Malchome wrote a post this week about his frustration with Cataclysm raiding. It’s become bad enough that he’s just retired from raiding for the rest of the expansion, and it’s not because of having reached an impasse or run out of raiders. No, his issue is that the fights have become too ‘gimmicky’, and one of the characteristics of gimmicky fights is that you can’t just roll over them once your raid is overgeared/ over levelled. ie. you have to know the gimmick.
I have a better tolerance for fights that are interesting or different. I’ve enjoyed them in the past, and I don’t dislike them now. But you do have to learn the gimmick and teach it to anyone in your raid who either hasn’t been there before, or hasn’t been there for awhile. For example, I feel comfortable off-tanking Shannox now, but the jumping/ intervening around took a bit of practice. But I felt quite stressed when I went to BWD with the alt group because I had to learn a lot of gimmick fights at once.
So a gimmicky fight can potentially be more fun to learn for a raid, because it has some feature that is new or different. But it’s a pain for farm nights if you have new people in the raid who need to learn it, it could be a pain for overgeared raiders because they still need to learn the gimmick, and it might not even be that fun to learn in the first place if it’s just one role that holds the gimmick and the rest of the raid aren’t patient.
I’m not sure how important it is for a raid to be amenable to lazy guild alt nights or for people to try to 2-3 man after it is no longer current, but this is a genuine use for the older content. It becomes a sociable sight seeing trip or personal challenge.
I have a few take away thoughts from this:
1) Many people prefer to learn encounters on their own rather than in a group, especially a group of mixed experience (ie. some people know the fight, others don’t) that isn’t patient or is a PUG.
The challenge of how to teach a player base to beat the encounters in a new instance is a very very difficult one. It was easier when players were more chilled out about learning in groups, and it was also easier when the encounters themselves were less complex. A raid encounter which requires different complex tactics for every role in the raid is also harder to explain thana simpler encounter with a couple of gotchas.
2) Is there a point at which increased complexity just drives players away? It isn’t so much the complexity of a single fight so much as having 5-6 complex encounters which everyone has to remember. Especially when the players who know the fight don’t enjoy teaching it to others.
3) There is a definite demand for straight forwards but pretty raid instances/ encounters for guild nights out/ smaller group challenges.
And has anyone else retired from WoW raiding because of this type of reason, the encounters being too fiddly/ gimmicky?
Welcome to Spinksville! 
It’s part of the reason for me.
I did prefer the days when the challenge was putting together a healer with good balance between mana efficiency and throughput. I can see too that the player base has optimised that away. In other words I enjoyed doing well because I had the game figured out at a time when most people did not have it figured out and weren’t aware of EJ etc.
I don’t know quite what else WoW can do. They can’t really undo the growth of third party sites. They can’t really go back to a game like MC which was exciting because we didn’t understand quite why the tank died and assumed it was a mistake in the raid (which is interesting and makes you want to have another go) rather than triple hasted parry procs (which is just RNG and lame).
So while I don’t really want to play the Take Three Steps to the Left or Wipe the Raid model I can see that the interest is no longer there for many in the Tank N Spank with decursing model.
I enjoyed playing a healer in vanilla, when you needed to know how MP5 worked, and usually had a load of downranked spells on your quickbar so that you could keep your overheal down to save mana. I used to like comparing my overheals with the other healers in the raid.
It was a type of skilful play that’s been replaced.
I think WoW should keep doing what they are doing and go with the current player base. But I also think that encounters could be just as entertaining and less complex at the same time.
What is the alternative option? Instances with 15 tank n spank bosses?
Also one players easily avoided dont-stand-here boss, is anothers “how-was-i-supposed-to-know” Gimmicky boss fight.
And why is gimmicky all of a sudden a bad word? If you want guild-nights off, easy content, go one or two tiers down, isn’t that why Blizzard nerfs them so hard?
Reading that article from malchome, he seems like a lazy player who want lazy player gear and experiences in his game. So maybe end-game raiding isn’t where that player should be anyways.
That’s a good question: when is a gimmick not a gimmick?
Not so much a lazy player, what I find enjoyable in game is different from what you do. I have 11 85s, that is not lazy, masochistic maybe but not lazy. Do not confuse difficulty with effort. It takes effort to level a toon, the overall effort may be easy or not very challenging but it does take time and effort.
