Originally Posted by
zenga
You use 2 types, execution and awareness fights. Well awareness in my book is what arena is all about, a fight like Valiona & Theralion on 25m heroic, a fight like Toxitron on 25m heroic, ... you have to be aware of your surroundings, know when to interrupt, when not to dps, move out, check dps on others, etc ...
But on the other hand there are fights where you have to do a dance: the tornadoes on alysrazor, atramedes hard, world in flame on ragnaros, sinestra .... I don't see at all how this adds any fun to an encounter, for the simple reason that there is a big factor that adds to the rng: lag & lag spikes. These happen every raid, and in 25m it's more a matter of waiting for an attempt where no one has a single lag spike, else he fails the dance. And the dance is very repetitive. I can't count the times we wasted 15 minutes on ragnaros hc because someone had a lag spike and died, resulting in a wipe.
I much more prefer fights where a certain mechanic requires you to move out, mechanics that make the tight dps check harder. But then again this is only harder for certain classes/specs.
There were plenty of fights in T11 where you had to run out or stack with this or that debuff, that required an interrupt and target switches; but no dance was involved. On the other hand ultraxion heroic is the perfect fight for me at the moment, but that is gonna last 2 more weeks until everyone pulls 2-3k more dps and it becomes easy for the raid. So was baleroc.
So I think it's a very subjective argument that you use. A raid should have a mixture between as you call it execution fights and awareness fights, but the dance should be skipped, since there it's an artificial layer of difficulty based on lag.
My personal opinion why DS doesn't feel like T10, T11 (awesome mechanics) or T12, is because the lack of an epic end boss. Madness (on normal) might have some interesting mechanics, in no way it compares to the Lich King, Nefarian, or Ragnaros. You fight some tentacles and that is not bad ass enough in most peoples book. And I can see why. All in all DS has some interesting encounters on heroic, but it lacks that epic end boss feeling, definitely for an expansion.