The migration guide is saying that the Guild members endpoint has been fully migrated over to the guild roster endpoint in the profile api. However the old endpoint used to give the spec of each member and the new one does not, is this an oversight or is it intentional?
I just noticed that and was about to ask this too.
It is probably intentional as some other endpoints had their returned data reduced but it would be nice to have that information back.
Right now we can still get individual character data but we must fetch the character profile endpoints (and comply to the new game data policy).
As discussed here and later released here the profile specialization endpoint is far more complete and includes all necessary information. However this is kinda of an overkill for apps that only need guild related information.
Assuming a full guild at the cap of 999 players, you’ll need 1000 requests just to fetch character spec statistics for that guild. At the rate limit of 100 req/s you would take at least 10s for loading a complete guild info.
If we end up having to check /status for the new API data policy it goes to 1999 requests and at least 20s.
One use case for this is to break guild roster on a chart by race/class/spec/role.
Even the wow armory guild table shows spec, so assuming someone wanted to mimic that, this would be a problem.
If this information was intentionally removed to reduce the response payload, may I suggest returning the specialization instead of the playable_class currently returned ?
Playable race/class and spec can easily be cached and specialization belongs to a class so it would be trivial to retrieve that information.
Does the spec when logged out really matter when any char can choose any spec at any time?
Depends on what you wanna do with the information, for healers that info will not be accurate as most will switch to damage for questing, however most dps-only classes like mages and hunters will stay always on their favorite spec, so it is a nice way to see spec popularity on big and competitive guilds.
Also just showing the spec in addition to the class is usually a common practice to guild pages, it is still better than picking a random spec.