Day1 of raid - "know the fights" required

[Chloral]

God you forbid you actually read a guide, watch a video or spend two seconds looking at the journal.

It's not like those runes/pots/flasks cost anything right?

Looking up the fights it not enough anymore.

[Deleted]

I just read the dungeon journal, its all you need. Blizzard like to mostly mix and match and reuse old mechanics so most fights you probably have done before.

[Soluna]

my guild has a policy that people go into the fights blind at first so we can feel out a boss rather than rely on strats. Just because a strategy is written by one guild, doesn't mean it will work for everyone else. It is far more fun to work out your own pathway in WoW if you can get a group that would be up to do the same.

We only look up detailed strategies if we find ourselves beating our heads against the wall after a week. So far we are sitting on 5/7 already.

5/7 is nothing though, the difficulty of the first five bosses is challenging only for those who spam incinerate/fireball/mind flay and think they will top the meters.

But whatever works for your guild is good. I myself got tricked by a social raiding guild. When I joined back in pre patch, they told me that their rules are to have relaxing raids, but still know our rotation/gear properly/enchant/gem ourselves and read the tactics so that we can get some neat progress every week. Right now my guild is also sitting on 5/7 due to 66% of the dpsers being shit. We went to Cenarius normal and we had an 821 ilvl feral druid. 6 melees 2 ranged. Ppl didn't know tactics, after lots of tries we succeeded in bringing Cenarius to 60% when he went into phase 2 due to all the forces of nightmare already being eliminated........

Gonna leave soon if this won't change. I put a lot of effort in my character and just want some casual and nice raiding. Not watered down hello kitty one. We even have a healer who claims to be so good from previous expansion experiences, yet she always screams when she heals in normal fucking raids. Ppl with 848 ilvl playing arcane mages and doing 80k dps while I do 230k as destro lock (without wreak havoc cheesing) on cenarius.

So yeah, being clueless as fuck (on top of sucking balls) is a NOPE in my book. I don't want to waste my time wiping on normal bosses when I can easily pug them in a few hours (And I actually did, I killed xavius normal with pugs lol).

Also, if someone is a quick learner and can do something the moment he sees it (on normal at least, cause going to mythic clueless will instant kill you) then I don't mind. I happen to raid with a friend who is arms warr, knows no tacts and learns on the fly. Still topping meters with me and almost never dies. I happened to know SHIT on Xavius too, yet I killed him on third try, no fails, just quickly read the journal while we were filling the group through group finder.

[Deleted]

The problem is not leaders who require you to know the fights.

The problem is leaders who require you to already have the achievement the first day. To "prove" you know the fights. You can have watched tactics etc for hundreds of hours, 99% of all leaders won't invite you without an achievement.

And that is undescribeably stupid.

Make your own group. Running EN on alts for example you'll need people who know what they are doing. Easiest way to somewhat make sure of that on D1? Achievements.

[Nisheda]

I think its not too difficult for people to look at a general video before the fight and have a general idea.

[Felarion]

Fun fact about my guild: We cleared heroic and some ppl still don't stop hittin' cenarius when thorns are on, unless someone shout at them, so yeah...that's about "raid day 1 fight knowledge"

[Deleted]

My guild went casual after raiding a lot last year so i thought "you know what, fuck it! not looking at any bosses" actually made the raid a lot better took me a few attempts to guess what was going on during some of the fights but it was good fun even if it was only normal took some socials along with us (who were quite bad) but we all had a good time during the raid and finished 7/7N + 1/7HC last week.

i can however see why people playing competitively look at the bosses to get a faster understanding of the fights.

[Deleted]

It all depends on what kind of culture you want in your guild...

Long term you will get the best group of raiders, by learning bosses and mechanics as a group either on ptr or live.

But it can be hard to maintain a steady enough roster for that to ever pay off, for a lot of guilds, wich then results in the fatboss sheeple strat being way supperioer.

You dont have to really understand a fight anymore, as long as you get if you get hit by ability X, then you run to fucking moon or skull marker with it. Fatboss guides are a great source of information, but often creates the most lazy ass raiders instead. They watch the short version, and get what 2 abilities they have to look out for, and then take 0 responsibility for anything else on the fight.
The second a mechanic requires a tiny bit of critical thinking and teamwork, you have to hold their hand on whatever voice program you use, because they where hoping someone else would deal with it.

My opinion is:

wanna crush normal and do decent in heroic: Go team fatboss

Wanna build a long term core of self thinking raiders worth to give a single fuck about, for long term progression... You get in there and wipe, learn and improve. Until every single ability does not need to be called out by the 1 intelligent person in the raid, who gets it.

The amount of soiled underwear the wow community would experience, if guides and in raid location markers vanished, and the average raider suddenly had to think where the optimal place to drop a big pile of aoe poo was.

[owbu]

As someone who would never read a guide before doing a boss, because I do not hate fun, I can tell you that nothing is wrong with the community. People enjoy playing the game in diffrent ways. Some people like to find out stuff on their own, some people like to be "efficient" and skip the discovery part. The tool is there to help you find a group with similiar playstyles. Its not there to make everyone play like you.