Additionally, I never said that I fit the classic raider profile. I have plenty of tolerance for difficulty when success and failure is solely on my shoulders. My tolerance is an inverse proportion to the number of players required to complete said encounter. As was mentioned later in this thread, I do not find running at 100%+ attention to be a relaxing and enjoyable experience. It is ok for short periods but really 2+ 3 hours sessions a week is a bit much to expect that level of requirement.
I think the encounter completion numbers between T8, T9, T10, T11 and T12 speak for them selves at this point. You need a variety of encounter complexity in a raid tier. You can either have that complexity by making sure each or most bosses have multiple levels of complexity so that you are can always be working towards a new goal or the bosses themselves need to be simple or complex and have a normal/hard mode. I prefer the Ulduar design. That way if you want to have a faceroll night you can, you may not get a good of rewards but you at least have the choice.
“Reading that article from malchome, he seems like a lazy player”
This is why I left WoW. The game is currently like being in a self righteous teenagers dream world – where everyone else is ‘lazy’ or ‘baddie’.
Gimmicky fights do *not* show skill. And for some people (like my wife who actually has a condition that limits her wrist movement) it will exclude them from encounters – when there really is nothing that the *gimmick* adds to the encounter.
Yes. Too gimmicky all the time.
It was nice for the beginning of Cata, but now it’s just getting annoying. They need a balance of gimmick and non-gimmick.
It’s not hard, it’s just frustrating to have to teach people over and over. I pity our Raid Leader because he must be tired of repeating himself. I think I might just record him and play it back for the odd PUG we have to bring in.
I’m not burning out because of the raiding, I’m enjoying that because I’ve got a good team that is a lot of fun. I’m burning out because I’m getting tired of chasing the tiered gear. I *feel* like I need to grind VPs – and the only options outside raiding involves heroics which I’m a little tired of as well. The main reason I feel like chasing the Tier sets is that the set bonuses tend to be worth it vs. the flat drops from bosses. Quite frankly, that sucks. I’d rather the boss drops be a fair bit better
On the bright side, we’re downing enough FL bosses (and the BH boss) that I cap out each week with only needing to run one troll dungeon or two regular heroics.
Heck, I’d even go with some lightly gimmicked. It doesn’t have to be all tank and spank. Some of the fights in Naxx were simple enough; the whole positive/negative charge thing was neat. Stuff like Marrowgar didn’t seem too gimmicky, but it had some change up in the fight. Stuff like that vs. adding a new GUI component and completely different mechanic that people have to learn.
I’m glad you mentioned Naxx because I think that’s one of Blizzard’s best ever raids. Unfortunately it was very undertuned in Wrath which meant that people could ignore some of the gimmicks right from the start but for me it had a good level of complexity with lots of interesting and memorable fights. (The mind control on Razuvious is the one I’d want to smack someone for though.)
That’s a good point, but it was also the case of most of the Wrath raiding content (Ulduar, ICC – ToC not as much, but still some). They all had minor gimmicks and gotchas. The big difference was that one person failing on them didn’t mean the raid was doomed.
On one hand it puts more pressure on tanks or healers (where they need to do what they do or the raid dies) and adds some to the DPS too, but having every fight like that stops being as fun.
Consider if Firelands had 14 bosses with 7 being the ones they have now and 7 others being less complicated or more forgiving? You’d have a lot more content to run and it’d be a little more fun because half the fights wouldn’t be as stressful. It’d emphasize the challenge of the bosses that were to be more challenging.
Gimmicks would be ok if the encounters didn’t have mechanics where a single player’s failure can greatly damage the entire group. Such “failure tolerant” encounters mean that if the encounter is overgeared, you can tolerate some people eating dirt while they learn.
^ This. I was thinking about this instead of paying attention in a meeting and came to this observation as well.
Personally I am torn.
When first learning a fight I think it is fun to try and master the gimmick. Most gimmicks are usually hard enough that it takes some getting used to but easy enough that once you have mastered the gimmick it becomes easy.
I think gimmick fights are more fun to learn.
After I know the fight I hate gimmick fights because instead of walking in with new people and saying okay, stay out of this and that and save cooldowns for when the boss does this I now need to go into a complex explanation of how the gimmick works. Usually this will mean two or three wipes while the new people adapt and learn, more if they are not fast learners or less if it is one of those gimmicks that will only kill that one person and not everyone.
People hate gimmick fights. Look back at wrath and trying to get groups to do EoE or Occ. Gimmick stuff, simple enough, people hated it. I would guess a huge percentage hated it based on the number of people that dropped as soon as you zoned into Occ on a regular basis. I often saw groups go though 8-10 people before we could actually start a run that was super easy and we WAY over geared it by the end and people still did not want to do it.
