When I look at the ladder...

[rietori]

When I look at the ladder, I see mostly Palas. Like 40% of the people there seem to be Paladins.
Then there's a bunch of Sorceresses and Amazon. The occasional Assassin or Barbarian, though they're already rare (especially Barb I think) and veeery rarely a Necromancer. Something I never see is a Druid.

Why is it like that?
I mean, I don't know a lot about those stages of the game (90+) so I can only guess. Are those Palas all Hammerdins? They're names often have "hammer" in them.
And why are Necros so unpopular? Usually it's just that the weaker classes are less played, but I never read anything about those classes being much weaker. In case of Barbarian I thought that it would maybe depend on equip too much, and most people would be to poor to afford really good equip, but I don't know. Maybe they're all playing hammerdins for magicfind.
Well I'd love to hear some opinions from people with more experience. =)

[Crowd Control]

Well I'm not even close to the ladder, but I bet most of them are MF Hammy's. Maybe some Smiters here and there. Soso's speaks for themselves, same story basically. And Druids are under-represented because Kiba PK's them one by one. People don't like to play them after several consecutive PK's.

[thepandafactor]

The reason is that most of the high levels are baal game runners, and they gotta be casters for fast tele, have high resists (for souls), and do a ton of damage. That basically rules out every character besides sorc and hammerdins.

[rietori]

The reason is that most of the high levels are baal game runners, and they gotta be casters for fast tele, have high resists (for souls), and do a ton of damage. That basically rules out every character besides sorc and hammerdins.

Are they doing it on their own?
I mean teleport in the games where I was wasn't that much of a problem, because there would be 8 players and usually a sorceress among them to teleport and open a portal to the throne of destruction.

Resists and Damage I don't know... I thought every character would be able to get resist and damage, given the right equipment and skillpoint distribution.

Maybe people don't play Assassin and Druid because they like to stick with the older classes from classic diablo. But then... the expansion has been out for like 5 years or more, so I guess not. :rolleyes:

So do you think in the lower level areas, it's the same? In the games up to level 65 I don't think I've seen THAT many paladins. Sure there are a lot, but also a lot more necros and all that.

[Solbaer]

I can only speak for myself here, i use hammer for mf, smite for ubers and im on making two assa for fun only...

[prion]

people don't actually play paladins, they get bug rushed and then tweak them out for mf or dueling.

I see lots of other kinds of characters in the lower dificulties but I think it's mostly sorcs. If I were to guess why it's simply because people like powerful spells.

Why don't the other chars progress to the end? you ever look at the join screen in Hell, nuff said

[Voorhees]

Well, it's like this. Most of the people at the top of the ladder started out day one with no gear. So it makes sense that Paladins, Sorceresses, and Amazons would top this list as they are the strongest pvm characters untwinked. Sure untwinked necromancers, druids, barbarians, and assassins can make it to the end of hell untwinked as well, but they kill a lot, LOT slower in hell without decent gear and are therefor not particularly great for leveling except as maybe support characters in a team. Druids pretty much suck butt with no gear in hell. At least the elemental variety that most druid players tend to stick with does. That might explain that.

[MYK]

people don't actually play paladins, they get bug rushed and then tweak them out for mf or dueling.

I see lots of other kinds of characters in the lower dificulties but I think it's mostly sorcs. If I were to guess why it's simply because people like powerful spells.

Why don't the other chars progress to the end? you ever look at the join screen in Hell, nuff said

I don't think most of battlenet actually plays any of their characters. It's a constant state of rushing builds and seeing how they pwn in Hell mode. If it's not fast enough(Not a hammerdin) then it's time to reroll a character and it starts again.