This Balance of Professions is Very Good!

Hello!

I was looking at some statistics and was extremely impressed by the almost perfect balance of profession popularity! This is usually quite hard to achieve in an MMO!

https://ibb.co/bup9Rc

Click the link above to see for yourself! I just thought this is nice to share :)

is that played or created? alts normalizes professions over time.

There was another thread like this a couple days ago. But they cited a different set of data i think.

https://gw2efficiency.com/account/player-statistics

While yes, having alts would normalize the amount of professions played (for example I have 13 characters, 1-2 of everything), but it wouldnt account for time played on each as people generally would prioritize 1-3 over the others.

There is no information, but I assume that it does count ALTS and not time played.

I think most people would prefer to have a graph showing class popularity variation over time. Revenant's statistics for example are given with a 3 years late start which make it naturally a profession with less use. However, you can see that the engineer despite being 3 years older than the revenant, is already used less than the revenant. Ain't this "scarry"?

The chart means nothing since all serious GW2 players will have at least a character for each class, leading to a "natural" balance if you look at it from an account point of view.

Most if not all of those with "only" 5 character slots will also have 5 different classes.

Since we also know that like 90%of players have HoT or PoF as opposed to vanilla or free, we're looking at much more slots than 5 on average anyway.

@"Dawdler.8521" said:The chart means nothing since all serious GW2 players will have at least a character for each class, leading to a "natural" balance if you look at it from an account point of view.

Most if not all of those with "only" 5 character slots will also have 5 different classes.

Since we also know that like 90%of players have HoT or PoF as opposed to vanilla or free, we're looking at much more slots than 5 on average anyway.

Fair enough. I didnt really think about that :/

ye a graph showing time played per profession per hour would be a VERY interesting read.

Yeah, also per mode/zone.

There are people with thousands and thousands of hours on characters that they don't even really play but just leave idling in LA and the likes because they look good or are RP'ing.

To really talk about profession balance being good, it'd need to be something like play hours in sPvP and WvW.

Thats not play time so it means absolutely nothing. I have all char classes unlocked but I use thief 90% of the time, and thats not because its OP or anything. Its the first class I unlocked and the one I have the most bag space for and the one with most map completion, its also the best class for farming materials.

I do think that raid dps is fairly close between classes looking at benchmarks, but the weapon systems makes dps balancing a lot easier than other mmos. I also think weaver kinda sucks for anything other than raids even though it scores the highest in benchmarks, survivability is not there at all.

@"Dadnir.5038" said:I think most people would prefer to have a graph showing class popularity variation over time. Revenant's statistics for example are given with a 3 years late start which make it naturally a profession with less use. However, you can see that the engineer despite being 3 years older than the revenant, is already used less than the revenant. Ain't this "scarry"?

Na it isnt. This is characters "played" and not most played per account.The rev has the bonus to be the new profession and its more magical. Both things that appeal more to most rpg players.I mean if you see an engineer its mostly a charr or an asura, everything else is rarely seen because of flavor.Revenant can be used on everything in some way. So basically the role play aspect has influence on how many of these were created.If you would look into the total play number you will see that engineer probably has higher counts than rev. Just due to older profession and more or less same distribution in player base.

@InsaneQR.7412 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:I think most people would prefer to have a graph showing class popularity variation over time. Revenant's statistics for example are given with a 3 years late start which make it naturally a profession with less use. However, you can see that the engineer despite being 3 years older than the revenant, is already used less than the revenant. Ain't this "scarry"?

Indeed you are right, I brushed over it. Engi have a 10 million years of played hours advantage over revenant. That was my mistake :)

To be fair every class is viable in every game mode.

Hell in PvP in plat Ive been seeing lots of people run core builds. Guardian, warrior (more so in wvw), ranger, and thief.

@"Dainank.1308" said:Hello!

I was looking at some statistics and was extremely impressed by the almost perfect balance of profession popularity! This is usually quite hard to achieve in an MMO!

https://ibb.co/bup9Rc

Click the link above to see for yourself! I just thought this is nice to share :)

The time played that somebody linked above is a more accurate indicator. Most people will have their alts as classes they don't normally play, so anybody with a few extra slots will likely fill them out with all the other classes.

By time played, engineer and revenant are the least played, by a wide margin. Revenant has some excuse because it was added a few years after the game launched, but engineer has been around since launch. Both are relatively complex classes that don't seem to get treated particularly well by the devs.

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@InsaneQR.7412 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:I think most people would prefer to have a graph showing class popularity variation over time. Revenant's statistics for example are given with a 3 years late start which make it naturally a profession with less use. However, you can see that the engineer despite being 3 years older than the revenant, is already used less than the revenant. Ain't this "scarry"?

Aye, but don't forget engineer has several years on revenant.

