WoW Arena Rating Data Analysis

I play a lot of WoW. One of the things I've always wondered about is how the arena system works and if you can use this to tell which classes are the most powerful. For those who don't know, WoW has an arena where you join a team and battle against other teams. Your team gets a rating (calculated similar to chess ratings) based on your wins, losses and opponents.

I wrote a script to gather from the WoW armory site. This data includes all active players in the top 5000 teams 2v2 of each battlegroup (over 56000 players). One of the criticisms of other lists of the top 1% of players is the small sample size, the data in this post uses a much larger sample size to produce an average rating for each class. The data only includes players who played more than 10 games in the previous week.


The raw data can be found here
http://www.archive.org/stream/WoW_arena_data_2v2_June_15/armory_full_june_15.txt
Thanks to carsonist of bardcast.blogspot.com for suggesting archive.org

This data shows the average ranting of each class for all active 2v2 players in the top 5000 teams of each battlegroup. I had run this script about a month ago and the disparity between the stronger and weaker classes was worse then. Rogues and priests have been brought closer to average, but melee and healers in general are still dominant. Ranged dps classes are struggling and are in about the same place they were a month ago.

Class	Rating
Priest	1745
Druid	1741
Death Knight	1737
Rogue	1732
Warrior	1715
Paladin	1705
Shaman	1689
Mage	1681
Warlock	1678
Hunter	1632

This data shows the number of players of each class for all active 2v2 players in the top 5000 teams of each battlegroup. The data suggests that players who play classes with lower average rating are playing arena less.

Class	Number of Active Players
Paladin	9896
Rogue	7993
Priest	7575
Druid	7428
Death Knight	6799
Warrior	4235
Shaman	3864
Warlock	3339
Mage	3094
Hunter	1771