~chron

I like reading the forum threads on AJ – there are a lot of good players on there, and when a few 2400 rated people agree on something you can generally assume they have the right idea. Still; it’s a small sample size – and a self-selected one at that – so I find it useful to sanity-check my decisions based on what successful people are actually doing.

So we turn to the official Armory. I’ve mentioned my data-mining projects in the past, and my current focus is on the Reckoning 2v2 bracket. I wrote a small script to have a look at all the holy paladins (you’re holy if you have more points in the holy tree than any other tree) in the top 300 teams so I could get some “real” data about what kind of gear people are using, how they gem, how they spec, all that good stuff.

Rather than attempt a hideously wide HTML table, here’s the output of the script as a text file. The second half is the statistics, so be prepared for some scrolling. There’s also a CSV file of just the non-PvE characters.

First thing to note – a number of those characters are flagged by the script as “PvE” (the exclamation mark) which discounts them from many of the statistics. I consider a character to be wearing PvP gear if she has any of the various medallions of the horde/alliance equipped or if she’s a human with at least 100 resilience across all her gear. I realise that isn’t a perfect test, especially in a world where paladins can afford to wear a lot of PvE gear, but it works well enough for my purposes.

Second thing – if there’s more than two people on the team, the script will take the two with the highest number of games played so far this season. In practice most of the teams just have two serious players, but I’ve probably missed a few people out because of this.

Representation overall is as good as you could hope for – 101 paladins out of the 300 teams is something like 17% which is absolutely crazy for a single spec. Paladins are the dominant 2s healer, no doubt about that.

In terms of partners for a Holy Paladin, Death Knights are far and away the most popular. Unholy (specifically Shadowfrost or 0/20/51) continues to be the dominant spec (46.5%), though the numbers of Frost and Blood DKs are slowly creeping up. Having said that, Paladins still have a fairly wide variety of potential partners at the moment. To some extent its just a case of putting any two overpowered classes together for even more overpowered-ness, but Survival Hunter, Fury Warrior, and to a lesser degree Rogue, Warlock, and Feral Druid are all very viable options.

The holy trinity of Paladin PvP specs is well established, with the hybrid repentance spec by far the most popular now (42.25%). Interestingly there’s quite a bit of “long tail” variation – about 24% of the paladins are NOT using one of the cookie-cutter specs, even just looking at point-distribtion alone. The faction ratio is pretty balanced at 50.7% alliance.

In terms of gear, the average resilience is ~565, which speaks to the strengths of Paladins’ innate defenses in high-burst environments. A similar thing happened in Season 1 and I will be curious to see how further LK seasons shift this balance.

I am on there, but pretty near the bottom :<

chronic Arena, Data Mining, Paladin