Archon: Disclaimers & FAQ

Release of Archon Build Guides & Tier Lists

The team at Archon, the company behind Warcraft Logs, has been working hard to release our new product's beta, Build Guides and Tier Lists.

We have optimized and tracked down gaps in offerings to collect statistics on Gear, Talents, Enchants, Gems, Consumables, and Trinkets from Warcraft Logs entire store of logs to generate recommendations for character builds based on popular choices. Our extensive sample set allows the data to be filtered down to the different difficulty levels, encounters, and key levels. This article will go through some of the disclaimers, caveats, and things we think you should be aware of while using this product.

We are primarily focusing on Retail World of Warcraft in the initial beta release, and Classic Wrath edition is now also out. Other games are on the horizon! Read more about the exciting releases in our initial Announcement Article and the Wrath Edition.

If you have any feedback for our beta release of Build Guides or Tier Lists, please send it to [email protected]!

Disclaimers & Caveats

The most important disclaimer to us is an aggregated data set does not necessarily apply directly to your specific situation. You should always sim yourself (Check out Raidbots for retail or WoWSims for Classic) if you have specific questions regarding your situation.

This tool is best used in combination with others. You should find your spec guides for a more complete picture and explanations. We can offer some of the 'what', but to learn the 'why', you should read your spec guides and participate in your Class Discord.

Popularity as a Metric

The main metric we have used to display information on Archon is Popularity. What does popularity mean? It is the most widely used items, consumables, gems, enchants, and talents by the number of parses.

This means that the majority of the time the most popular choice is the best choice - especially for things like enchants, gems, and consumables (where every option is usually equally available to every player). However, particularly for gear, there can be scenarios where the most popular choice isn't the best choice in terms of total player power. For example, near the start of a new season, a Mythic+ trinket that is slightly worse than an end-boss Raid trinket will be more popular because it is easier to obtain. As the season progresses, the Raid trinket will likely overtake the Mythic+ trinket as more players start to loot it.

Make sure to use the filters to find out what the best players are using. For example, even if you raid Heroic, looking at the data for Mythic might help you find improvements in your build choices.

It is also important to emphasize that just because a spec has lower popularity, does not make it unplayable. There are a ton of factors to consider, both how fun a spec is, how useful it is in a raid environment (which includes much more than just throughput), and more.

What do the Numbers Mean?

We use the 95th Percentile (on Warcraft Logs) for the throughput (DPS/HPS) numbers. You can view these on the Statistics Page - 95th Percentile.

A percentile is a mathematical term that describes how a score compares to other scores from the same set. It is commonly expressed as the percentage of values in a set of data scores that fall below a given value. A 95th percentile parse means it is higher (in DPS or HPS) than 95% of total parses. We believe this level of play gives a good idea of the potential throughput of a choice while excluding potential anomalies at the top end.

Item Level Disclaimers

To make this data easier to read, we have merged equivalent items except for their item level or faction. E.g. Death's Verdict and Death's Choice are counted as the same, despite being available to different factions.

Tier Lists

We show two different tier lists on the site. Throughput (which is DPS/HPS) and Popularity (Number of parses for the spec in the last two weeks).

For Throughput, we use the 95th Percentile parses. You can see those statistics here.

Below the tier lists, you can see the data set we use to generate the tier lists and browse through those metrics yourself. The data shown in this table for Throughput and Score includes the correction for variance.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is Raid data sampled?

For each encounter, we sample the top 50% (or top 1,000, whichever is bigger) of ranks after eliminating duplicate uploads. We then compute builds for items, gems, enchants, talents, etc based on this subset of the data.

These per-boss top-end datasets are then pooled into a single "All Bosses" dataset, which we use to compute builds for the raid as a whole.

Contact Us

As always, we love to hear your feedback - send us an email at [email protected]!

Please feel free to also join us on Discord to share any feedback and suggestions, or to ask any questions, and follow our Twitter for updates!