Such is the price of curiousity =p

Why hello there.

I like how many of the bosses in WoW are "technical" encounters, defeated through tactics rather than by brute force. What is cool is trying different tactics, and seeing which ones work. Many encounters require that every single player know exactly what to do, and execute their job.

Seeing 8 healers ready to spam their heals on me as I tank Azuregos makes me feel like a God.

I think it took us several attempts to down Azuregos (pictured above) for the first time with a full team of 40 players. Now we can comfortably do it with around 25 members, without a single casualty, since everyone knows their job, we have so much redundancy. Killing Azuregos is a 20 minute long encounter, a matter of outlasting her and dealing slow steady damage. Everything must run like clockwork -> in these sorts of encounters, a single mistake by a single person can get everyone killed, each person must know their job and execute it precisely. And your "job" in these encounters will be vastly different to your normal duties when playing WoW. For example sometimes Priests are expected to DPS, and are told to heal as little as possible. In some encounters, Warriors are supposed to fire their ranged weapons, and not use their melee weapons. In some encounters, Mages don't fire a single offensive spell, but only use their Decursing spells. Some encounters a Paladins might be asked to be an OOC combat rezzer, just hang around 'outside' the combat zone so they can ressurect players who die. The level of creativity that players have to resort to in making such technical encounters easier is just amazing.

On the other end of the spectrum there are brute force encounters, which are also alot of fun. There's Lord Kazzak, a demon boss which "must" be defeated within 3 minutes, or else he goes into an "ultimate" state and kills everyone. Also doable with around 25 players, but of course it's faster and easier with 40. It's fun once in a while to unleash the full damage potential of your character without having to hold back.

The other type of brute force encounter would be something like Ragnaros. There is a lot of fire damage in this encounter, and melee characters often have to swim through lava to navigate the area. The key to winning? Stock up on large quantities of Greater Fire Protection potions, and obtain the best fire resistance buff by getting your priests to mind-control the spellbinders in Blackrock Spire before the fight... and the fight goes really smoothly as long as everyone stacks on as much fire resistance as they can. I have more than 300 Fire Resist for this fight, and our Main Tank has more then 400.

And some encounters, are obviously a mixture of both, like the Onyxia encounter. Large amounts of fire damage, which must be negated, and lots of AOE fear, which must also be protected against. Yet this is also technically demanding : aggro control is important, everyone has to have a really good grasp of how much threat they're generating, because this boss in particular is immune to taunts from the MT : a single mistake at any point in this 25 minute encounter potentially exposes the raid to a 3600 damage AOE fire attack (sometimes up to 4000 even 5000), which is almost surely fatal to the entire raid.

At the moment, I have 5 epics and have more than half my dkp remaining to be spent, but that's not really the point, the best thing is watching how we get better and work together in defeating the ever trickier encounters in the game.