[arthurbrown]

People conjure various reasons for why things are different now, but routinely omit the changes in class talents and gearing.

At launch there was zero spell damage or healing on raid gear as a stat. You might find some green of shadow wrath but items like Robe of volatile power simply did not exist yet.

Warriors, the current top damage class, had a talent rework at BWL release which introduced their main damaging ability at nearly half the effectiveness of where it eventually end up.

Throw in world buff scheduling and the game is very different from how it played at launch.