You’re looking at the boss that less than 5% of guilds have killed world wide?
Nice.
Look at razorscale.
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That’s a terrible fight to look at to see what classes/specs are being actively avoided.
That just gives you the full population of people raiding as a spec, not how valued it is, or how much people work to include/avoid it.
You want to look at the top end content to find representation numbers.
You look to the easiest stuff for population counts.
Nah, I let it rot and get disenchanted. I have zero desire to heal on this character.
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We can all agree, poor poor elemental…
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Yeah, that spec, just… Ouch.
You can technically pick a different DPS spec that performs well, but that one is far more wildly different than most other DPS → DPS respec options.
But not everyone has done that boss yet.
You’re looking at the top % of the playerbase, and I bet all their parses are 98-99’s.
Elite of the elite. That’s not a fair “representation”.
It’s like looking at the richest people in the word and say that VW, Honda and Toyota are the least driven cars…
There will always be meta. And even if 1 class is at least 1% better, it will be the meta.
Also, meta classes are picked now because not everyone is geared. In a month, this diversity will grow.
What this says is I gotta play a lock or pally to get invites to uldar in the in day and age of parses and retail children running wotlk
Those are the players most likely to discriminate against you for your spec choice.
That’s the fight your spec choice is the most likely to matter for the success of failure of the group.
That’s the level of guild that’s choosing what specs they bring without any warm bodies.
No one cares if a spec can do Razorscale. They literally all can. You don’t need any balance changes to make those fights more friendly toward any given spec.
The ones that are hardest? That’s where balancing decisions matter most, because even though many aren’t there yet, those kinds of comps and strategies are going to be what get emulated later as the lower guilds get there.
It’s literally the only place representation matters.
On a fight like Razorscale, all you learn is that a lot of people aren’t playing warrior. The power of warrior isn’t keeping them from killing the boss.
When you look at a fight like Algalon you see that even though warrior isn’t being widely played, it appears to be a fairly viable choice as a DPS.
You learn it’s viable to bring a warrior for sunders and commanding shout.
Good analysis. Though I do take issue here. When you look at it in terms of “best dps spec available to the class”, then Fury is exactly second last - followed only by Ret. We’re bottom middle of the pack when compared with Sub Rogues, and BM Hunters etc. Literally every other class except Pally has a better represented DPS spec than Fury. I wouldn’t call that a “good place” especially when considering the overall class raid representation.
You get a like though for the analysis and effort getting the numbers. I like what you’re doing here but don’t quite agree with your conclusions. 
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Why couldn’t you just reroll Fury?
I think the model is a little off by breaking it down by spec and not total role.
So, a better approach is to collect all the dps presents for each class as one category. Using this approach Rets were well below but Warrior surprisingly (given it has two specs) weren’t that much ahead and still coming in second last.
Basically, this approach shows total dps participation per class. Which is really the salient point. Rets still come off worst in either approach.
But I really don’t think there’s anyway of looking at the data where warriors are doing “okay”. Not without crystal balling to ICC.
Ret is an obvious outlier though.
Too be fair, affliction isn’t just a ranged dps, it’s a ranged dps that heals itself constantly through siphon life and in big chunks every like 6ish seconds because of haunt. And it can drain life without losing crazyamounts of damage additionally if needed… AND it also gets more healing from it’s armor.
If other ranged where healing themselves as much or as often, they’d be in high demand too (and that’s before looking at fights like Yogg where the lock can channel while facing away from boss and have a mechanical advantage).
They’re strong for sure, but they’ll be much more reasonable in later tiers.
Buff fire mages.
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So you don’t want to look at the full population of people raiding, to determine if certain class and specs are getting raid spots? Lol wot?!
This.
Affli locks have like 1k+ Raw hps on themselves.
Passively.
Not as bad as in Legion, where Dotlocks had more Hps than they had HP, and literally did never play any mechanic unless it was a oneshot. That was a good time to play warlock 
To put context to the conclusion here:
Fury is still in the pack, and the design of the class is set for it to keep climbing in power both this tier as they approach full best in slot, as well as in follow up tiers. In addition, there’s a fairly steep drop off in desirability of anything under Fury for fights like Algalon.
Being last when still part of the pack isn’t an awful place to be (in my opinion anyway), especially when the spec is going to be moving up with gear throughout the expansion. Ret needed either intervention to get there, or to wait for gear with some pretty crazy effects in the late game which we won’t be able to touch for several more months.
I mean, that just shows what people are playing, and those values are used to normalize the Algalon data. The general population of classes gets skewed more due to flavor of the month rerolls in classic than the percentage of them being used in the highest content.
There isnt anywhere near as much loyalty to a “main” in the classic series as there used to be thanks to knowing that class balance is largely fixed, so there was basically no hope that the next patch would make things better if you hit a low point.
We can fairly accurately project how each class will perform throughout the expansion now, so people choose what they will play based on that.
We knew fury would be weak for the first tiers and accelerate in growth per phase. It’s kind of expected to see warrior counts overall start off lower. Even with that, it doesn’t look like they are being particularly excluded from the toughest fight in Ulduar.
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- Am I missing something here? Even if you missed a decimal spot I don’t see how this adds up to a 100. The sum of each role seems to just go over a 100, so maybe that is what you’re showing?
- The 2 priest healing specs outnumbering holy paladins is a surprise.
- Same with restro shamans being that numerous. This only makes sense if you’re counting 10’s.
- Biggest shock would be bear druids > prot pallies. Anything encounter specific going on?
- Showing class % for dps and heal roles makes more sense as you can switch specs and not have to change to a role you didn’t make the character for. Also need a division between 10s and 25s.
- This could be data worth something. All sorts of caveats but it could represent class/spec balance the general population will follow.
What’s funny is that fire is performing better than arcane on that fight.
Yes, you are missing something.
That’s not what it says. See above. There are almost as many paladin healers as every other healer combined and WAY more paladin tanks than every other tank combined, which is why I find this data to be very misleading in service of his “ret is underrepresented” narrative.
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Well, it’s a percentage of the total population of that class that has an Algalon kill.
The percents are better at showing if the fight is causing that class to be taken more than their population distribution or less, or about on par with.
From what it looks like, if classes are at about .2 to .25 % ish of the population (where most of the specs fall), that’s pretty much not being excluded. If it’s higher, the class is generally being stacked or sought out for the fight, and if lower, it’s being avoided.
The raw numbers of holy paladins is less important than the fact that if you rolled a holy paladin you are more likely to see an Algalon kill because the class gets stacked for the hard content. This would be true even if holy paladins were rare.
The only dps spec anyone is stacking is affliction. Definitely not stacking combat rogues. And BM almost looks fine here, but a look at the raw numbers shows you 5 BM parses. The spec is barely used at all.
But holy pally representation by these numbers is barely better than resto shaman representation. Even though there are 3 holy pallies doing Algalon for every resto shaman. Probably more.