The only hard raid in WotLK was Ulduar, which doesn't even work here. Vanilla was super easy and each of the 40-man raids could be done with half of the people, as long as they knew what they were doing - and most people didn't. Now if we're gonna talk about hardcore, I'd say TBC raids and especially some heroics (Shattered Halls, oh dear god) were hardcore. Just go and try some Vanilla or TBC server and you'll see. You'll see that vanilla is actually not that hard at all, you'll see that you can't clear a TBC Hc in 15min as you can on WotLK. After WotLK I can't really say - nothing was hard for me on Cata, but it was fun at least. I don't play MoP.
Lordaeron being hardcore? Why? Just because it's gonna be 1x? This just means 2 more weeks needed to level, from which point it will be absolutely identical in terms of gearing up - farm the 90% unscripted PoS, farm RDF, reach 4.8k, farm ToGC and VoA, then farm ICC - I don't see any difference or anything hardcore here...
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