There are different ways for players to learn boss fights.
- Trial and error. Go in blind, figure out what you can, and if you fail then figure out why you failed and try something different next time.
- As above, but with addons that give additional hints (eg. Change targets now! Move out of the fire now!)
- Talking to other players. Get someone to tell you what you have to do.
- Read about it offline or watch a video tutorial.
Blizzard have tried to incorporate #4 into the game with the in game dungeon journal. This lists out the abilities (and phases) of the dungeon and raid bosses.
Shame it doesn’t mention that the middle of the floor disappears in the last phase of the Elegon fight, so if you don’t run to the outside, you will die. You might think this was key information. I assume this is intentional to make sure that players need to figure out the strategy – but if it is meant to replace looking things up offline, it doesn’t work.
Do you find the dungeon journal useful?
Welcome to Spinksville! 
It’s vaguely useful, in the sense that most LFD runs are PUGs, and noone is going to bother explaining the fights to a “newb”. Certainly not beyond the most basic instructions, like “lol druid kill adds first”. So if I get a second or two before a fight (unusual), a very quick read up can give an important tip.
See, while it would be handy to quickly look up ‘what should I do in this fight’, I find the journal a bit confusing because it doesn’t tell you that. You have to figure it out from the boss ability list.
I used it to look up the boss abilities that came with tank warnings when I started pugging heroics. Not that it helped much because it never mentioned any of the other things I needed to pay attention to. Like Gate of the Setting Sun, where just about every fight involved adds, and I still don’t know what exactly I am supposed to do in the Raigonn fight. Heh.
Well, I have always considered it to be just a list of boss abilities, something to save me the time to open the combat log and click on all of them to see the damage/mechanics they have.
I definitely don’t expect it to tell me HOW I should handle the mechanics, especially since this will depend on the group composition. In our guild, we go in blind and do a couple of pulls just to see what’s going on. Then we read the journal to see in detail the boss abilities and we decide for a strategy, which will often be changed in the beginning.
BTW the entry you cite says “disabling the energy vortex”. This is a hint that “something” will happen, and during a bos fight, this usually means that things could go wrong 🙂
I think this is the use Blizzard had in mind when they wrote it.
This is sort of like books that come out after movies, you get the substance (or most of it) without the nuance. If I were to describe to you what a rainbow looks like, it still wouldn’t replace you actually seeing it.
Still, it does give you some foot forward in terms of what to expect.
I’ve read the Journal entries, but I find I get just as much if not more useful info from PUGees instead.
Well when you’re new to a fight, it often helps clarifying certain stuff. Like for how much does abilty x exactly hit? can my tank live through it or does he need timed heals? We use it to optimize when bosses are still rough.
But in no way does it replace a tactics guide.
It’s not useful, IMO. It could be useful if it explained what the strategy was, rather than mostly context-free tidbits of information about individual boss actions.
I find it quite epic in this case. In LFR its that “noob” check (call it newbie check if you will), and you know you’re playing with a doughnut if he falls down again. I also like how battle res / mass res is unavailable in this case (fell down too far). Heck, we even had our tank die to it on normal mode (as a guild who’s progressing in HMs). He’s normally a very good player.
I find the dungeon journal useful. You can link abilities from it and quickly look something up. True, it doesn’t explain you the fight completely but that’d make the fight too trivial. Part of the epicness is people failing from it. Part of raiding epicness is overcoming challenges (although this mechanic by itself isn’t very challenging). The dungeon journal explains you what the boss does; guides teach you what you should (or could) do.
You forgot one method which teaches people how to do a fight: addons. Not only boss mods I’m talking about. There’s addons which make fights trivial such as Yor Sahj Priority, addons which tell and explain you how and why someone died, and so on.
I understand the dungeon journal speaks of phases in the Elegon context but its confusing. I rather speak of P1 (100-85%) then transition phase (which contains the sparks and pillars; so you could call this part A and B of transition), P2 (85%-50%) and then same again a transition phase (the 2nd) and then P3 (50%-0%).