Blizzard needs to ditch the gimmick concept.
It is great fun the first time around learning it. It is a general annoyance every other time you do it.
As for raiding this expansion it is fun when learning a new fight with people that are all learning with you. Once you know it you hate going back to do it unless everyone already knows it because it is like you need to learn the fight all over again while someone else is now learning it. This makes the previous tier, even nerfed, still undoable by pugs (at least on my servers) because no one wants to have to teach new people the gimmicks or even wants to deal with them again themselves once they got their achievements.
I guess given the option I would want no gimmick fights.
The gimmicky fights were certainly part of why I stopped raiding. The gimmicks are often combined with mechanics that ensures a wipe if just a single player screws up.
This makes it very frustrating for everyone if players have different amounts of experience with a fight. Those who already know the gimmicks will have to endure multiple wipes without being able to do anything about it. And those who don’t know the gimmicks will have to learn in a pretty hostile environment as people get impatient.
Most raiding guilds require high attendance to compensate and that pretty much turns raiding into a second job.
On the other hand, I don’t know how else Blizzard could make the fights more challenging.
I am also of the opinion that it’s not whether it’s gimmicky or non-gimmicky – it’s the tolerance of the encounter. When the loss of one person dooms the whole thing to failure, maybe it’s too finely tuned.
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I quit rading in January because the raids were too gimmicky. When I get off work I want to have fun not overtax my brain with game gimmicks or mechanics. I mean I’ll work for my purples but Cata went too far. The gimmicks also apply to some class mechanics. Boomkin, paladin, holy priest.
“That’s a good question: when is a gimmick not a gimmick?”
Thinking about it, I would say the fight becomes a gimmick when skilled players who know how to play their class well and have researched the fight carefully still have difficulty downing it–not because they did something stupid like stand in fire or get cleaved by boss, but simply because they didn’t follow the very exacting, unforgiving demands of the encounter mechanics to the letter.
An example is Rhyolith RNG @#%$@. You can take a bunch of geared, skilled players who researched the fight carefully, and put them together in a random PUG to do the fight, and they can still wipe all night despite all their skill simply because Rhyolith happened to be slightly overturned, or was underturned, etc.
I guess it depends for me. I haven’t raided (or played WoW) in a while, but when I did I can tell you this:
I loathed Eye of Eternity.
I liked the Heigan fight.
Both are probably “gimmicky” fights, but in a whole different spectrum. When I have to learn something completely foreign to my character class, I am probably going to hate it. (See your example of the mind-control Razuvious fight.)
I’ve retired WoW for many reasons. Linear die-a-billion-times raid mechanics, gimmicky or not, is one of them. What I really want to know is how’s raiding in RIFT?
The fights are fairly gimmicky too.
😦
I think the term gimmick is way overused. It’s also used with the assumption that other people agree with you on what it means, and that’s just not the case.
The only fight in Firelands that I would consider a gimmick fight is Rhyolith. That’s because Rhyolith is approached in a fundamentally different way from the rest of the game’s combat. Beth, Shannox, Alys, Baleroc, Domo, and Rag all have mechanics that require attention, but there’s nothing fundamentally different about the concept of do your job while avoiding attacks.
A mechanic that requires players to pay attention is not, in my eyes, a gimmick. A gimmick is something that causes players to play differently in a fundamental way. Here are the fights from Cata that I’d consider Gimmicky:
Chimaeron – requires healers to fight their most basic instinct.
Atramedes – only somewhat. monitoring the sound mechanic is more a theme of the standard “don’t get hit by attacks.” It’s the interaction with the gongs that makes this fight somewhat gimmicky.
Rhyolith – a boss that is not tanked and must be moved through damage.
Alysrazor – maybe, but it’s edge. Select players engage in a gimmick (flyers, tanks), but the fight is otherwise a standard add fight.
I guess mainly my frustration is that the word gimmick is often used interchangably with the word mechanic, and it’s not the same thing at all. A mechanic is just something that the raid needs to pay attention to. A gimmick is a mechanic that significantly alters normal play. If you can describe the fight more or less by saying “Damage goes here, move like this when that happens,” it’s not really a gimmick fight.
I have to say that almost any complexity drives me away, when that complexity derives from scripting.
I used absolutely to love being main healer for a group in Everquest. I also loved being crowd control, back when that was the third pillar of the Holy Trinity. I even quite liked tanking.