If you are my type of player, join a group that likes to play that way. There is plenty of them. Look for lower itemlvl requirements and words without numbers in them.
If you hate wiping and want to ogogog through the new raid, look for a "850+, know strats, no failz0rs" group. There is plenty of those, too.

[Deleted]

How bout this?

''LFM Emerald Nightmare, link achiev or no inv''.

Lolwut?

[Deix-EU]

I don't get it. You're mad that someone is asking people to do a bit of research before stepping into a raid for the first time?

Indeed, what is wrong with this lazy ass community?

Problem is people think the word lazy goes to the one that don't seek for themselves with empiric but instead acting like sheep applying things other discovered and asking the same with other. Degenerescence of scientific approach is real.

[Duronos]

People actually enjoy not reading up on boss mechanics beforehand?

[Deleted]

People actually enjoy not reading up on boss mechanics beforehand?

I can read up all I want on mechanics I wouldn't know what to do exactly until I see the boss for the first time.

[Duronos]

I can read up all I want on mechanics I wouldn't know what to do exactly until I see the boss for the first time.

Last time I raided was in Cata (haven't really played much since) and the you could easily figure a boss fight out based on a quick read through, maybe it's just me and understanding mechanics super fast but it seemed pretty simple.

[Nahela]

my guild has a policy that people go into the fights blind at first so we can feel out a boss rather than rely on strats. Just because a strategy is written by one guild, doesn't mean it will work for everyone else. It is far more fun to work out your own pathway in WoW if you can get a group that would be up to do the same.

We only look up detailed strategies if we find ourselves beating our heads against the wall after a week. So far we are sitting on 5/7 already.

This is somewhat of the approach we're using in Legion, going back to how I used to run things. I have one member of leadership that's still doing the usual research, but the first pull of each boss is 'blind' other than what people might have looked up on their own. Experiential learning is just dramatically better. Spending an extra wipe (if one at all) per boss to feel out mechanics first hand, without preconceptions, and learning how to adapt on the fly seems to immediately help people play better.

[Duronos]

This is somewhat of the approach we're using in Legion, going back to how I used to run things. I have one member of leadership that's still doing the usual research, but the first pull of each boss is 'blind' other than what people might have looked up on their own. Experiential learning is just dramatically better. Spending an extra wipe (if one at all) per boss to feel out mechanics first hand, without preconceptions, and learning how to adapt on the fly seems to immediately help people play better.

Like I still don't understand this, it's not hard for people to lookup strats and just figure out what their role is in the fight.

[aikanaro]

Whats funny to me is that I am the other way. I wont even attempt a dungeon without watching a video or reading a guide (unless my friends were like dont worry about it we will tell you) because I want to know whats coming and be prepared.

[Nahela]

Like I still don't understand this, it's not hard for people to lookup strats and just figure out what their role is in the fight.

You're coming at this from the perspective that reading a strat tells you more than firsthand experience, which is just silly.

There's a reason a lot of guilds spend an inordinate amount of time reading/watching strats and can't execute any of them, they never learn how to actually deal with the mechanics or adjust on the fly. People are so afraid to wipe once to learn something that they end up doing completely the opposite, failing over and over again to the same issues because they've never bothered to try anything.

There are still people that play this game that don't understand how to handle the simplest of mechanics simply due to it being a different color on a different boss, because they weren't handed a strategy on exactly what to do. A somewhat sad example is one of the final bosses in the new Violet Hold with the spiders you have to look at. The game flat out tells you exactly what to do with context clues, but I've seen incredibly few players that figured it out without being told. If they're not explicitly told what to do, they're helpless.

TL;DR - There's nothing wrong with looking up boss fights, but if that's the only way you can learn anything you're doing yourself and your fellow raiders a huge disservice.

[unfilteredJW]

Just popping in: cleared all the way to Xavius with no vids and coming up with our own strats this week. We start Heroics tonight. Stoked.

It was a blast watching quick thinking in action during our Cenarius fight.

[Duronos]

You're coming at this from the perspective that reading a strat tells you more than firsthand experience, which is just silly.

There's a reason a lot of guilds spend an inordinate amount of time reading/watching strats and can't execute any of them, they never learn how to actually deal with the mechanics or adjust on the fly. People are so afraid to wipe once to learn something that they end up doing completely the opposite, failing over and over again to the same issues because they've never bothered to try anything.

There are still people that play this game that don't understand how to handle the simplest of mechanics simply due to it being a different color on a different boss, because they weren't handed a strategy on exactly what to do. A somewhat sad example is one of the final bosses in the new Violet Hold with the spiders you have to look at. The game flat out tells you exactly what to do with context clues, but I've seen incredibly few players that figured it out without being told. If they're not explicitly told what to do, they're helpless.

TL;DR - There's nothing wrong with looking up boss fights, but if that's the only way you can learn anything you're doing yourself and your fellow raiders a huge disservice.

No it's not that, I read them up before the fight and I usually do just fine. Why would I go into a fight blindly, that makes no sense, you have to prep for new encounters so you have an idea of what's going to happen. It's not hard, boss fights are for the most part static with the way they work, it's not like PvP where you literally have to adapt to the slightest thing.