I'll open up with saying that if the moderators feel that this thread is too redundant in light of this being discussed in other threads, then please go ahead and delete it. But I think the question warrents some interesting discussion.

I was watching the film "Collateral" with the commentary turned on, and Michael Mann explained that he can't compare himself to any other filmmaker because he has no idea how anyone else makes movies. That gave me a laugh because I feel exactly the same way; I've been a raid leader for two years now with very little experience in other guilds' raids. I have no idea how other guilds learn bosses or how raid leaders filter their strategies. I've heard of "hardcore" guilds that bombard the boss with attempts until he dies, as well as "casual" guilds that spend several weeks on a boss to get it right.

The terms "casual" and "hardcore" are thrown around in every which direction, and they're used to describe almost everything that a guild does. My guild raids four nights a week for three to four hours a night, some of my guildies advertise the guild as a "hardcore progression guild" because we have at least one new boss down every week, while others say we don't nearly raid enough when compared to the guys that do 6 days a week.

I have found, however, that a large amount of time spent raiding doesn't necessarily attribute to faster progression - at least not for us. Generally when we're learning a new boss I will research what I can about the boss in a preliminary fashion. I'll find out his abilities and what the general or most popular strategies are. When we face the boss, we spend no longer than an hour wiping away to find out which mechanic gives us the most trouble. We never reclear respawns after the first night of attempts. In fact, as soon as we hit respawns I call the raid and congratulate everyone on a good job. After the raid a large number of raiders remain on vent and discuss all of their ideas, usually I just listen in for a bit and go to bed. The next day I'll think about the fight all day and do a lot more in depth research, especially in regards to the mechanics that give us a lot of trouble. After reading threads here and watching a lot of videos, I post a descriptive summary of the previous night's raid and open up a strategy discussion on my guild's forums. We figure out what exactly was killing us and how to fix it. We raid the boss again, spend about another hour figuring out the execution of our changes and the boss falls.

We spend two nights on any given boss, but no longer than an hour per night, so technically we learn every boss in about two hours of gameplay and an entire day of discussion. I don't know if what we do is "hardcore" or "casual", but it is certainly effective. How do you do it?

We have our raids scheduled for approximately 5 hours and we almost NEVER end earlier than that. We'll generally modify our strat between attempts on the same trash timer till we find that something is working, then hammer away at it till the execution gets good enough for a kill. We've generally found that for most BC content, a boss a night really isn't unreasonable for progression. Archimonde is the exception we've found so far, and I'm sure bosses from Mother->Illidan will take a couple nights as well. We haven't tried RoS yet but it looks like a 1-nighter to me.

My guild's casual when it comes to that. The officers does a bit of research and finds what they see as the best tactic and post it on our guild forums for the members to read. We den go by that tactic, and when we figure out our weak and strong points we tune the tactic a bit towards that.

Pretty much same as Zerazar states. We raid 4 nights a week for 4 hours at a time at max so we don't have a lot of time to dick around. We rely on most members reading up on the fight to know at least the basics beforehand. I'll then post what I think will work best for us as a guild and take feedback. We'll then try it out and tailor it to what is working for us and what isn't at the time. Though we'll never make any major adjustments on the same night as then you spend more time sitting around than actually making attempts and getting experience as that's what is eventually going to lead to a kill over anything else.

It's worked out decently for us so far. Fuck Morogrim though. Honestly wish we would have done Karathress and Leo first, what a pain in the ass. We finally found a working strat for us after 3 nights of raids, what a pain in the ass.........

My guild is really casual. We only spend one night a week working on a new boss (one progression night, one for Gruul, two for Karazhan), for about three hours, so we have to make it count.

Usually before a new boss I'll ask someone to post a strategy on our forum. We'll go in, and attempt the boss for as long as we can. I'll err on the side of ending early rather than late though -- no need to burn anyone out at this point. Then it's off to the forums!

A week of massive theorycrafting later, we head back in and apply our theories. Usually they help solve the previous week's problems, and we can move to the next group of issues. (Last week on our first Lurker attempt melee was getting kinda whirlwinded. This week they stayed alive, only to discover that clumping up for geysers sucks.) Rinse and repeat.

For the tough bosses it can take two or three weeks of honing our strategy, and then the last week is all about applying lots and lots of DPS.

Wipe a bunch, if there is no generally public strat, go into combat logs, and start a theorycrafting thread on our forums, which invariably includes a rogue gouging and soloing the mob, Mindflay chaining, tanks generating MAXX THREATS, and something about vRaid - a super secret mod.

