Bring the Player, not the Class!

Bring the Player, not the Class! is Blizzard's new motto for class balancing in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

During the previous expansion, The Burning Crusade, a lot of players complained about the the heavy raid stacking that was required in order to succeed in the later tiers of raiding, with the The Sunwell Plateau raiding instance reaching never-before-seen limits in terms of class stacking. Some classes such as warlocks, shaman and priests were in very high demand and stacking a raid with many of them greatly increased the chances of success, whereas other classes such as paladins and mages were mostly frowned upon due to how little they brought to the table.

In order to solve this issue Blizzard decided to homogenize all the classes under the Bring the Player, not the Class! motto. Hybrid classes were stripped of their unique raid buffs at the same time all raiding buffs and debuffs were classified in non-stacking categories to prevent raid stacking. The goal was to have all DPS classes do more or less the same damage and have all 4 tanking classes be more or less equal at tanking.

Shortly after the release of WOTLK it was quickly shown that homogenization effort had failed. Warriors ended up, once again, at the top of the tanking food chain while the DPS hierarchy changed, with hunters and mages taking the top spots and elemental shaman as well as retribution paladins at the bottom.