It depends on the raid, the fight mechanics get substantially more complicated than that. Even in Lich King which was one of the easier expansions (and the last one I seriously played) you had fights like the Dracolich before Arthas (the name eludes me) which involved mechanics where all the spellcasters would get a stacking debuff that would blow them up if it got too big as they cast spells. In addition the boss periodically froze random raid members into blocks of ice, and the only way to avoid his attacks was to hide behind the blocks of ice, but the gimmick was the people in the ice blocks were suffocating so you had to time breaking them out of the ice so they wouldn't die, but also keep them frozen long enough to avoid the attack. In the final phase the dragon lands, has to be tanked sideways, and you need to position the people getting frozen near the head and tail and run between the ice blocks as the only place to avoid a radial DoT, and let it's stacks diminish, periodically smashing them to save the raid members and replacing them with new people being frozen.The-Traveling-Bard said:
WoW hasn't been "tank and spank while avoiding AoE" for quite a while, even the easy fights require some fairly obtuse mechanics and a decent amount of practice. After a while it gets easier, but typically learning new fights can take wiping a raid for days on end, until you finally get the timing and strategy just right, then it becomes increasingly easier as you progress, get better gear, and get the fight down. After a while it becomes easy to bring new people who don't know the fight at all and win because their contribution and getting it right doesn't usually matter.
To be honest having a good healer isn't nessicarly the key, though it does help. The reason being is that most WoW bosses require you to follow the fight mechanics (bypassing them can get you banned if there is even a way). This includes instant kill effects, with there being nothing to heal you from, it's just "Bam! your dead". In many cases what kills you might have nothing to do with your actions, but depend on someone else doing something to avoid killing other people in the raid. The old Molten Core "Da Bomb" mechanic was an example of this (Baron Geddon) but it got far, far, worse and more obtuse.
Now to be entirely fair, most MMO encounters now are a simple matter of "tank and spank while avoiding marked AoE", but that's because developers have been focusing for a more casual market. It's also what's been killing MMOs because people come in, gear up quickly, and then wind up with nothing to do with that gear since they exhausted all content. When you consider most endgame content is developed so people can sit down and do it in 45 minutes to an hour rather than needing a huge time committment or lots of people, and so that you can pug it without needing the same people to show up every day to try, it means that MMOs cease to be a time sink, which means people stop playing, which has killed the subscription model and has even hurt some FTP games in the long run because nobody is going to want to buy exps potions for example if they can't get exps anymore.
I see where the accusations are coming from, but to be honest WoW isn't a good example, and hasn't been for a long time. Ironically WoW is what developers are trying to get away from in making more casual friendly content, the idea being they will get a bigger market from people who can't commit to wow-type raiding and endgame, but in the end without that kind of an endgame it becomes difficult to sustain long-term interest since people finish the content too quickly, it's that long-term involvement that makes WoW what it is.
To be fair though Molten Core, their original "big" endgame was somewhat overrated as the big trick of it was to get 40 people together. None of the boss gimmicks except for maybe Domo were all that hard to deal with, especially with decurse mods. That said BWL (Blackwing Lair) was known as a "guild killer" as many guilds could not even progress past the first room (with the eggs and huge crowds of spawning mobs) due to that transition point being where it took more than just tank, spank, avoid. If you didn't do the egg destruction/mind control orb perfectly, you WOULD get overrun, especially if your groups wreren't set up to kill the adds properly.
