Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
At least if there's too much information at once you can pause the video or watch a section again until you fully understand it. Much worse are overly long videos with minutes of uninteresting filler.

Then there are text guides which under-explain or explain poorly. My pet peeve is when a guide describes the dance the players must do, but fails to properly explain what kind of shape the mechanics have and how much damage they do. Knowing how to do the fight properly is all well and good, but true mastery comes through understanding what's happening and why you need to do the things you do. That gives you the ability to adjust on the fly if something goes wrong.

One example of a symptom of too rigid guides and lack of full understanding is the popular macro used to visualize player positions around the boss in O10S. I was in a static back then and we had a different method of determining positions (tanks/healers take cardinals, DPS are paired with them and take intercardinals clockwise from their partners). When we had to get random players they were often confused by our way of doing things. The positioning really boils down to two rules: during the large X-shaped mechanic DPS get thunder circles around them so each DPS must go in a different direction, and earth shaker shoots a cone-shaped AoE towards each player so players must be roughly evenly spaced around the boss. When you understand what the mechanics do you can easily figure out where you need to be.
See thats why I just dont do guides. I need to learn by DOING the content. Then when I die or we wipe I need to be told what happened and at what part. Seeing it and playing it myself and having my Party Members help me understand is leagues better then watching a video from someone else perspective.
My own experience and perspective along with helpful teammates is the way to learn.