Pretty sure MC wasn’t tauntable in original version. Also, I was told by someone who experience the original fight that the MC did way more damage than it does now. A MC’d mage could destroy the raid quickly.
The fight was also extremely buggy. When Vashj/KT were retuned when BT was released, the MC mechanic was removed but from my memory the rest of the fight feels the same as the one from the BT patch. The BT patch didn’t put in the huge nerfs that people remember from later TBC. Kael wasn’t killed til BT was released and I’m pretty sure that version of Kael is the one in TBC classic. Seems exactly the same to me.
Let me correct you, Naxx was hard when it was current, Naxx now is easy, still the hardest content in classic. Ppl came in there near BiS with organised WBs. It took casual guilds some time to down Sapp and KT, so it’s not wrong to say Vash is on par with Naxx classic
My guess is that the reason people were able to do it anyway is that in the old days, it took weeks of learning the earlier bosses for people to get this far, so they were mostly in T5 gear–and they didn’t optimize as heavily for DPS, which meant higher health pools and therefore less risk of random death from mechanics (and especially MCs). Because I know for a fact that people didn’t bring the kind of meta comp that nearly every raiding guild does now, and otherwise I simply can’t see people clearing Vashj with 20% or so less DPS.
I wouldn’t say that. Classes got a lot of buffs from 2.0 to 2.4.3 and raid epics were hugely buffed in item level in 2.1. Everyone’s gear has like 15% more stats.
Mages especially are much stronger in this patch than back then. The spirit formula change greatly advantages arcane blast and improved frostbolt used to reduce your spellpower coefficient a lot. Plus mages got icy veins as a talent added and ice block became baseline.
I wont argue with that for most bosses, but Vashj is one of the few where arcane is not a whole lot better than fire… mainly because of mana & range. e.g. mages cant help take out sporebat #1 as arcane, but can do it really well as fire. And the trouble with Vashj is only phase3 where she starts at 50%, meaning 40% of her P3 HP is in molten fury range.
This is an exaggeration. Some of the weaker items got buffed, and some stats were slightly increased, and in many cases a lot of ivalue went into stamina … but you made it sound like it was a global 15% stat increase. Here’s an example:
https://youtu.be/TXAPFk7-ODo
Netherspite ring got +2 crit rating +3 strength.
Meanwhile, ZG buff was already a flat +15% to all stats, on top of all that crit, AP, haste, HP, mana regen that came from the other world buffs. Together they are worth WAY more than any stat increases from gear in 2.1.
And there were nerfs between 2.0 and 2.4 too which you didn’t mention. e.g. spell haste rating got like a 50% nerf in 2.1 before it was buffed about 25% later.
Shaman T4 & T5 4pc bonus nerfed. Livegiving gem was nerfed.
MSD meta gem was OP at launch as well.
The AOE caps were added in 2.2.
Shadow Weaving debuff was nerfed 5%.
Prot pally mana-from-healing no longer works at full HP.
Lifebloom coefficient was nerfed 20% in 2.4.
Brewfest trinkets werent available until like 2.3.
Item/trinket proc rates were progressively nerfed throughout.
And of course, dont forget the massive nerf to Thunderfury which remained the BiS tanking weapon in TBC until the nerf (i remember having our prot warrior tank Moro’s murlocs purely bc of TF threat).