In those days the complexity largely came from the fact that the mobs you were fighting were ALL very, very much tougher than you were. If more mobs came than you were expecting, you might all die. Consequently you had to consider every fight beforehand. You had to assess the sociability of the mobs and judge (or guess at) their abilities – might they charm you, fear you, blow you up in the air, silence you, mez you, strip all your buffs?
Might they, in fact, do to you any of the things you planned on doing to them.
There was plenty of complexity, but it came from the innate abilities and social structure of your opponents. You had to work out plans to separate them, isolate them, control them. You had to pick off their healers, lock down their crowd controllers, break their line of sight, turn their own pets against them. And when your plan didn’t work out you had to improvise and FAST.
What you didn’t have to do was learn a script. Or dance steps. You didn’t have to do things over and over and over until everyone had their part down pat. You could think, improvise, be creative. You could wing it. Every trip through the same dungeon was different. It was lots of fun.
When scripted events began to find their way down from raiding, which I never liked, to dungeon groups, which I loved the net result was that I stopped grouping. I still rarely group in a formal setting, unless I know for certain no scripted events are involved.
I agree with Prunetracy.
I wandered into Shannox last night, having only the vaguest “watched tankspot video a month ago” knowledge, on a alt druid still wearing some greens (and with only 3 purples) and successfully tank-healed with no fight explanation. Just don’t stand in stuff (thank you GTFO), and attempt to figure out how to tank-heal with HOTs. I’m sure the fight’s much more complicated for tanks and DPS though.
On the other hand I was in an ICC, on my well-geared main, and spent 2+ hours wiping on PP, Dreamwalker, and Sindy because several people didn’t know the fights at all (The iceblocks forming are not your friends; do NOT hug them! Kill oozes! Go in the gorram portals!)
I guess I don’t see much difference between break people out of webs, keep track of polarity, and switch off between 4 horsemen, and Magmaw, Nefarion, and say Valiona/Theralion, except their tuning. Heck, I went into Sunwell and Black Temple with decently-geared 80s, and we still wiped because we had no clue how the fights worked.
To me, a gimmick’s something like pass the plague in heroic PP (which is ignorable at 85) or Chimeron (HATE) or Patchwork when the tank had to go in the ooze (I don’t really remember why tanks had to do that, and I know they patched it out). It’s something that’s at least somewhat counter-intuitive to an experienced raider. And it’s not always boss based. In that same Firelands raid, we had a warlock as our stack point on Rhy and he was doing this aoe fire thing around him and well, it’s hard to overcome that “FIRE BAD, NO STAND” instinct. That’s a raid composition gimmick, but it’s still a gimmick.
Tanks didn’t have to go in the ooze on patchwerk, it was melee DPS who had more health than the tanks. It was only an issue in some of the more oddball weekly raids where you had fresh 80 tanks trying to tank for T10 plate DPS.
I just remember someone having to do it, and it being the raid’s DK. Of course, he may not have been tanking at the time. I was busy trying to maximize my DPS to prove my worth as a 3rd hunter (and new raider) in our 10 man, which was decidedly odd, both in gearing and composition.
There’s a big difference between gimmicky and complex or difficult. In a complex fight you’re still doing what you’re usually do, only that there are more different things to tank/heal/dps/not stand in. In a gimmicky fight you’ll find yourself doing something that has little to do with how you usually play, like the Razorgore example in BWL that’s mentioned by Malchome, which is all about controlling the “Razorgore vehicle”.
In a way I think gimmicky fights are in fact Blizzard’s attempt at avoiding too much complexity. After all players always demand new and exciting fights, but in the end there is only so much you can give people to do in their normal roles. So instead of just adding more and more adds and sources of damage, they add things like “steer a giant around by poking his feet” or “fly through flaming hoops in the air”.
Personally I’m a bit torn on whether that’s a good thing or not. Unlike Malchome I’m not concerned with whether the encounter will be easy to outgear – in fact I find it quite fun when lower level bosses can still wipe you. But at the end of the day, people play the roles they play because they like them – and if you always make them do things that go contrary to their chosen role, you do risk alienating players after a while.
Some folks have touched on this a bit, but I want to echo the question. What separates gimmicks from mechanics, and how do you make new encounters that are different and exciting without introducing new gimmicks/mechanics? I’m all for bosses that test my abilities as a healer or DPS, (raw throughput, etc.) but at the end of the day, if that’s all the boss is testing, then each boss is indistinguishable from the last.
Having to explain fights like Omnitron (which is the very definition of a gimmicky fight) on a weekly basis to new raiders is what sent me packing. I used to run a fairly large guild, but the mechanics weren’t as forgiving as Wrath was. I know many players cried for this, harder raids, but it has turned off many players.