I am actually heavily surprised by this for 2 reasons:

• Firstly my own experiences are very different. For example, my experience dictates that Engineer is one of the most popular classes, particularly Holosmith which is the next best power damage spec in the meta behind Weaver for high end PvE. Revenant is also one of the least played due to being low tier in effectiveness in 2/3 game modes. Other variations such as Elementalists/Rangers/Mesmers being overwhelmingly numerous in such content also contradict that table.

• Secondly a survey I conducted on Reddit a few weeks ago of 1602 people which found that Elementalists was the overwhelmingly dominant profession in terms of number, by almost double any other class.

I wonder how much of this is open world based and just people with characters in their slots.

In my experience the least played classes as shown by the graph and my own encounters in PvE are:Revenant and Thief

PvP are:Revenant again and Ele (the reverse of PvE interestingly)

WvW:Not enough playtime to comment at the moment.

This of course omits any elite specs variations, which would skew results further. Like Holosmith being one of the most popular PvE high tier specs but Scrapper being basically non existent in the same setting.

@"PistolWhip.2697" said:I am actually heavily surprised by this for 2 reasons:

• Firstly my own experiences are very different. For example, my experience dictates that Engineer is one of the most popular classes, particularly Holosmith which is the next best power damage spec in the meta behind Weaver for high end PvE. Revenant is also one of the least played due to being low tier in effectiveness in 2/3 game modes. Other variations such as Elementalists/Rangers/Mesmers being overwhelmingly numerous in such content also contradict that table.

• Secondly a survey I conducted on Reddit a few weeks ago of 1602 people which found that Elementalists was the overwhelmingly dominant profession in terms of number, by almost double any other class.

I wonder how much of this is open world based and just people with characters in their slots.

In my experience the least played classes as shown by the graph and my own encounters in PvE are:Revenant and Thief

PvP are:Revenant again and Ele (the reverse of PvE interestingly)

WvW:Not enough playtime to comment at the moment.

This of course omits any elite specs variations, which would skew results further. Like Holosmith being one of the most popular PvE high tier specs but Scrapper being basically non existent in the same setting.

The stats from GW2efficiency come from anybody who's ever entered their API key into gw2efficiency. The data is pulled from all of those API keys. So players who have never entered their API keys into GW2efficiency won't be counted on there, which is a sampling error. However, I think its information is mostly accurate. Self-polls are often way more inaccurate.

Holosmith has given engineer a bump in popularity, to be sure, but it's a bandaid elite spec. The core of engineer is really lackluster and frustrating, and I've seen several threads on the engineer subforum from people who love holo but hate the rest of the class because they don't get it. Most recent was this one.

Thief is the third least-played class according to GW2efficiency, btw. It doesn't quite have the gap of playtime like engineer or revenant though.

@vesica tempestas.1563 said:ye a graph showing time played per profession per hour would be a VERY interesting read.

The link posted by Khailyn shows that Guardians have been played almost x3 times the the hours using the Engineers. So the diferences are way larger than the PC suggest.

I have overy a 1000 hrs on mes, rev, ranger, warrior. There really isn't any conclusion you can draw when people play what they think is fun over actually balanced.

@"Dainank.1308" said:Hello!

I was looking at some statistics and was extremely impressed by the almost perfect balance of profession popularity! This is usually quite hard to achieve in an MMO!

https://ibb.co/bup9Rc

Click the link above to see for yourself! I just thought this is nice to share :)

That doesnt Show Balance.

For me, i only Play necro, because i Like its theme. But right now the realization is Just Bad.

@Vagrant.7206 said:

@"PistolWhip.2697" said:I am actually heavily surprised by this for 2 reasons:

• Firstly my own experiences are very different. For example, my experience dictates that Engineer is one of the most popular classes, particularly Holosmith which is the next best power damage spec in the meta behind Weaver for high end PvE. Revenant is also one of the least played due to being low tier in effectiveness in 2/3 game modes. Other variations such as Elementalists/Rangers/Mesmers being overwhelmingly numerous in such content also contradict that table.

• Secondly a survey I conducted on Reddit a few weeks ago of 1602 people which found that Elementalists was the overwhelmingly dominant profession in terms of number, by almost double any other class.

I wonder how much of this is open world based and just people with characters in their slots.

In my experience the least played classes as shown by the graph and my own encounters in PvE are:Revenant and Thief

PvP are:Revenant again and Ele (the reverse of PvE interestingly)

WvW:Not enough playtime to comment at the moment.

This of course omits any elite specs variations, which would skew results further. Like Holosmith being one of the most popular PvE high tier specs but Scrapper being basically non existent in the same setting.

Another factor is type of content. I play mostly instanced content (raids, fractals) in PvE, and it is possible that my experience doesn't necessarily reflect the majority who play open world and story content.