World of Warcraft : New Blog Uncovers the Mystery of Encounter Tuning

The latest developer blog on the World of Warcraft community site gives players a fascinating look at how the team in charge of raids fine tunes the encounters once they are on live servers. It's a great behind the scenes look.
Our players are ingenious and adept at coming up with clever solutions to the challenges posed by our raid encounters. While we have learned from past experience to an extent (Rule #14 of encounter design: If it's possible to kite adds instead of killing them, someone will kite them instead of killing them), we are still unable to always anticipate the lengths to which our players will go to overcome a difficult encounter. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and often one of the hallmarks of a great encounter is that it is open to multiple approaches, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of an individual raid group. I can think of three distinct approaches that we saw to handle the Molten Elementals summoned by Heroic Ragnaros, for example, and I'm sure there are more out there.