Thanks for the notes! These are useful for us to cross reference with our internal data points that we gather as well.
On that note, we internally gather data on things like how many times any group loses to a boss before killing it, fight duration, etc. These can be separated by raid difficulty, raid size, average item levels, date of kill, and more. If a boss shows up as out of band for a particular difficulty given its place in the raid, we open conversations to resolve that outlier. It’s not often that we might make a boss harder (especially in LFR), but certainly if data shows a boss to be too tough, we’ll take a deeper look at it.
On the topic of the dungeon journal, these are good points. At a high level, we try to have the dungeon journal describe to players what a spell does, and not how to handle a mechanic. An example previously mentioned is that Painsmith’s spikes in the dungeon journal tell you they do a bunch of damage if they hit players, but it doesn’t mention spike patterns or moving walls of spikes. Similar to that, the Lords of Dread and Rygelon dungeon journals should inform players what a spell effectively does, while at the same time not giving instructions to players as to how they should solve the mechanic. Experiencing the mechanic first hand should always be the most informative method for learning a boss. That’s not to say we always hit these points though, we’re constantly looking to improve on visibility and clarity in boss fights and the dungeon journal itself.
Thanks once more for the feedback points and bug reports though! For us, data points should not be the sole determining factor for making decisions–player sentiment and feedback also play a very important role.