Hardcore Raiders, how do you learn heroic fights before guides come out on youtube?

[Kuniku]

I must say, one thing I do miss in the game is the learning curve. When TBC came out, I'd just been promoted to raid leader for the little guild I was in at the time, and my job started with the hell fire 5 mans, I refused to let anyone tell me any mechanics, nor did I look them up, we just went in, saw what happened and come up with a strat, this went all the way up to starting kara, we got as far as Moroes before the officers decided the guild wasn't suited for raiding because they were all to lazy to actually gear up so I left and joined a hardcore guild ^_^

[Toxigen]

Experience, analysis, and good communication.

[Whiskra]

The question confuses me. The answer is the same for any game with an obvious start and goal. Or do people nowadays they think they can't beat a game without looking up videos or guides about it first?

[Tavin]

This is just one of those things where experience (fro
Previous expansions) will helP you immensely. Doing the bosses on Ptr will help you. But with some theory crafting normal modes and journal will be enough. The only difficult part is to know what the optimal setup is before you killed it. Trial and error is all what it comes down to. Think of a better solution etc

[Hermanni]

I think the worst thing that has been done to the raiding scene is the PTR and Journal. Let Blizzard do internal testing and then give it a go. That's when you will see kills not happening in the first two weeks.

I doubt there's a single player in the top20 guilds that likes PTR and wouldn't prefer not having raids available in the test realms. But past experiences show that bosses that aren't tested by players are usually very broken, e.g. Sinestra, and being stuck on a bugged boss for days isn't really a much better alternative.

And PTR's don't just magically make bosses easier. Easy bosses are easy, if a boss dies in a matter of hours I very much doubt it would have taken more than an hour longer to kill without any PTR experience, often not even that. I also doubt Ragnaros would have taken significantly less time to kill if we had had a few hours with him in PTR, but it would probably have taken a bit less if for example the Cloudburst bug had been fixed before it hit live. (Though it's not like we would have gotten past phase 2 in the matter of mere hours to see that particular bug.)

[Magemaer]

On an ideal world boss fights wouldn't need test on PTR.
I'd like if there was a way of isolating information so that guilds that so chose could progress on their own, without importing anything from outside. The thing about too much info is that it's a double-edge sword, it makes things easier, but tends to get you rusty on your own skill to learn fights and make up strats. You start relying on videos and such, and that's bad, i think, for raiding.

[-aiko-]

Time. Lots and lots of time.

[Miraclous]

Don't stand in the fire usually works.

[Keoren]

I think the worst thing that has been done to the raiding scene is the PTR and Journal. Let Blizzard do internal testing and then give it a go. That's when you will see kills not happening in the first two weeks.

PTR testing is a mandatory evil. Without it either many of the encounters would enter the live realms broken, the amount of bosses would be lower, the raids would be released slower, or any combination of the three.

[hulkgor]

Dungeon Journal
PTR
Trial and Error, making every attempt matter to get the most information possible.

Plus, as already said above, 'fresh' mechanics are very rare and far apart, with most mechanics being well known to experienced raiders. So it's easy to deal with them.

Don't stand on the fire, tank debuffs\swaps, cluster up\spread out, dispel\decurse, so on, so forth.

[Danshot]

I pick it up much faster than the avg.