Also, having so many diverse mechanics can also turn away new raiders. It’s can push players to become insecure on their playing abilities. It’s almost like going on a horrible date that didn’t go very well. You’re apprehensive to trying it again.
Gimmick fights are any fight where you have to learn an entriely new style of play in order to complete the fight. Lashlayer, Malygos, Rhyolith, Flame Leviand that’s honestly really it. Anything else is just a boss being a boss and if you start complaining x is gimmicky, then everything ever is gimmicky
The issue Is that fights have more than one layer of mechanics. And they need to because we’ve absorbed all the past lessons. Even for a new player, if you’ve gone through the Cata 5 mans, you’ve absorbed nearly every previous boss mechanic that’s still in the game. In fact, if they included an irritating resistance grind somewhere, a council fight and a BC era click the box fight, that’s pretty much every raid boss mechanic ever contained in the 5 mans.
So they do need to add new layers of mechanics because people will bitch when the boss gets cleared the day the raid comes out because because they already know how to do that crap by heart at this point. Not standing in the fire or tranquing the dog or needing to interrupt the heals isn’t going to cut it anymore because we know how to do these things. So the boss fights get more complicated.
I do think that you’ll get several different answers for what a gimmick is in a fight.
For me, it’s actually hard to pinpoint sometimes-other times not so much(Chimaeron, Rhyolith.) I just know that I’ve felt their new encounters have either relied too much in certain gimmicks, or then just certain mechanics get overused(stack up and heal everyone quickly in a soft enrage/high damage phase!)
I do think that the difference between old and new gimmicks were the tightness of them. Now, some things like Naxx 40 were very tightly tuned(but hell, even that had a small handful of fights where a couple of deaths wouldn’t completely bone the encounter.) I think one issue that’s coming up is that Blizzard feel they need to tune these encounters to the top raiders so they don’t defeat them in the first 2 weeks(oh, wait…) IMHO, they should be tuning Normal modes to ”Average” raid guilds and Heroic modes to ”Very Solid Raid Guild” level. I don’t want to sound mean to the top 200 guilds in the world, but these are a minority of the players. (However, I DO think this is where a ‘Legendary’ difficulty level would be great-one reserved for the best of the best of the best, completely and utterly brutal, just so they get something too.)
See, I wouldn’t be complaining as much if it was like it was in the old days-with raids being reserved for the more ‘elite’ players. However, if they want to make raiding open to all, they need to tune difficulties for a wide variety of players. They can’t seem to find a sweet spot with only two difficulty levels, really. So then I guess they try to bring in gimmicks to make things more difficult in some areas. I don’t know-honestly I feel like their encounter design has gotten a bit…confusing? Like they aren’t even sure how to handle things anymore. I suppose that when a game is seven years old this can be bound to happen, though, so I can’t totally blame them. I can have trouble thinking of stuff to write more casually, I can’t imagine having to make up new stuff for encounters for years and years to keep millions of people interested.
Any of these preprogrammed dance scripts are a gimmick. All of them are bad. To me a fight against any mob including all boss fights should come down to three things. Mitigation for tanks, heals for healers and dps for the dps. The fights should be tuned to an increasing scale based on the entire groups throughput in each of these areas.
Too easy you say? Yes because the classes are too easy. A mage pounding two buttons is not knowing the class. They need to make dps more dependent on how well you know your classes mechanics. Remember the John F’n Madden chart for feral kitties? Do that for all classes. make it so people need to know how to maximize their dps. Then do that for heals and mitigation.
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Bit late to comment on this but I agree 100% with gimmicks going too far in Cataclysm raids. The heroics were already too gimmicky for my tastes. I also strongly agree with Dink’s comment above about classes. Blizzard seem obsessed with everything being a ‘set dance’ now. Boomkin, my main since 2007 is no fun for me anymore as gameplay is gimmicky.
If fights don’t have gimmicks then what else can blizzard do to make fights different? If there was nothing to “learn” then every fight would just be the same recycled crap with a steeper dps/healing requirement.
You are right in that most normal mode encounters are about performing the mechanics correctly. However the heroic modes include a combination of performing mechanics correctly WHILE doing enough dps/healing to meet the requirements of the specific encounter.
Each fight has different mechanics to learn, however the same basic wow skills of “moving around and not standing in fire” apply in every single fight, and there are obvious differences between an experienced wow player who might not know a fight, and scrubs who just continue to die in the fire no matter how many times they have attempted a fight.
