The first fight was one of your raid taking control of the boss(one could mess that up and the boss would take out much of the raid in the meantime), taking out various gizmos why enemies spawned all around and attacked the boss. So you have to get rid of the spawns or they’ll yeet the boss, which then blows up and yeets the raid. Adds were spellcasters, melee and melee dragons. One tactic was kiting the adds around. My raid settled for killing all but the dragons (they had far more hp) and take them down when there was a window of time, problem: The kiters had to stay alive, if one kiter died the dragons would snack the healers.

Once all gizmos are down, you only had to kill the boss, that part was rather easy then, unless you took too many casualties.

In short it went from barely any mechanics in Molten Core to that, with nothing in between.

The second boss was a pure and simple brutal damage check. Everyone got extra mana/rage/whateverrogueshad regeneration but took huge fire damage per second and would blow up eventually. During the process of blowing up one had no skill costs and almost no cooldowns. After that, I tend to agree it was quite comfy in the Lair.

Yes the difficulty came from a lack of knowledge, that was part of the fun, figuring out how things worked and keeping the raid together during that time. Honestly I’d agree with you, I would have dropped out too once that was gone. Left during Burning Crusade, didn’t have the patience for it anymore.