I avoid watching videos before coming into a new fight, simply because I feel it ruins the fun of actually learning the fight. You can watch a dozen videos, overgear yourself to hell and back, but here's the thing: those videos are generally of perfect fights that are run by FCs. So if you're in a standard PuG then odds are you won't have that perfect run, and things will undoubtedly go wrong.

For example, I set up a Turn 1 group a while back that had two people who had completed it, while the remaining six of us had either never run it before, or had gotten up to Caduceus. I'd say four of us (including myself) knew the gist of the Caduceus fight in Turn 1, while the other two had never set foot in Coil. They both watched videos, but one only watched it for hints and asked the experienced people in our group for tips on what to do, while the other followed the video's strategy verbatim and didn't ask for help because they thought that's how everyone ran it. Needless to say, it took the person who followed the video step-by-step longer to actually get used to the fight. When a mistake happened, they waited for everyone else to explain what went wrong, while the other guy quickly understood how and why he messed up. They couldn't get over the fact that another group's strategy wasn't working for our group.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you're in a group with people new to the fight, be prepared to wipe. Wiping, contrary to some people's belief, is NOT the end of the world. And sometimes it's best to take things slow, as well. Yes, burning through a boss is by far the fastest way, but if you wipe five times doing so then guess what: you just spent longer than if you took your time. Most of us in that run had never fought ADS, and the people who had told us to burn ADS while I (WAR, at the time) held all the Nodes. The first five times I couldn't stay alive holding more than two of the Nodes, and so we kept wiping (didn't help that out BRD was lagging a bit and missed silences). I eventually asked one of the DPS to help me out in killing the Nodes, and guess what? We won on that first try because, even though we got hit with a High Voltage midway through, I was able to survive against the Nodes long enough to keep them from going off and killing everyone else. Yes, that last attempt took all of 30 seconds to one minute longer, but we won, and it would've worked out earlier had we not wanted to rush through it.