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Doing heroics, pre-nerf, as soon as you were able to zone into them (which was usually well before you outgeared them) could teach you a lot about situational awareness, reactions, multi-tasking, agro, and so forth. At the time that it was still cutting-edge content for the people who were doing it was an excellent test ground. And while it's impossible to teach you to coordinate 25 people in any situation that doesn't have 25 people, TBC instances do a comparatively good job of showing the bits and pieces that boss fights are made of so that people get experience with their job in isolation.
This would seem to indicate that, if the 5-mans introduce individual mechanics well enough (and by mechanics I mean "Get Out The Way", "Run Out Of LoS", "CC The Add" and so forth), then the intro raids should be introducing coordination rather than mechanics and min-maxing. In this respect our favorite example of Kara has a ramp-up, but probably a rather sudden one: The first boss requires just tank pick-up on a second target, not hard to coordinate, while the second boss has five targets that require individual CC and/or tank attention, a well-defined kill order, spell interrupts, and a generally coordinated healing strategy if you don't outgear the Garrote. Each of the individual bits is simple bread&butter 5-man stuff (allowing that pally fear isn't common), but in terms of getting people to do their respective, heterogeneous tasks in a coordinated fashion it's a massive departure from the fight before it. Just in terms of coordination, illhoof and curator would have made better stepping stones. Aran (elemental phase) and prince do serve as nice culminations in that respect, though.
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