#26 - Sept. 17, 2009, 6:05 p.m.
We think we can design better encounters that generally take 1-3 tanks in 25-player content and 1-2 in 10-player content. There will probably be exceptions from time to time, such as the occasional caster tank (Maulgar and Razuvious perhaps).
It's very easy to get burned out on raiding, and we think having fights that all felt the same would contribute to that. That goes as far as comparing raid tiers. We don't want it to be "Here's the Patchwerk fight. Here's the council fight. Oh, interesting, they switched the lots-of-adds fight to position 3 this time." ToC is fairly small as instances go, so you're not going to get the diversity that you do in larger raids. Heck, the Eye of Eternity is one boss with no trash. There is no way to make that a typical fight with a sample size of one.
We want you to approach every fight differently, and that includes shifting people around to different roles. Sometimes you need more healers and sometimes you need less. Sometimes the casters have to handle the adds and sometimes the melee have to be on interrupt duty. Sometimes you need to split the group up. Sometimes your OTs have to go dps since the fight only requires one tank.
It only gets to be a problem, in our minds, if the OT is such a liability on single-tank fights that she gets swapped out for another rogue or whatever. That has happened in the past in the history of WoW. It doesn't seem to be happening too much these days. All of the tanking classes can do much higher damage in a tanking spec with dps gear than they used to be able to do, and there is always dual-spec if that isn't enough for you. (The truth is also that very few fights only ever require a single tank.)
It's awesome so many players are interested in the tanking role, but no, we're never going to promise that every encounter will require 4 tanks.
