Do you still remember that the first bit of real Icecrown Citadel information comes in the form of a tank discussion about how Blizzard is staunch in their stance to not give every class "block" or "the same taunt tools". It then wandered off slightly into how certain classes are far superior at performing the tanking role on some encounters, while being fairly useless on others.

Ghostcrawler hinted that there will be 31 bosses in Icecrown Citadel, which brings a fairly rapid "huh?" to mind after glancing over the post. Whether he was serious or just pulling random numbers to make his point, it does raise an interesting question. How do you keep players happy when they can't fully enjoy all of the content because their tank class is sub-par in comparison for encounter A, but they dwarf their cohorts on encounter B? Sure, being the best at encounter B might be fun, but it's also offset by the fact that encounter A sucks for you. How many tanks truly enjoyed playing second fiddle to death knights on Sartharion, or General Vezax in Ulduar? Yeah, maybe your raid is okay with you being 5% harder to keep alive, but it still makes you feel like you could be better than you are if you were a different class. I've had many guildmates and friends over the years who've felt that way.

But let's pretend that Ghostcrawler was serious for a moment; this would better explain the decision to change instance locks so they can be extended. He also mentions that the bosses won't hit very hard compared to previous content, and that instead the tanks and raids will be challenged in other ways. What other ways can the tanks be challenged? If it's managing cooldowns, death knights obviously have a bit of an advantage -- though less so than in patch 3.1 with the nerfs to the talent and Icebound Fortitude cooldowns. If it's threat generation, paladins can currently generate quite a bit of single target threat -- though that may be an unintended side effect of Hand of Reckoning. If it's movement-related then there probably isn't a clear-cut winner.

The guy at worldofraids said that I'd love to see a perfect world where every tank class had similar abilities that weren't quite the same. Druids were given a quasi-block in patch 3.1, but did that homogenize them with warriors and paladins? Not really. However, I guess the other alternative is to throw a bunch of bosses into an instance so that each tank feels like they have a place, even if it's only 25% of the instance. But in the end, is that any better for the game than just giving people like-abilities?

At any rate, let's assume there will be 31 encounters in Icecrown Citadel. What kind of mechanics would you want to see from a tanking standpoint? Or heck, even as a healer hoping to keep your tank alive. Are you bored of the current mechanics Blizzard has thrown at you leading up to the faceoff with Arthas?

What's your opinion?