Cruel experiment

While thinking some more about questions of class balance, I came up with an interesting thought experiment: Imagine you took 30 equally skilled players at the start of WotLK, 3 players of each class, with the 3 players of each class each choosing a different talent tree, and putting all talent points into that. So you have one frost mage, one arcane mage, one fire mage, one arms warrior, one fury warrior, one protection warrior, and so on. You level all of these characters to 70, and equip them with equal item levels of gear. And then you start a race: Each player plays the same amount of time per day, lets say 4 hours, has free choice of whether he wants to solo or group (but only with some of the other 29, no power-leveling), and we'll check which character reaches level 80 first, and which character reaches it last.

What I was saying in Saturday's post was not that my holy priest was impossible to level. But I'm pretty sure that in our little thought experiment the holy priest and some other healing specs would be among the last to reach level 80.

Now we come to the cruel part of the experiment: The 30 players form a guild, and *YOU* are the guild master and chief raid leader. Which 10 of them do you take on a 10-man raid? Which 5 of them do you *not* take on a 25-man raid? You should choose the raid composition in terms of maximum efficiency, so what classes and specs are in, and which are out? I'm not posting my list, because that would be a bit too cruel, and I'd get too many angry letters. But feel free to post your two lists of which 10 talent branches would together make the best 10-man raid, and which 5 specs you would need least.

Whether you post your list or not, you might come up with the surprising conclusion that some builds who finished the leveling part of the thought experiment last would nevertheless be the first when it comes to raid invites. Which probably explains why people play those builds at all. And of course I didn't specify which raid dungeon we would be going to, because if the raid dungeon would be sufficiently easy, your selection wouldn't matter so much. Which, some would say, is one of the big advantages of having easier raids: You don't have to select your friends by their character class and talent build any more.