Our good friends at Paladin Sucks point to this very interesting breakdown of classes in all the 5v5 area teams over 2000 arena rating. Can you guess which classes are winning the Arena PvP game?The answer surprised me: it's warriors. For all of their bellyaching, warriors are cutting through the opposition in the arena-- they make up almost 20% of all the players with teams above 2000 arena rating. And next on the list, surprisingly enough, is paladins-- with 33, they're 18% of the winning players. And maybe most surprising, Druids and Warlocks, the two teams who seem to dominate in PvP, are bringing up the rear in terms of players, with a measly 4% and 3% respectively.
Now, this makes no distinction about what these players are actually doing in these teams-- when I go into the arena with my Shaman, it seems that all I'm doing mostly is trying to stay alive, and warriors with a healer behind them are very, very good at that. I believe the numbers came from the Armory (where you can sort by rating, but only by battlegroup), but whoever wrote it up didn't say where the numbers came from. I've reprinted the full list of classes with the number of players in teams with an arena rating of over 2000 after the jump, for the benefit of those of you at work.
Number of players in each class that are members of 5v5 arena teams with a rating of 2000+
(via http://www.worldofming.com/?p=393)
Warrior - 35
Paladin - 33
Mage - 28
Priest - 27
Shaman - 17
Hunter - 13
Rogue - 12
Druid - 8
Warlock - 6
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
3-06-2007 @ 6:32PM
DontLetsStart said...
If you look at the census, the numbers @70 are pretty even (except for pallies and shaman, who have an obvious disadvantage at least for a while yet). Druids are at 10%, warlocks at 11%, warriors and mages at 15%, so population difference isn't enough to explain these figures.
As Hidden_Agenda mentions, the soul shard problem is a big one that probably hurts warlock's willingness to participate. But after all this time I doubt blizzard will back down on their stance that soul shards are a balance to warlock's power. IMO that approach is broken though, since you'll always either have the situation where you farm shards ahead of time and are overpowered, or if you balance for that, then once they quickly run out they're underpowered. Soul shards are fine as lore for PvE, but a broken mechanic for PvP.
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3-06-2007 @ 6:32PM
nea said...
@12: Well, it's not like warriors have many multiple roles awaiting them at the arena, neither prot nor fury can match the usefullness of MORTAL STRIKE HOOOOOOOO! And it's similar with other classes, most of them have only one viable arena build, and that build usually doesn't fit into PvE at all.
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3-06-2007 @ 7:43PM
jahuel said...
collecting arena points sucks.
it doesn't matter how many teams you are on, it seems - you only get points for your highest ranked team.
so if you get 1400 points, expect 225 that week
if you're on 2 teams with roughly 1600 points each, expect 375. or one 1 team with that many for that matter.
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3-07-2007 @ 10:20AM
Marra said...
Warriors dominating arena is no surprise at all. Warriors are the strongest class in pvp while backedup by healers, witch they always are in arena. Pala is prolly the best healer in arena since they can survive anything
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3-07-2007 @ 11:23AM
Sergio said...
I'm not surprised by the warlocks. Unlike other BGs, warlocks cannot simply DoT people up and run away, or get into many 1v1 situations where the OPness of fear puts people at a disadvantage. In 5v5, they may fear one person, but still have 4 to contend with. Their DoTs can be dispelled, decursed, or healed through once the warlock is dead. They probably have better luck in 2v2 arenas.
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3-09-2007 @ 4:44PM
Aaron said...
Saying that the highest occurring class in the game is in most of the top teams isn’t a surprise. Its kind of like saying black tires are better because most tires are black.
The real information would be to say out of the total warriors in 5 man teams what % of them are in the top 5% of all teams. And on average what % of the games have they played in to help attribute to their teams rating.
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