~chron

So the official Armory now shows both specs for characters who have shelled out the cash for dual talent specialization, along with the accompanying glyphs for each spec. That’s great, and the format they’ve chosen is pretty much exactly what I hoped they would do.

However, it poses an interesting problem from a data mining point of view – how can you ascertain the intent of a spec now, since a player can only have one set of gear equipped at a time? In the past I’ve tried to make educated guesses about whether players are specced for PvP by looking at whether they have certain trinkets equipped, or are over a certain resilience threshold.

You can still do that to some extent since one of the specs will be marked as active, but it’s much less solid, and of course doesn’t allow for the possibility that both of a player’s specs are intended for PvP; different arena brackets, perhaps.

You could possibly check for the existence of certain talents – Master of Deception for rogues might be a good candidate, but not every class has talents which are so clear-cut. It’s a brittle implementation, and very class-specific.

chronic Data Mining