[Reminiscing] Do you remember the good old days when......

I was in a Trial of the Champion this morning with a good friend of mine, and a few other random old-school raiders, and we got into the discussion of what was challenging, and then went from there to reminiscing when the game was actually kinda hard.

Trial of the Crusader is not hard. It's a bit of a range and positioning nightmare, but there's no real strategy to it. Most bosses can be zerged down with a group of heavy hitters. There's no positioning required except that you stay behind bosses, get out of fire etc.

I look back at the Gurtog Bloodboil fight in Black Temple, I remember running in and out of the pools of water when you had Bloodboil. I remember spell stealing buffs off of Reliquary of Souls, I remember needing special gear for High King Maulgar, tanks needing nature resist gear for SSC, and warlocks tanking Leotheras the Blind.

What happened to the days where the game required a little more work than sitting there mashing buttons? Where it could take Blizzard over a year to release content because no one had cleared the existing content yet, where healers actually had to balance mana regen and spellpower?

What about raids, 15 man and 40 man raids are a thing of the past, and with it the guilds that kept a decent number of players, and that unguilded people were hunting for the perfect guild to help them feed their need for raiding. Now we see such a large population of players being unguilded, and still rocking awesome gear, and wearing the titles that would've been previously reserved for people in organized raiding guilds.

I miss the epic quest chains for things like weapons, or titles. I remember working so hard on getting "Champion of the Naaru" and even working toward "Hand of A'dal" (I did not get Hand of A'dal since my guild wasn't that far ahead in progression at the time). I remember my first trip into Tempest Keep, and learning to dodge orbs on Lootreaver.

What happened to those days when downing a boss left a sense of accomplishment throughout the raid?