Today Blizzard announced that previously restricted classes such as paladins and shamen would finally be allowed to be played by the opposite faction for the upcoming expansion The Burning Crusade. Blizzard just may have saved WoW by doing this although the attempt to justify it with their lore is rather comical at best. They should have seen this coming from the beginning and done this before the game was launched. Blizzard did the practical thing considering that the Horde on many servers is slowly but surely on the path of extinction. Without the Horde vs. Alliance dynamic (not that the implementation is even believable or credible) the whole underpinning of WoW is in jeopardy.
Now that they have one more additional class per faction it’s time Blizzard made a 6 person group a fact of life. There is no compelling argument for keeping group sizes at 5 instead of 6. It worked for EverQuest. There are now simply too many classes that will be LFG if Blizzard doesn’t increase the group size to 6 with the infusion of these new classes to their respective factions. With all of the new paladins and shamen running around where will they fit into existing guild raiding rosters? Something has to give.
While they are at it Blizzard should convert old raid sizes accordingly: 5 person to 6 person, 10 person to 12 person, 20 person to 24 person, and lastly 40 person to 46 person. Let’s hope that the 5 person group and the artificial raid size caps that result are another sacred cow that will soon fall to the butcher’s cleaver as Blizzard finally come to their senses.
–Wolfshead
