Reading up on raids

For most of us, we are coming close to the point where we will have gathered what we are going to gather in terms of gear from reputation, crafting and heroics. Now we turn to the new tier raid content and look to the entry-level raids. We've been raiding content we are familiar with for so long and have grown somewhat accustomed to 'someone else' knowing the heroic fights and explaining them that a gentle reminder to read up on the raid fights ahead is due diligence.

Frankly, most of the many sources of "how to" guides or strats have slim pickings in regards to 'win' strats with the new Tier 11 bosses - strategies are, understandably, still being improved upon. An exception to this is Tankspot.com which just uploaded this week a whole host of win! Go watch them! Hence, we will need to prepare ourselves old school, by also referring to write ups found in Wowhead.com (old school would have been Thottbot) and wowpedia.org (formerly wowwiki). You can find a wealth of information on the instances, bosses, and mobs as well as strategies in the comments on wowhead. e.g.:

Baradin Hold   wowhead    wowpedia    [wowhead comments]
 - Argaloth (boss)   wowhead & comments   wowpedia

You will find that tankspot has the strat videos up and also that, for example, the Argaloth tankspot video is on wowhead.com.

The theme here is: Go prepare for raids! Go now! What are you doing still here?! Go prepare!!

The resources available to us in advance of stepping into an instance mean no one should need any boss abilities explained nor should there be any surprises on boss phases - tankspot videos pretty much lay out everything visually for you.

All raiders that will be in Tier 11 content are by default progression raiders! This is not like doing Naxx when ICC is the current tier - all raiders must step into the raid instance prepared both in gear, consumables and mindset. It will take far, far, far too long to explain every nuance to every raider for every trash pull and boss in the new content if people do not know the mechanics of the fights. What raid leaders will explain in the instance is how we will tackle the mechanics, will explain the strategy we will use and will answer questions. The raiders by default must know the mechanics before they zone in.

For example, Argaloth does a meteor slash. It is on the 'Abilities' tab for him on wowhead. Raid leaders will not be explaining that ability. When it lands, it should not come as a surprise to anyone and everyone should know what caused them to just lose 40k health on one shot and the healers should have been anticipating it as soon as they see the cast bar in DBM. Tanks should not need to be told that it places a debuff on them, just how we are going to handle that debuff (the other tank taunts the boss once their debuff has dropped).

Raiding windows are very small as people have to get home from work and have to go to bed - please come prepared so that we can maximize how much content we cover rather than how many hours we spend on the same bosses.

Thank you in advance!