The question was asked yesterday about bringing crowd control back into the game, and the devs cited the Faction Champions fight as an encounter where it was still necessary. Obviously, players weren't quite happy with this one either, pointing out that as a showcase for CC, a fight meant to emulate PvP, where crowd control is still on diminishing returns, might not be the best option. Not to mention that plenty of guilds don't bother to use CC at all in the fight, and get along just fine.

Ghostcrawler falls more in line on this one, saying that if you're completely ignoring CC for the heroic version of Faction Champs, he wants to see the fight. He does admit that Trial of the Champion was a little bit of a break from standard raiding, and that Icecrown will have the trash that a normal instance has, though he seems to stop short of saying crowd control will be required in there.The first is in response to some feedback about what the devs yesterday called "binary" hard modes -- they said that instead of providing multiple levels of difficulty (as in Sarth and his drakes), they'd prefer to have a hard mode either on or off (you'll be able to toggle between the two in Icecrown). This relates to what we just said recently, with different types of guilds looking for different types of content to play. GC replies that the "in-betweens" in terms of difficulty will come with later bosses in normal mode -- if you want to play a challenge without stepping into the hard modes, Blizzard will do their best to make sure that the last bosses on normal give you that challenge. Which makes sense -- bosses should ramp up in difficulty as the instance goes along, and no one would suggest, for instance, that Yogg was nearly as easy as Flame Leviathan.