Good article.

As a warrior, I've found that most of my deaths happen when there isn't total raid synergy: e.g., if the healers are a little late getting a heal off, if my HoTs fall off (or, since I'm in a 10-man guild, if we're missing buffs or classes), if I, with unimproved Demo Shout and no locks in the raid, don't strictly keep up DS, or if I miss a CD or think, "Enraged Regen will get me through this so I can save Shield Wall for later...", or if DPS classes miss a certain debuff or just don't get a boss down fast enough.

I realize that in hard-mode raiding, this is the point, but it feels like, at least on 10-man content, the "room for error" shrinks to almost non-existent, and a single miss or bad tick of the RNG dooms everyone to a wipe. I understand that balance questions creep in if the game gets balanced around 10-man content (thus making 25s trivial with better loot, rewarding those with a bigger group of friends), but still... I'd like to see a strict-10 guild that doesn't use crafted items above 10-man item-level that reliably clears hard modes. That's why I'm looking forward to the 'Icecrown Radiance' situation. Hopefully it will make healing more strategic and tanking more a matter of aggro management, positioning, and general raid leadership than cooldown chaining for survivability. That way, there can be room for small errors and recoveries (testing a raid's ability to correct itself on the fly) while still requiring tremendous raid synergy for high-difficulty content.

And, I hope, with stat rebalancing in Cataclysm, each tanking class retains its flavor while leading to greater balance and equanimity amongst tanks.

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