Progression by the Classes

What is 'Progression by the Classes?'

This probably won't be too terribly exciting for everyone, but this is an alternate take on raid progression. We've pretty much only dealt with guild tracking for raid achievements in the past, reducing the efforts of 24+ individuals into one guild name and call it a day.

The aim of this project is to shed some light on the classes behind the kills, and the variance in their occurrences. Essentially, this is a tool to gauge the desirability of the different classes, to see which classes we players deem more worthy of a raid spot over another, and the balance of subclasses as we perceive them.

This thread will contain images of several raid mobs, graphing the total number of each class to kill said mob. Also provided below is a link to a spreadsheet file. Feel free to peruse the data, make observations, and do your own research based off of these numbers.

The Data - Integrity is Awesome!

First off, I did not divine these numbers via a ouija board, nor pull numbers out of a hat. This data was collected through the EQ2 Census API. EQ2's Census is opt-in only, as such any private profiles do not show up on the kill count, thus there absolutely is a margin of error. It also will not be updated in real time, because I have things to do! However, I will try to update it every 1-2 months or so if people find it interesting enough.

To The Data!

If you prefer a basic spreadsheet, you may find the data on this google doc spreadsheet.

Alternately, below you may find images for individual nameds. Prepare for graphics overload!

Zavith Loa

Brokenskull

High Hold + Temple

Cathedral of Bone

Whoops, mulligan on the duplicate Grethah graph, meant to put this one in for Farozth!

That's kinda sad. Take 1 most popular tank as an indicator for total raid forces and we have about 200 raid fotces total, dropping down to under 10 tackling the hardest stuff

So much h8 for Channelers and Beastlords

For still being a relatively young class that guilds are timid of, Chanchans aren't doing too terribly. BL tho, yeaaaaa....

Katana, I am mad at you.

You only served to remind me that Swash and BL are pretty much forgotten in the name of Mr.EdgeyDark the Assassinpants XD

I dunno...looks like the only scouts that are consistently high in attendance are the Bards. And while it is true that Swashbucklers and Beastlords are consistently low, given the charts above, the Brigands and the Predators seem to be taking turns making sure that Swashbucklers and Beastlords don't get a raid spot.

True. I blame mages. Even with our supposed "advantage" in terms of poison no scout no non-assassin comes close to their putout making Bards more desirable by comparison

Sorry! Just don't forget the Swash class motto:

"At least I'm not a BeastLord!"

Why blame mages? The Enchanters have the most slots in the mage archetype. That, combined with the predominant presence of Bards, suggests that it is utility rather than straight DPS that is the primary determining factor on bringing a given character along. Also, there are only a few fights where the Troubador class has greater representation than the Dirge class, which appears to suggest that the melee DPS classes are getting more buffs than the spell casters (from the Bards, at least). The lower representation of fighters suggests that they are being brought primarily for tanking, with perhaps a few off-tanks.

However, the only definite conclusion that we really can draw from the data is that BLs, Bruisers, Necros, Swashbucklers, Channelers tend to have lower representation in those raids than other non-fighter classes.

I've never played a troub, but I know dirge get an in-combat rez that raids seem to love having available. Do troubs also have that? If not, that might explain part of the difference there.

I am probably blind but what are you graphing? What is the Y axis measuring? I can see that the X axis is showing the classes but not what is actually being measured. If DPS is what you are referring to then it appears that healers and scouts are the primary DPS classes, which is not intuitive.

I interpret that to mean the graphs are simply showing the total number of each class participating in the various boss kills.

Yep! How many of each class have killed each raid named.

If we look at Barin and Morin, the first named in Brokenskull, clerics are almost identical with 243 Templars and 244 Inquisitors having killed them. However, Looking at some of the later fights such as Arch Lich Rhag'Zadune, the last named in Temple, there are 48 Templars to only 25 Inquisitors.

What starts out as an impossibly balanced distribution becomes horribly uneven towards the progressively harder bosses. It's one thing to just say 'Templars are better than Inquisitors!' - this gives us direct evidence that there's something affecting Cleric demand as fights get harder.

First thought that comes to my mind is Shield of Faith, the Templar-only arcane ward, as all the hard mobs seem to prefer arcane damage. But there's probably some other stuff going on too :3

Hey Katana, you could change that Moto to

( Hey at least I'm not a Bruiser !! ) as well... so sad

So, to summarize, these graphs say nothing about how well these classes perform in raids. They only state how often each class is invited to participate.