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

[This name sucks]

Pretty much what title says

They're the one that write the guides.

[stomination]

PTR is a huge part of it. Then trial and error.

[Hermanni]

PTR doesn't really play as huge of a role as some of you may think. It's usually an hour or two of testing that may or may not yield any useful data depending on how broken the test was, and more often than not whatever you learned will have completely changed by the time the boss is live. Aspects of the encounter that were trivial may have become challenging and challenging parts may suddenly be trivial, and the boss may be very different than what you prepared for. Besides I don't think it answers OP's question at all because he asked how the strategies are invented and whether or not the boss is encountered on PTR or live isn't very relevant to answering that question.

In practice it's just about coming up with different ideas and trying them out. You pick what seems like the best strategy, try it until the mistakes are ironed out and see if it worked. If it didn't, you approximate if it would work if you kept doing it until near perfect execution and move onto the next approach if that doesn't seem likely. If there's uncertainty surrounding some mechanics you dedicate some pulls just to trying them out. Sometimes it takes a lot of time and adjustments to find the strategy that works and sometimes you try a plethora of things before you realize that your initial or secondary approach was the best one. Sometimes after hours of trying someone has a genius masterstroke that makes impossible suddenly seem possible. It's important to listen to everyone and it's important for everyone to be able to take part in the discussion if they have something to contribute, and it's important for people to be able to approximate how well they played and admit if they did mistakes.

[relindrani]

PTR raid testing, also most top guilds take their time with normal modes practicing heroic mechanics, even if the boss doesn't have a certain ability on normal.

[Shaley]

And yet Heroic Spirit Kings was a problem :P

Nothing he said had anything to do with Spirit Kings' false difficulty.

The fight had nothing to do with the skill of the players. Had everything to do with impossible combinations, which is why it was changed.

[russykh]

I think one thing about the top end guilds is that their entire teams tend to be very good at following plans without mess ups. My guild is currently learning Elegon (yes, we're behind, we know, we're also mega mostly). It slow going because often someone will mess up somewhere - we had one dps miss an orb on draw power and start the next phase without killing any waves of orbs, we usually wiped due to having an add up during the transition to draw power and not killing it in time, we also didnt realise that one of our shaman healers was wearing a mix of mail, cloth, and leather!! because he thought the added stats were better than the bonus for wearing all mail compared to what he had. Paragon or Method do not do things like this, unless the complexity and timing required is much, much higher. The window for getting elegon to 85% before the next add can be much smaller for them than us, and they'll still be more likely to hit it correctly than normal players.

I think at that level, they are more likely to use the tools that each class has. Remember seeing Heroic Al'Akir when that hunter jumped off the ledge then disengaged back on to avoid the tornado wall? Most players wouldnt even think of doing that - they would just run into the wall.

[Deleted]

the fun part about raiding is actually figuring out the strats by yourself. it's all about reading what the debuffs and buffs do and understand how to use/counter them. dungeon journal has made that part super easy though.

[Isotope]

PTR doesn't really play as huge of a role as some of you may think. It's usually an hour or two of testing that may or may not yield any useful data depending on how broken the test was, and more often than not whatever you learned will have completely changed by the time the boss is live. Aspects of the encounter that were trivial may have become challenging and challenging parts may suddenly be trivial, and the boss may be very different than what you prepared for. Besides I don't think it answers OP's question at all because he asked how the strategies are invented and whether or not the boss is encountered on PTR or live isn't very relevant to answering that question.

In practice it's just about coming up with different ideas and trying them out. You pick what seems like the best strategy, try it until the mistakes are ironed out and see if it worked. If it didn't, you approximate if it would work if you kept doing it until near perfect execution and move onto the next approach if that doesn't seem likely. If there's uncertainty surrounding some mechanics you dedicate some pulls just to trying them out. Sometimes it takes a lot of time and adjustments to find the strategy that works and sometimes you try a plethora of things before you realize that your initial or secondary approach was the best one. Sometimes after hours of trying someone has a genius masterstroke that makes impossible suddenly seem possible. It's important to listen to everyone and it's important for everyone to be able to take part in the discussion if they have something to contribute, and it's important for people to be able to approximate how well they played and admit if they did mistakes.

I will agree with majority of this.

However I still think the PTR plays a huge role in it as any pulls on the fight is better than zero. Values may change on on some things but you can still from seeing it get a general idea of how said mechanic is supposed to work. Now you factor in the journal on the live reams and everything you being to almost know what the fight is going to be about. Sure you will have to "see" some new mechanics or how they work on live cause they were broken on PTR. But generally they aren't a huge deal.

