class, but Ensidia is the daughter of the two guilds that made it to the top of the PvE charts by raid stacking.
The deal with getting a high WoWjutsu rating was to get through Naxx (and to a lesser degree, the other two raids) as many times as possible as soon as possible. Leveling to 80 and starting gear would have been more important than class.
If there's a problem with warlocks/shaman getting spots for raids (above and beyond the usual difficulty for any DPS to get a raid spot), the data aren't very clear at the moment. After the release of Ulduar, raid stacking patterns will get clearer. Alternatively, a gear-rating site with good data might be helpful.
Summary
- Looks like there is a bit of a warlock population decline, but it's not an obvious one, because we've always been rare.
- Rogue numbers seem to be declining a bit, but I'm not sure why. I'm not seeing any QQ posts at Roguespot; they seem happy, and there are quite a few rogues still leveling.
- Shaman, always the rarest class, are declining further, but a dramatic buff for the elemental spec in patch 3.0.8 and the introduction of dual specs may help them recover.
Total Comments 5
Comments
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no surprise on shaman... the ele spec has never been very flashy, unlock warlocks or mages where you could potentially see big numbers... with no scaling and the lack of spell pushback untill Wrath it was prob one of the worst casters around
leveling as enchance is nice but when push comes to shove and you're a pinch, there's no evasion to save you just your heals which really doesn't heal that much.
lvling as restoration... well aside from good healing in 5man you're slow as hell
overall leveling a shaman takes a fair amount of dedication to stick it thru esp the first 20 to 40 levels and i doubt many people can really be botheredPosted January 12, 2009 at 10:36 PM by Coud
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Agreed, Shamans really need a break, cant see any harm in making them a little op for a while at least resto shamans.
Great write-up warpy, I think warlock representation in arena's says it all about warlock pvp right now.
I cant see the problem in giving locks more pvp tools, but clearly blizzard has a higher plan. lets just hope that the situation gets resolved by resi.Posted January 13, 2009 at 12:04 AM by Liche
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Thank you so much for the painstaking research on this postPosted January 13, 2009 at 12:07 AM by Edrac
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Great post, alot of care and detail went into this post.
The charts are a direct indication of the current state of PvP and PvE. Sadly we are broken in PvP right now, and its the main reason many warlocks are even warlocks. Most of the flavor of the month players made warlocks way back when they were OP, and clearly they aren't OP anymore.
But on shamans, I myself have a level 71 shammy that i started leveling about a few weeks before wrath it(it was level 41 i believe.) All i remember is having a blast leveling something knew. I felt that it was an easier experience then leveling my Warlock the first time through. Unfortunatley now i'm stuck because i can't find the time nor patience to level the poor guy to 80.
DOn't give up on warlocks just yet, many warlocks who are in PvE gear should see a jump in dps by about 200-300 dps after the patch goes live.(providing they fixed immolate)Posted January 13, 2009 at 10:57 AM by Emmcee
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I'll be waiting until 3.1 to determine if I am going to replay my warlock, between how bad the pve/pvp situation has gotten, and the fact that my alliance guild I raided with most of The Burning Crusade (top 5 server) is regrouping..YAY for friends again.. I may not play my lock any more.. its not a matter of FoTM, its a matter of a class that is no longer enjoyable, is seen as a liability when we used to be seen as a competitor.
its about giving too much to those who didn't need it, and taking away from those who had less to work with!Posted January 15, 2009 at 04:50 AM by leprmesiah
