Exactly what I said.
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Nost has always tweaked encounters for a relevant challenge.
Probably not actually as the “best people in the world in 2004” didn’t actually know what they were doing, they just had the time to sit in MC for 8 hours at a time painfully slow grinding their way through trash, respawn trash, more respawn trash, bathroom breaks, more trash, food breaks, more trash, oh look a boss, more trash, while putting up with 39 other people they barely knew with a Raid Leader screaming obscenities as the most mundane and likely inconsequential of mistakes.
Vanilla was about finding the least toxic guild that could still herd 40 people to loot in a raid. The numbers made PvE actually a PvP game… thanks politics!
/tin-foil-hat
I’d have to dig through the patch notes. But I do recall, on Nost, people saying the Rag fight implemented was ‘post nerf’. Which I’m guessing means Blizzard, at some point between release and 1.12.1, had nerfed the Rag fight a bit.
So, since this is 1.12.1 game mechanics…ya. Stuff is going to be easy. In fact, I bet Cthun will be killable upon release (Blizzard actually made it so it was mechanically impossible to beat; later nerfing it to be beatable…OG Timegating! 
).
Mechanics are what make bosses difficult. Not just increasing their health or damage output. That is nothing but a gear check.
I think your view of ‘difficulty’ is overly narrow.
From the standpoint of twitch gaming, Vanilla raids were indeed easy. You showed up and just did your thing.
From the standpoint of logistics, they were a nightmare. You had to assemble a 40-man team of the right mixture of classes. You had to ensure they all had the right gear/attunements. You had to cover a wild mix of bizarre consumables. You had oddities like healing rotations that needed to be set up.
All of this is essentially hand-waved away in retail. It’s more like League of Legends, where you’re handed a stock character and the skill is in how you use that stock character.
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Where did all the 
's go?
I miss seeing Williams be wrong about everything.
Technically, not wrong. This is 1.12.1 game mechanics applied to content that was in 1.1 (think that was the official ‘release patch’ that launched the game back in '04).
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It technically is wrong because all people can point to are vague memories of having a harder time 15yrs ago with no actual changes listed anywhere on things that actually matter. I swear every time I ask for proof I get Patch Note changes about trash respawn timers or bug-fixes that actually made the encounter harder.
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Ragnaros_(tactics)
This page hasn’t changed in ages. The DoT Rag applies to the Tank is 4,800 over 8 sec. You can look at Warcraft Logs and see that’s the same DoT applied on Live, and Tanks are rocking various amounts of FR to deal with it since its the single nastiest source of damage in the fight since Rag otherwise melee’s weaker than many of the other bosses in MC.
Regardless, even a modicum of buffs place any Tank wearing half-decent gear well past the point of “melting” if your Healers aren’t dead, asleep, or swimming in the lava. Damage taken by Tanks in Vanilla never really spikes save for a few select encounters with literally no other mechanics for the Healers to stress about like Broodlord or Patchwerk.
compared to every other alternative available to them in 2004, player steamrolled stuff in WoW.
it was literally the most casual-friendly MMO on the market by a very long shot… actually being able to solo your way to max level on every class was simply unheard of in the MMO genre ( and laughed at… solo’ing to max level in a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER game?)
WoW did 2 things right : it could run on a toaster, and given enough time even my grandmother could reach lvl 60. this was a novelty compared to EQ2 and co.
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They have said in a Q/A they wont be using the unkillible version so… you are not wrong there. however they said if you want the challenge have the raid go in minus a few gear slots. like everyone with no shoulders for example.
When I say game mechanics I’m also including talent/ability changes. An example is in Patch 1.4, Rip had it’s damage increased.
Changes, like that, are why I was against releasing Classic on 1.12.1’s patch level. Even after learning that content would still be ‘progressively released’.
Basically, we should have been aware that this time Vanilla wouldn’t be like last time Vanilla. It would be different…heck, we would be different.
I’m enjoying Classic. My leveling has purpose. My drops have meaning. Dungeons feel like dungeons, instead of “loot cave”). The community is there; I’ve seen the same player more than once across multiple days! 