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.

[EruptorNZ]

Discussing strategies, whether it be on mumble/vent or through the guild website forums.

Coming from an Oceanic guild, we start our raids a couple hours after US guilds have ended theres, normally I try and scan through world of logs, seeing if I can learn anything from their mistakes and apply it to our strat before we go into our raid.

Using a private stream is also beneficial as you can have raiders not in for progression, giving advice to the raid on things that they identify while watching.

[TyrannyRec]

PTR is one way. PTR is huge. You can game a lot of stuff on PTR and write it up for when stuff goes live. The most important thing PTR does really though, is buy you time. It removes ambiguity from mechanics. It allows you to see how what is listed in the dungeon journal interacts.

The other important way is Logs. Most guilds logs are public, even during progression. Logs can tell me more about a fight than any youtube video, and not just "how to do it" but the correctness of what we're doing.

The third most important way is experience. The game has a finite number of ways that it can fuck you and we've seen most of them. By calling on solutions from older content and applying them to newer content, we skip wipes and solve problems. We've had healers refer to Sinestra's Wrack to draw experience from in this Tier. We've had tanks kite like Heroic Spine.

And to touch on another point, the most active part of our forums is the strategy board. Let me put it this way. Back in the day our M'uru thread was 50 pages long. Our Heroic Sha and Tsulong threads were 11 pages each. Empress was 8, Ambershaper was 8, Heroic Protectors was 8. We talk a lot. We game back and forth ideas. Even our normal mode Lei Shen 25 thread is 5 pages long.

Get people engaged, and solutions will follow. no one person has all the answers.

[Moshots]

Imma put it this way. Here is our idea of normal modes. first pull on jinrock. 4 people die to standing in water during first lightning we still killed it. They didn't make the same mistake next week on heroic :P. repeat for every boss. including the 18 whipes on normal durumu to people not being able to see any pattern in the dance.

[esoterickk]

Trial and error. Dungeon Journal makes it more trivial to know what mechanics do, but previously it was just simply seeing the mechanic (normally on PTR) and then learning from it. Most things are easily made sense of once you experience them.

[Desh]

the best way to learn fights is by doing them.

[eschatological]

You can prepare to a certain extent by talking to the people who went before you (not relevant to Manni and his ilk), videos, etc. I'm generally of the opinion that you need 2-3 macro analysis people in a raid, and by macro, I mean the opposite of micro, not the buttons you make to kick turtles or pass the ball on H-Sha.

When you have 2 or 3 people who can look at the dungeon journal, and have an idea of the interlocking pieces of the fight and how to deal with them, it's easy to form a basic strat. Then, if you have videos and logs, it becomes even easier. Even then, you have to adjust what other people do to suit your raid style - if your mage is supposed to do this X thing at Y time, but your mage has 500ms and is unreliable, you may need to adjust. As an example, most people used mages to blow up traps on H-Ragnaros because they could blink out of it after activating it and never get thrown in the air, let alone take falling damage. But if your mage had high latency, you'd have to rely on a priest levitation or the mage slow falling once he popped the trap, etc.

Lastly, it's about critical analysis, finding the flaws in performance and addressing them without raging on people (the rage part should go without saying). Our mage was arcane on H-Will (before Nether Tempest was a thing people used much) and our add waves were dying unevenly due to AB spam and not spreading it out enough. One easy suggestion was to go frost for the fight and have much more reliable and even AoE burst for the adds, and that's how we got the fight down. You need intelligent people who can take criticism, and think about their classes' entire toolkits, especially in light of the new talent system which gives classes a myriad of options in fight utility.

[MrExcelion]

Definitely PTR. PTR is the start of progression for them. Or arguably when the Dungeon Journal first gets datamined if you want to go even deeper than that.

[draconisaerius]

By doing them and seeing what works.

[Nekrosislol]

Back in the day before video guides and dungeon journal, they used trial and error. Mind you the top guilds still do this and when they release a video that is the general strat from there on. (Doesn't mean its the best way but what worked for them to down it quickly). World of mouth was pretty big for awhile in the MC days. Jimmy's cousins brother did boss X like this so we should try like this etc.

[Liax]

PTR? lol

They are hardcore for a reason.

[Mikehuntz]

They all do the PTR testing....all normal modes...all read up on the dungeon journal...I would even say calculate how much damage/healing one does/take. They're all natural good players at their class and plus they put in long hours on attempts that some people do not have the luxury of having because of whatever reason

[Thirstblood]

Learning by myself to understand the mechanic of the fights. No need ptr for me.. I like surprises..