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On the Foreman encounter...
I personally think that the strategy we worked out on the fly was roughly as the developer intended.
There are 10 permarooted guards that you must first kill within a certain unknown time period to spawn the Foreman and 10 different permarooted skeleton guards that stand about him.
Getting him to spawn, that is having enough DPS to kill the first 10 guards within a certain amount of time, is usually the hardest part of the encounter.
Once he pops along with his 10 guards, you have to decide whether to gimp the encounter and lose all melee DPS or kill his guards off one by one thus allowing your melee dps to help rip him down.
His guards are warriors, the developer could have picked any class, but he chose warriors I believe due to their shielding ability. That is warriors have an ability where they activate shielding on a mob/target and they take 75% of the melee damage and the target takes 50% of the melee damage. Shielding doesn't help with spell damage.
If you aggro all the guards with one peep and send in your MT and the raid to burn down the Foreman, you have to be SUPER careful as any of the 10 guards may randomly use their shielding ability. When that happens, within a few seconds the raid's melee peeps will have dished out more than enough damage on the Foreman and on some random skeleton to have it summon the peep that has aggro on all 10 guards. At this point all 10 guards gang rape the aggro holder (and in our experience almost always killing him) and then you then have 10 angry skellies going ape on the raid with at least one of them summoning, likely the healers. (This happened a few times, thus wiping us a few times so we went with clearing them each time.) To ask a whole raid of peeps to notice one tiny emote that a skeleton is shielding the Foreman and at the same time stop attacking so that they don't do more than 2% damage to a skeleton just isn't workable on raid.
On our very first ever pop of him, we got two foremans, and 20 guards that time. That's more mobs that need to be babysat/tank parked than any other encounter that I know through to PoP, and thus it got us to thinking out of the box as 2 raid mobs and 20 guards just seemed absurd. We mucked about with what spells worked and so on. Slow, mez and charm didn't work, but go figure, root and snare did, so that also suggested to us that the dev wanted peeps to aggro them from afar and build aggro. We then tried killing the Foreman without killing his guards, but the shielding ability caused us to wipe a couple of times. We then went to killing all the guards, but even then, it caused us to wipe a time or two due to peeps being too slow on turning off attack. (That's the challenge and fun in this encounter, in having peeps watch their aggro and being HYPER aware of any shield emote as to not notice it will in most cases wipe the raid. That has and will continue to wipe the raid a few times before getting the Foreman solo.)
Thus, the killing strategy that we use is to have one peep to four aggro all the guards and then burn them down with melee hyper aware of any shielding emotes. Once they are all dead, you tank and spank the boss which takes about 2 to 3 healers and one bored spotter.
To gimp the encounter from the killing the boss perspective, (you can't gimp getting him to pop, that part is actually quite intense,) you have one peep aggro all ten guards and maintain aggro on them and stay out of their melee range. You send in your MT, preferably a paladin who uses non-damage stuns and builds a whack of aggro. The pally heads in with attack off and calls in nukers. Melee sits on their asses and waits for the 2 to 3 healers, plus MT and nukers to do the rest... rather boring, and you're missing out on the fun part of the encounter.
To REALLY gimp the encounter, you do the hard part of popping the Foreman and his 10 guards. Then you tell everyone to go and grab a beer and food and wait 30 minutes or more for his 10 guards to despawn on their own then engage the Foreman and get your one drop.
Given all of the above, I personally think we did the encounter roughly as intended. You can't gimp the other two encounters as if you have the peep try to leave the combat area, they are ported to a lava pit well away from the raid. I am not sure if they lose aggro, my guess is yes, but we can test it to make sure. The witchdoctor requires 7 mobs to be offtanked and 4 mobs perma-mezzed along with one MT. The Archmage requires a well balanced, but AoE heavy force with a massive, massive burn down at the end.
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