Raiding won’t be the same, but that’s fine. I don’t have the time these days to raid “like it use to be”.
Changes like these are why I can’t take the “1.12 is nerfed Classic” crowd very seriously. No Feral Druid worth their salt is using Rip, at all. Never mind the fact that Bleeds simply don’t apply to a ton of mobs, especially in Molten Core, but it takes up a debuff slot and Ferocious Bite scales better.
There are hundreds of changes exactly like this that are changed from 1.1, and have no bearing on the current raid environment. Look at the massive rework between 1.1 and 1.12 for Rogues in their Subtlety tree and then look at the talents taken by Combat Swords specs, the dominate spec at the moment.
There are some clear cut improvements in use right now, like Winter’s Chill for Mages and Bloodthirst for Warriors, but the vast majority of classes being used in raid right now are as strong as they were on release. Spell Power is a bit higher, but weapon damage has also already been normalized so melee is actually WEAKER using blues like Thrash Blade than prior.
Gear tweaks and talent improvements alone cannot account for the differences in DPS we saw 15yrs ago that was considered amazing with what we’re seeing now from the top parses across multiple guilds.
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lol, I actually had every major patch I thought would make ‘current content’ easier. But deleted it all because it was kind of wordy. 
But they were patches that either changed damage, reduced costs, or added abilities (ie when Innervate became a base Druid ability; Patch 1.11.0; replaced with Swiftmend).
I just left the first patch because it objectively increased damage output of an ability. Like, there’s a patch that made SoCommand proc more, but only do 70% of the weapon damage. Which would require mathing to figure out if the damage was higher or lower, especially for a ‘raid boss fight’ length of time.
Couple that with the knowledge base we have to pull from and…Rag goes down inside of a month ‘after release’.
Right. And a ton of those are irrelevant, even the efficiency things like Innervate and Evocation becoming baseline abilities, because fights are so short. Shaz only has 350k health, why we ever bothered with anything other than zerging his paper thin butt down is beyond me.
I can do the math thing, I’ve done it in the past a ton and don’t mind doing it now for more classes because frankly they’re all so much easier to model. For the handful of outliers I’ve messed with so far, the biggest winners of 1.12 are Warriors with about 18% net increase if and only if they make good gearing decisions that specifically exclude most big pretty epic weapons and 8/8 Tier 1.
It doesn’t help that most people in Vanilla didn’t hang on to their Mara quest rewards for very long and were eager to drop Thrash Blade in favor of something much tastier looking (and purple!), and using daggers is for Rogues (lol). People assumed their way out of ideal scenarios because of lack of reproducible experiments/equipment and ain’t no one wanna grind BRD for Ironfoe (although they absolutely should, that thing is a beast).
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Classic in my view is nothing but a dumbed down version of BFA just to level 60 in real vanilla blues and epics were rare asf ah is flooded with them thousands have epic mount already due to cheating using layers to farm more then a normal player to amass huge insane amounts of gold but blizzard allows it…
i knew something was up after 20 minutes i was level 10 vanilla you needed skill to level your toon …this is same as BFA jsut spam stuff it dies… it pathetic
Or we could ask blizz for a tune. I am pretty sure the ease at which people are downing MC has further reaching effects than, “game2easy.”
For instance, anyone want to buy my fire resist potions? no? Don’t need them? ok…
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be people who aren’t as skilled as the top of the line guilds who will buy them. Or, y’know, you could make healing and mana potions. Those are always useful. Sure, not exactly a moneyspinner, but once you have your epic mount, you don’t need a ton of money, anyways.
My point is that the difficulty, or perceived difficulty, of raid content has effects on all aspects of the endgame right now. The economy is only one of them. The whole emphasis on gearing in general suffers. I am sure we can think of more if we took the time to.
It’s pointless arguing with people who still view vanilla as their peak for raiding skill.
it’s a massive shock for them to see top players dumpster the content they struggled on for months back in the day and you should 100% expect to see them call all future raids ‘‘nerfed’’ when guilds 1 day clear Naxx.
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