Am I playing WoW or youtube?

I just joined a raiding guild.

I even teared up a little bit as I left my old casual guild behind. My new GM invited me as an "initiate" where I have to prove I can be successful in raids in two weeks. Except that I haven't raided anything relevant in Wrath, so I need to nail it cold, or at least fake it convincingly.

So I've been watching a lot of youtube lately.

There's a great series of videos that teach WoW raid bosses by a website called "Tankspot". They are great and informative and I usually nod off about halfway through. Because instead of playing WoW, I'm watching somebody else play WoW while trying to memorize the five ways I can wipe the raid in every fight. So I can avoid doing those things.

Why do I need to do this?

You'll find a lot of people on the internet, and on the forums, and online, that talk about how great it is to come up with a successful raid strategy. I'm sure that it is great to come up with a raid strategy. But now that raiding has become mainstream, how many people get to have this kind of fun? If your guild asks you to watch the tankspot videos, it's likely that none of them ever had that fun.

If you're not one of the strategizing-fun people, you're one of the learning-bored people. And step one (falling asleep on youtube) isn't even the worst part -- the worst part is step two : going to the instance terrified that you'll forget something from youtube and wipe the raid because you didn't see a little debuff icon that said you were a 30-second bomb. Of course there's a mod to watch for the bomb icon. (sigh)

Can't we just dispense with this? Most single-player games don't require you to spend hours strategically planning fights ahead of time, and they certainly don't require you to watch for tiny icons.

A good boss encounter should show players what they need to do before the fight, while making it clear during the fight what is happening. For example, before the fight show the boss turning one of his minions into a bomb, and then show his minion exploding and killing other minions. Every player will then know (sans youtube) that being a bomb is bad, and that being near other players while being the bomb is worse. Then during the fight, instead of giving players a little "bomb" debuff icon, turn their character models into a physical bomb.

So without any mods that yell I am the bomb, and without watching youtube, I can actually play World of Warcraft. Instead of the mod-downloading, youtube-watching MMO that I'm playing right now.