Season One, Race Event 36: 3 Hour Solo

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RaikosAzure wrote:

2nd Dualist, 3rd overall, I Just couldn't catch him, I think I shouldn't have done the 2 skillpoint quests but they lined up so well with my build idea and netted me some resist for all/fire at docks. I just don't have enough experiance on this build.

Leap slam > Full Life melee > Cold Dmg Linked, Double Strike for single target, hatred for my aura.

Had some insane luck and drops this race. Good race all!

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TyrusDark wrote:

Stat porn for this race is titled: "Buffing the duelist, urdoingitright"

or maybe "nobody likes a (w)itch"


Statistics used:

I eliminated all characters of Level 1 (assuming they virtually didn't play)

There's some argument to be made about using only characters hitting the reward tier, but that's a different discussion. Also keep in mind since total characters played is not even, I should technically do a dotproduct to determine average experience, but I forgot so I left it as is. In short, it doesn't affect the results a lot...

edit: If anything, it makes the poor witch look much worse, so the witch gets saved a bit by my error :P

# Chars Level 2+ is self-explanatory, raw number of characters. The recent duelist buff pushed a lot of players that direction. Interestingly, the duelist and templar USED to display fewer total characters but higher averages, indicating more experienced players used them.

Top Exp - Winner of the class, highest experience

Cutoff Exp - The experience of the #20 character in each class

Avg Exp (Top 20) - Average experience of the elite of the class

Sum of ranks - Smaller is better, a measure of how well the class did relative to other classes at the upper echelons. In a perfectly even distribution all classes would score 1200. The "% of average" graph has been normalized so that higher bars are better

Avg. Level - Self-Explanatory, All chars Level >2

avg. Experience - Should be identical, more or less, to Avg. Level (In fact I probably should have included only one of them, oh well too late)

Avg. Rank - How well the class as a whole compared to its peers in terms of where each finished. Lower number is better. The graph has been normalized so that higher bars are better



To normalize everything and prevent scaling issues, I normalized each stat to a "% of average." That is, I took the average of each category, and compared the class against the average. The graph has been normalized so that Lower, Shorter bars are worse. Higher, longer bars are better in all cases (specifically, I took the reciprocal of the rank categories.)



The duelist won in virtually every category... though personally I'd give it some time to settle before making too many determinations. Playing a duelist myself I have to say the early nodes for the duelist are now amazing (+12 life at level 2? Sure!) The marauder is now the worst-off of melee classes. In addition to being slow, he is a bit lost after about level 20 unless you build the whole resistance tree (which is not wortwhile compared to the options BOTH the duelist and Templar have)

MORE interesting, the witch is virtually absent from racing now. The totals for the witch are MUCH lower than her peers. Concepting a witch, it's apparent there is simply not enough tank. Without the damage mitigation provided by either evasion or armor, early-game energy shield tanking is simply not very good. Additionally, the shadow has early access to movement speed nodes, much easier access to damage nodes (while still moving towards tanking nodes), and better non-magic options.

As noted earlier in this thread, the fire trap nerf probably hit witches as an unintended side effect.

Exact numbers below.