Most of us know that Situational Awareness is one of the more important key abilities to making a good raider. However the vastly different playstyles makes this a difficult thing to train unless you convince people to unlearn how they usually play.

Examples of this would be Hunters that have a mindset to fire from max range but on fights such as thaddius this puts them outside the range of the stacking debuff when they switch polarities.

There are also issues that may not be able to be overcome. Is the persons eyesight poor? Is their computer powerful enough enough to see all the spell effects that give you the warning signs? Video and Network lag factors in as well, but network lag can typically be ignored as the cause if the problem repeats itself consistantly with the same person.

Examples of this would be the red void riffs being hard to see when mixed in with a Death and Decay DK or someones computer not being able to handle scrolling the camera to its maximum distance to see sarthanons lava wave as soon as it starts rising.

Then you have the problems that occur due to 'Damagemeteritus'..."Let me finish casting my spell/finish the duration of this skill before moving", or overloaded healers that feel they cant take the time to move quickly or the tank will die.

The key question is how to fix the problem. The good guild might throw out members that cant learn, but the great guild will try to train them before benching them for good.

For us, we tell these people to take the next boss attempt, and don't do ANYTHING but stay alive. Don't dps, don't heal. If they live through the attempt, hopefully they've learned something. If not, they get to sit for awhile. Of course, setting spell detail to minimum and other things like that are also important.

This obviously doesn't work for tanks, but if you're tank isn't aware of their surroundings, it's time to find a new tank.

WoW is pretty terrible at teaching the situational awareness necessary to do well in either pvp or raids. The solo/leveling portions of the game just don't require it. It has gotten a little better since castbar has become a part of the UI, but most of the game really only requires a small portion of your awareness. I think this is something that appeals to a lot of people (which accounts for the large portion of the population who don't do any sort of raid). It also means the game is very accessible for people who are not necessarily gamers. However, gamers are the people who I have found are best at the situational awareness needed in raids. And if people are messing things up I encourage them to treat WoW just like they would a normal video game. The skills needed to get out of the fire are not any different than the skills I use when playing Team Fortress. Because WoW conditions people to not play this way though, the transition can be tough. What it comes down to, is getting people to prioritize other skills than concentrating on their dps (survival/interupts/etc.).

When I think about this thread's potential evolution and endpoint, I can't find that it will offer anything broadly to our community other than one more circle jerk in the public forums.