May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

The problem with "challenging" 10 mans is that they are totally and completely subject to class balance. If it is a challenging DPS race that pushes 10 well balanced people to the brink, then a group that stacks shamans and rogues wins easy, and the group with a moonkin and a ret is up against a brick wall. If tank burst is the problem then you can make it a ton easier with a bear, or if there's AoE a prot pally trivializes it.

I see this more as an encounter design challange than a problem. We already see many examples of encounters where different phases require different efforts from a group. A properly designed encounter may require heavy dps for one phase and then go right into AoE the next phase. If you deck out your group to trivialize the dps you could be in a lot of trouble come AoE, etc. The end result would be an overall challanging encounter while any particular phase may be somewhat trivialized by group makeup.

On a side note, it was previously mentioned that certain classes would most likely be ostracized by a challanging 10 man content (IE ret pallies, moonkins, etc. which are usually restrained to a single spot in 25 player content). I don't think this issue is a question of encounter balance but more class balance. I don't think that there is any question that Blizzard is still having some problems creating viable uses for all the class trees and hopefully they continue to improve this area of the game.

Edit: I believe i misread your post initially. I'll leave my original response because i think it is still valid, yet maybe not as a response to your post. lol.

Like i say in my second paragraph though, Class balance is an issue. But this should be looked at seperately from encounter design. Encounters should be designed to challange groups and individuals based on thier class purposes. If an encounter is set to be a dps race than any dps class should be able to offer something to the group. If certain classes are weighted so that they offer so much more when it comes to their class purpose than Blizzard needs to work on the class balance more. What they don't need to do is design encounters around the imbalances that are already present, or dumb down encounters to alleviate the inefficiencies in class balance.