Yes. WotLK gave us our first real iteration of “hardmode” options for bosses. By far, the easiest to down were the bosses who had no additional mechanics other than more health and more damage. Even 3-Drake Sartharion, which was mostly just ridiculous increases in damage taken, proved rather trivial to overcome compared to any of the Ulduar Keepers on their respective hardmodes. I’d even place Mimiron and Yogg-Saron NORMAL modes as harder than Sarth3D.
Yes, because the bosses are tuned to have very large special attacks and anemic auto attacks such that Block actually has relevance and mechanics like Parry-Haste and Thrash can exist without globaling the Tank. Dramatically increasing the Tank damage on all fights such that Warriors are required to max out their EH/Avoidance gear to survive only ensures that fights are all just Patchwerk with a different flavor, assuming they can be beaten at all given the very limited duration of Healers if they’re having to go heavy throughput.
Further:
A max defense Bear has significantly more Threat than a max defense Warrior, so this wouldn’t be true.
This doesn’t really matter since almost no fights in Vanilla have soft-enrage or hard-enrage mechanics, and the average guild will see a boss mechanic at least once no matter what anyway.
Vanilla doesn’t provide many avoidable mechanics or anything that resembles personal responsibility. Patchwerk’s Hateful Strikes can’t be outskilled, Gluth’s stacking debuff is entirely RNG, Gothik’s adds do AoE whether you like them to or not, etc. The mechanics we can avoid are things like 4HM aura tics (which one-shot you if you mess up), Anub’rekhan’s Locust Swarm (which will kill you if you stand in it), KT’s Shadow Fissures (which one shot you), etc.
That just leaves Frost Resist for Sapphiron (which we’ll need anyway), and consumables for Loatheb (which we’ll use anyway).
You can’t just amp up Sapph’s aura tics and call it a day. Otherwise you either a) don’t do anything, b) make it so nasty that guilds spend weeks building FrR gear to down it, or c) you accidentally make it impossible without lots of favorable RNG resist tics. A is pointless, B is just annoying but not hard, and C is stupid. There simply aren’t enough levers to toggle in Vanilla because bosses lack mechanics.
They won’t be challenging in the slightest. Making Patchwerk last 2 more minutes means Healers need to pop additional potions and Tanks might need to min/max their EH a bit better to add as much Avoidance as they can, but that’s done BEFORE raid even begins and literally changes not a single thing anyone is doing during the fight.
You don’t understand what makes a fight hard or not, and like Blizzard did with so many early “hardmodes” and Heroics, you’ll only create a fair number of slightly sturdier loot pinata fights that didn’t really challenge anyone.
Your premise that Mythic kills are devalued by LFR existing holds zero water. No one felt that their Heroic LK kill was devalued by the existence of Normal LK, notably because the fights were so dramatically different from one another, not to mention the extreme differences in most of the fights leading up to LK in the first place.
LFR sees the least amount of a fight. Half of them are little more than jazzed up 5mans in terms of any understanding or responsibility, and LFR often barely touches upon the NORMAL mode requirements. Mythic mechanics often, if not always now, completely alter how a fight plays out.
Normal/Heroic Operator in Blackrock Foundry was fun, but boring, and the trains were just kind of silly.
Mythic Operator was a frantic (and amazing) mess that had little to do with damage/health and all to do with way more mechanics to deal with, loads of new timers, and on-the-spot perfect positioning.
No one is under the illusion that they “beat” a tier by only doing LFR. Only very shallow and poorly progressed people think others believe this nonsense.
If you want challenging PvE content, go to Retail, do Mythics and actually down them.
