As I use HearthStats to track all my games I decided to use their January data to try and derive the order in which to pick classes.
Disclaimer: I am not a statistician, I have just messed around with the data in Excel a bit, I'm sure there are better and more accurate ways to do this and you are welcome to do that, I'm just sharing what I did.
While they do publish the win rates for classes and they come out below:
I'm not so much interested in the win rates as which class is the most consistent and most likely to get me a high result independent of bad draws.
I took the arena data they give below:
And entered it into an excel spreadsheet
Unfortunately I found that the percentages given for each class don't add up to 1, so I redid them from the raw numbers on the top row.
I then graphed out the cumulative percentages to try and see which was best. The higher the line, the worse the class.
Unfortunately, you can't see much from this. The reason being that the classes look to be fairly even in arena.
You can tell that Druid and Hunter are most likely to be knocked out before 5 wins, but after that Warlock seems by far the worst. Mage and Paladin also look good below the line.
This didn't really give me an order of classes to pick though, so I decided to take a different approach.
What I really want, is the least chance to lose across the board. I don't want a class that sucks early but is good late or vice versa.
At each max win bracket I scored the class from 1-9
As the data gives you the % of people who finished a total arena with that many wins, a large % with 1 win is bad for a class and a large % with 12 wins is good for a class, I couldn't just apply "large % = good" for the whole data set. So from max wins 1-6 I gave least % 9 points and highest % 1 point. From 7-12 I gave the reverse, highest % gave 9 points and lowest % gave 1 point. I then added the totals for each class. This approach has issues around the middle range, but I couldn't think of a better way.
It came out as below:
This means that the top 3 are Mage, Shaman and Paladin, this disagrees with the percentage win rate above ie rogue is now 6th, down from top and priest is 4th rather than last.
Pally wins by being consistent.
The interesting thing about this data is you could also say what class is best at the start and what's best at the end.
So if your question is:
'I don't usually get past 3 wins, what is the best beginners class?' It would be:
Top classes 1-4 (best at top)
| Shaman |
| Paladin |
| Priest |
| Rogue |
| Warrior |
| Warlock |
| Mage |
| Hunter |
| Druid |
or your question is: 'I can get any class to 8 wins, but have trouble afterwards, what should I pick?'
Top classes 8-12 (best at top)
| Paladin |
| Mage |
| Priest |
| Warrior |
| Shaman |
| Rogue |
| Druid |
| Hunter |
| Warlock |
If you are wondering, my best arena score is 9.