Then someone actually posts something worth thinking about, and we go wipe a bunch to see if it works. If not, we wait until someone has an epiphany as we wipe more, or someone on IRC gets someone to cough up some information.

I don't yell, I speak forcefully.

I'd imagine it's fairly dramatically different to be more or less on the content edge, than comfortably "Months Behind". For us, we generally read up on a boss well in advance of pulling it, so nothing catches us off gaurd and we have a general outline of what we'd like to do, and then adjust accordingly. For learning, we'll probably reclear trash once or twice, but we won't drag the raid out unless we're on the verge of a breakthrough.

As the raid leader for my guild (and the raid leader of several past guilds pre-TBC), I take responsibility for understanding fights as quickly as possible. Being that my current guild is significantly behind the curve in terms of progression, the common strategies are usually well propagated for us to learn from. However, we inevitably end up changing them to suit ourselves - our first Curator kill, we had two Shaman using their Elemental totems back to back to hold aggro on Flares, etc.

When I was closer to the bleeding edge, during Naxxramas, etc., I found that unless we got instagibbed in some unexpected fashion, I could usually understand the mechanics of a fight after the first attempt. From then on, it's just an issue of how fast people can learn, or how well they can take directions.

What I'm finding more and more, as the game wears on, is that most raiders play by doing what they're told. In a raid situation, this is a mixed blessing - it turns the game into something of an RTS for the raid leader, but with varying results. I prefer having everyone read their own strats, theorycraft their own class, and so on, but I find myself holding peoples' hands through even the simplest things (gear choices, for example) on a very regular basis.

With that said, progression still happens, and we still press onward, so I can't really complain.

On a more constructive note, unless you are one of a half-dozen guilds in the world, odds are that even if no public "strat" exists for your fight, there is a video of the fight. Personally, when we go into something new, I've probably watched every video that exists of the fight, multiple times, thought about the differences between them and the reason different guilds made different choices, and have a fully fleshed-out strat going in. I can usually figure out everything I need to know about boss ability use, timing, cooldowns, etc., from a single video. There are inevitably question marks remaining, and initial attempts are aimed at answering those ASAP. Then we almost always end up tweaking what we do based on our observations, figure out what's wiping us, and proceed with tailoring our strat to suit our particular composition and strengths. I try to avoid just mimicking a video mindlessly, but even one video will save probably an hour of learning wipes, if not more, and it lets us jump right into strategizing rather than "so, uh, what does this guy do."

I will post a full writeup of everything I know about a given boss on our forums before we reach that boss, so that no one has any excuse for ignorance.

My guild raids 25-man content 3 nights a week for 4 hours at a time. As others have discussed previously, 4 hours works really well (exactly 2 flasks and so on). Only raiding 3 nights a week definitely puts us at a disadvantage, so I make sure to make the best use of our time as possible.

One thing I like to do is focus on the most difficult aspect of the fight, or whatever's giving us trouble, before going all out and really trying for the kill. On Void Reaver, the ranged folk did nothing but avoid the Orbs until we could safely hit the Enrage timer. After that, we turned on the DPS and killed him in another attempt or two. On Lurker, we did literally zero DPS to Lurker for the first few attempts while people figured out the Spouts and we focused on handling the phase transitions and the adds.

The way I see it, there's no point in really going all out until everyone's mastered the basic aspects of the fight, whatever they may be. If that means doing no DPS to Lurker so you can learn to avoid eating a Spout, so be it. Once we execute the transitions or movement or avoidance or whatever it is, we ramp up the DPS and usually beat the encounter in relatively few attempts.

We're a long way behind on progression, but again, the fact we only raid 3 nights a week makes it important to not waste any time. Learning from every single wipe, even if it involves studying the WWS parse after the raid, is very important. AddOns like Expiration or Recount can help you understand why people died on a given attempt. There's nothing worse than wiping over and over and over, and not understanding what's going wrong.

This is true for me too (though I don't lead all of our guild's raids- I trade off with some other officers), mostly. I hate hate hate hate watching videos. They sap all the magic right out of the raid game for me. When I see Kael'thas phase 5 for the first time I want to be appropriately floored, not to go "ho-hum, seen it in the video." I'm sure this isn't true for everyone- after all, videos of cutting-edge bosses have a very wide audience- but I don't think I'm the only one either.