I know this is probably a dead thread by now, but I thought I would toss in my two cents. WHY I QUIT PLAYING WOW….raiding.
First let’s take a look back. Forgive my dungeon/raid names, it has been a while, but I should get them close.
Questing, anyone can do it, it is simple, nice, and straight to the point. This did remain true in cataclysm.
Dungeons, little more complex. If you look at the Icecrown dungeons the bosses all had little tricks. Like one or two things you need to know to stay alive. Example: Forgemaster Garfrost. You had to hide from his ice blast and watch your stacks of debuffs. Under geared this was important, but over geared you could still kill him quickly, even if someone died. I remember all dying except a dps and healer when he was at 25% hp. We still killed him because we were over geared. Point being dungeons are strategy, but eventually you can get good enough gear to farm them and help others learn without 20 failed attempts. For the most part this was true in Cata as well, some got trickier or gimmicky, but typically 4/5 bosses could be geared past their tricks and gimmicks.
On to Raids. Icecrown Citadel is my best example, talking 25 man. Mobs were easy, just took time, but remained relatively simply. IE be careful not to pull too many and skill beats them. Then the first boss, Marrowgar. Some gimmicks, but without some wouldn’t the game just be boring. You had to be aware, know the fight, but could easily figure it out in a couple attempts, kill bone spikes, stay out of fire, watch debuffs. Fights got progressively more intense, but remained true to the fact that they were more forgiving the better geared and skilled you were. Ending with the Lich King. This fight was great. Yes, he had tons of gimmicks, but he was the main boss of this expansion and should not be easy. But they were all do able and STILL got easier to combat with gear and skill. IE kill adds before they drop someone off the side.
RAIDING CATA: Every fight became the Lich King. It was rare to catch a break and have a boss with two gimmicks that you can just relax your mind on. Fights no longer could be improved with gear simply because you spent the ENTIRE time fighting his gimmicks first and tossing dps on the boss in their short down time.
Raiding used to be fight the boss and deal with tricks and gimmicks. Cata became know the gimmicks and then kill the boss. The Lich King is my prime example because a good PUG could still get a fair ways into ICC, while most Lich King kills were reserved for a dedicated group, or guilds. And that is great! It let everyone in and gave them a fair shot while getting increasingly more difficult as you progressed through ICC, thus strengthening guild play whilst not punishing PUGers. Cata on the other hand destroyed this. No one wanted a PUGer that hadn’t done it already because they didn’t Know the gimmick. Reasoning? I could keep ANY, yeah I said it ANY geared for entrance, that means not over geared but just ready to progress to this raid, PUG group alive in ICC by explaining a fight in under five minutes. One wipe is expected so they can see the actual gimmick, but from then on….solid. Cata killed this because you could not explain the fights fast and successfully because there were just too damn many gimmicks and everyone had the potential to wipe the group.
I know there are others out there who too believe they could keep any properly geared group alive in ICC at least to fester and rot. Can you say the same about Cata? No, groups fell apart because no one wants to wipe 10 times without downing a boss outside of guild learning runs. This turned the dreaded gear check into a pissing contest. It was no longer ok to prove yourself worthy to try by having the best possible gear prior to a certain raid and having killed every single boss in the game prior to said raid. You simply had to have done it before.
To prove my point. Explain Marrowgar, the first boss in ICC
Tanks, you need to stick together as damage is split over all in front of his slice. Thus dps stay behind him. He will cast bone spike on random people, these spikes do damage over time and prevent the impaled person from doing anything, dps should immediately switch to these until all are gone. Lastly he occasionally enters a whirlwind phase where he is not tankable and does damage to all near him, stay away from him and continue dps if possible, but stay alive is priority as he comes out of this phase on his own. Also, throughout the fight, blue flames appear on the ground, they do high damage stay out of them. Rinse and repeat. Overview, tanks need to stack and pick up Marrowgar after whirlwind and face him away. Healers, tanks will take a lot of damage along with anyone impaled. Dps, stay behind him and don’t stand in fire and do kill bone spikes.
Phew, kind of a mouthful, but not even two minutes for a pretty in depth overview of the fight. My challenge to you is to explain Morchok in 160 words or less as in depth as I just did Marrowgar. I am choosing him because he is the first boss of the last released raid in cata, just as marrow was for wraith. I will even give you a link to him that failed to do so in a timely manner. If anyone can do this, and do it successfully I will come back to wow.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Morchok