Consequently when writing up a strategy article I rely upon all the information I can gather about the boss from other sources besides videos. This has some downsides, particularly in terms of learning timing, but good boss mods (which are always available by the time we get to a certain boss) lessen the pain somewhat. As for public guides, we're far enough back that a Bosskillers guide is usually available for a given fight but I've learned to be extremely leery about accepting their advice. It's frequently written about a version from a previous patch, or just wrong about one element or another in a fight.

Whenever there is EJ discussion about a boss I read it compulsively. This generally provides me with as much or more information than a 'guide' would, and often elucidates more subtle points that never make it into boss guides. The downside is that "obvious" features of the fight are never discussed (naturally), and so sometimes I get a nasty surprise

These days I also look up WWSes of guilds who have done it, including anonymous reports, and see what I can learn about the fight from there. This can be surprisingly useful; I feel like I basically knew exactly how the Illidari Council fight goes several few weeks ago, and I haven't seen a video or come anywhere near the fight myself.

Interesting. I kind of wish our GLs would do that. They don't make us really read up on the fight or anything, but over half, prolly about 75% more or less, reads up on boss fights they know are coming up, on their own time. We can always tell who doesn't read up on boss fights because they'll say things like,

"There was a totem doing a ton of damage, WTF (i.e. hunter just stood there where he was not supposed to, til he died)" or

"Why did so many adds spawn when we moved? There were only four before!"

or

"OMG He [cleaved/AoE'd/Shadow Dmg/aggro wiped/etc]!"


I read up on the fights and usually watch a video, or two if i think it's going to be hard, simply so that I don't panic halfway through the fight; I would be utterly mortified and embarrassed if I ever actually caused a wipe or even just did something super retarded. It helps me stay calm and helps me not freak out to always know what's coming next.

edit: More to the point of this thread, the GLs will explain the fight generally (for most this part is redundant) then give everyone their assignments and we just address obstacles as they come. We don't necessarily stick to any given strat; we usually just adapt our it to whatever raid makeup we have for the night.

I am more partial to "Are you kidding me?" and the classic "Gonktarget, sometimes I hate you."

Haha, well said. I'll definitely use that one

When you have no idea what the hell happens, the primary objective is to survive as long as possible and record all the abilities the boss does and have everyone keep their eyes open. After that, head over to Thottbot or similar and dig through the abilities you just saw the boss use. Take it from there.

That's mostly speculation though, only had to do some of this in early AQ40. Later on it just got too popular to post strategies and videos.

This is largely how our guild operates. We raid three nights per week for about four hours, so we need to be extremely efficient. On the first visit to a new boss, our raid leader explains the fight and we try it a few times. Everyone gets a good idea of what the encounter looks like and we call it when trash respawns. The next day, everyone discusses our strat on the forums and we work out the kinks.

The key for us is killing a boss on the second night. It's much easier to iron out a solid, repeatable strat after everyone has done the fight a few times.

For us, normally, a majority knows the general idea of the fight (i.e. It's a big robot, it throws out arcane orbs, dodge them, theres some tank switching), but the raid leaders go over the positioning and some rough healing assignments. If a fight has two phases (i.e. Leotheras pre and post 15%, Morogrim bubble phase etc.), they'll explain that when we get there. Most of the time we'll get through those 'enrage' phases on the first try seeing it.


After each wipe we ask why who died where and to what. This I think is more important than anything else when learning a new boss. Did you die because you were brain-dead and stayed in too long and got WW spammed, or were the healers not spread out enough and weren't able to reach you to heal you? But, in my opinion, we are spolied by a group that learns their roles and adapts very quickly to a strat, and it's simply a matter of time before bosses die. So far I think only Morogrim has given us real trouble and several raid nights to kill. Quigon said it another thread somewhere that the bosses in TBC aren't harder than pre-bc, but they can be more frustrating from an execution standpoint. They are very tightly tuned, but have simplistic strategies.

Edit, Re: Strat Vids: The only videos I really watch are the more 'production-oriented' showcasing a guild conquering an instance.

I doubt many guilds would do anything other than read up on strats beforehand, do some attempts, tweak mistakes and then stubbornly attempt the boss until it dies. The differences seem to only come out of how much discussion a guild does about a boss or in what manner.

I imagine some people would figure out better and cleaner ways of killing a boss just by discussion on their guild's forums. Others (including myself) find it better just to attempt the boss to see what is going on and everything that could go on. Left brain vs Right brain if you will.

My guild typically has everyone get familiar with a fight on bosskillers, videos etc on bosses that are coming up. We perfect the strat after each attempt until we get something that works. Then it's only a matter of time to win.

Learning a boss is more of something to practice rather than using your own intellect to do it right.

We will typically go after a new boss later in the night right after finishing farm content, generally getting somewhere between 1-2 hours on the first night. Basically, we use this to learn the abilities, and then send everyone off to think about the fight, what they can do better, and to watch some vids.

Also, I yell at people who mess up on the longer learning fights and we naturally call them stupid.

Learning abilities then going in for the kill has worked well for us though. We spent a day on Teron, then for various reasons didnt get back to it for about a week and a half. When we finally got back to it, the first attempt was our first kill.

On the other hand, fights like archimonde, we know we're just gonna have to throw hours at a time into it, so you just have to take 5-10 minute breaks every couple hours to think it over and re-assess tactics.

Well, guess we are pretty much unique then.

We have a strict guild policy to never ever use any stratgy guides, walk-throughs, other guild's videos, etc.

We dont use spoilers, because, they, errrr, spoil things for us.

We work out every single bit of every boss fight by ourselves. We use our own observations, combat logs, our own fraps and WWS. And lots of forum discussion.

Sure, we may progress a lot slower than other guilds,but for us its more about the journey than the destination.

At the end of the day, we know that we are 100% responsible for our own success or failure. Not too everone's taste, but we love it and would not have it any other way.

I was waiting for that one. It's a style of play that I'd really like to experience. Unfortunately I've spoiled just about every TBC boss for myself, it still feels like a huge accomplishment to down the bosses but I can only imagine figuring out the entire thing on your own.

One real downside to the way people play this game is, I find, that a large amount of the raiding population wants their guild to succeed and every other guild to be months behind. We downed Morogrim the other night and immediately people started discussing where our guild name would be placed on the "Guild Progression" thread on our realm forum. I'm all for healthy competition, but being amongst so many people who want to fight Illidan tomorrow means that we must use every resource possible to strengthen our efforts. The biggest resource being others' experiences. I fear that if/when my guild ever reaches the frontier of progression, only then will we be able to truly test ourselves in every which way.

This is effective for us as well. No matter how many ways we make it clear that we're doing a boss, there's nothing like *doing* the fight to get people to understand it and decide to put some effort into learning/thinking about it. Also, an engage or two puts any external learning (e.g. EJ threads) into far better, sharper context.

I'm a big fan of us engaging to a key learning point, then walking away and coming back the next day.

e.g. we did 2 Vashj engages so we could get to P2 (the first engage could've been entitled "Oh THAT'S static charge!"), and then went to bed. I set up the raid with a kiter, some tanks for the nagas, and told everyone else "if you don't know what to do, kill elementals" -- the goal being to just get as far into P2 as we could so people could understand "oh, THAT'S the strider, whoa he actually does fear!", so we could see how the nagas actually come in, see the rate of elemental spawning, understand how fast tainteds despawn, etc.

I firmly believe that our next day (yesterday) of attempts went better as a result, even though we "lost" the time on two "useless" engages where we knew we wouldn't come close to killing her. It gave people the impetus to come prepared the next day, and gave those who learn by doing a step up in understanding.

We also did a similar thing with Leo and FLK, shotgun-engaging them, just to 'get' the fight, when we didn't really have enough time left in the evening to make serious engages at either (and it let us know FLK should definitely be our next target, we downed him within a trash cycle when we actually engaged him.)


Outside of that, probably the biggest thing we struggle with is the perception of some raid members that the officers must have all the answers, and if we don't know for sure the answer to their question then we're holding back or they haven't asked it enough times.

I prefer a bit more open-learning approach to raids, where we don't go in with a single specific strat in mind, but more a set of ideas and we pick a likely one, try it, see what didn't work, and then tweak (or sometimes change dramatically.)

Some get very stressed at not knowing "the" strat, however -- and don't understand, it seems, that there isn't one certain strat yet.


(edit) While I was posting, someone posted what I'd love: a guild that doesn't actually look at videos, strats, etc. ahead of time. Much more my personal style, regardless of how far "behind" it puts us. But I don't want to raid enough days anymore to be in a truly cutting-edge guild.

I just do what I can in terms of repeatedly telling people not to just believe what they read/see, and encouraging them always to think about our guild's strengths, weakenesses, and how we run our raids.

(e.g. we really don't like to class-stack, so we want to be able to do everything with 4 tank-types, 7 healers, 14 dps, and 2-3 of each class -- and we'd like that to be able to vary every single night based on who logs in, rather than having to have EXACTLY 3 mages, etc. Right now Vashj is testing that desire -- we may go in Sunday with 3 tankity-types instead of 4.)