Good Lord. Okay. Several people in the thread seem dubious of any claims that BC heroics were harder. To be fair, each of them straight up admits that they didn't play in BC. This is going to be a tome so buckle up:

BC HEROICS WERE MUCH MORE DIFFICULT (unless you were in a raiding guild)

So first there was the issue of accessibility. Nowadays all you need to get into a heroic is an easily-cheesed ilvl. In BC, you needed to grind to revered with the appropriate faction before you could access that faction's corresponding heroic. Not all heroics. Just the particular one or two that matched with that faction. And I use the word "grind" very deliberately: doing all the quests for a faction would maybe bring you from neutral to halfway through friendly. To get the remainder of the rep you had maybe one daily that could be done for reputation. Some factions didn't even have dailies, all they had was repeatable turn-ins, which meant either grinding mobs or hitting up the AH for really overpriced goods. Even worse was the fact that some turn-ins or dailies and most mobs depreciated and stopped giving reputation above a certain level. So after a certain level (often Honored) you were stuck doing the one daily, killing mobs hoping they drop the item for the or repeatable turn-in, or running the corresponding regular over and over, to the tune of maybe 800 rep a run. So imagine that in order to fight heroic Squid Hat, you had to be exalted with Earthen Ring (which would be about a comparable grind). Grats now you have the reputation, paid a non-insignificant fee for the key (18 gold was about a day's worth of dailies back then =P), now you have to find a group willing to run it with you (sans-LFG of course)! Okay but now your friend really wants the trinket off Rajh, so time to grind to exalted with Ramkahen...

Second was gear. I remember that after running all the heroics I did in BC, even with pugging Karazhan a few times, I had enough badges to buy one piece of gear. One. There's a reason experienced players decry "welfare epics"; I disagree with their (unhelpful) views, but I can sympathize with where they're coming from. Nowadays if you can't beat an encounter, it's common to come back later when you have more gear and just run him over. Remember how at the beginning of Cata a lot of groups used to skip Commander Springvale in SFK because he was so hard? About two months in, people stopped skipping him because he was doable. Some of it was the nerf, some of it was the dissemination of strategy, but some of it defintiely was people accumulating gear from BH, craftables, VP, and maybe pugging some easy raids, and thus being able to do more everything: tank more, heal more, DPS more. That didn't happen in BC. One upgrade from badges: the only other epic you had access to was one item which dropped off the final boss of the instance. Just drop the words "Sun-Eater" to anyone who had a warrior tank back then; might want to have an EMT on hand for when they go into convulsions.

Finally were the mechanics. I could go into great length about how much more difficult the mechanics were back then but this entry has already run horrendously long so I will focus on one main point: the anatomy of your typical trash pull. Tanks didn't have good AoE threat, as none of the AoE moves did much damage, which meant that the only way to aggro a group of mobs was to tediously select each one individually, throw a few sunders on them, and then select the next one in order. This meant that DPS could only really target one target at a time or else they would pull off the tank. At the same time the tank had to keep tab-targetting because his AoE threat was so poor, or else eventually the healer would rip aggro off him. But oh, remember how all the DPS are focusing on one target? If the tank concentrated too hard on keeping the various mobs on him, then eventually one of the DPS would pull the focus target off. But oh no the tank focused too hard on skull, so now the mobs are all over the healer again. This delicate dance continued until all the mobs were dead.
HOWEVER
A non-raid geared tank, even if they could hold aggro on everything, could not survive having more than one or two mobs on him. You know how nowadays you maybe mess up a pull, someone accidentally AoEs, but everyone blows all their cooldowns, and you survive with maybe a DPS down and the healer OOM but you feel awesome? Yeah, that doesn't happen when the cooldown on Shield Wall is ten minutes. So CC is a requirement, except that before the great CC-homogenization of Wrath and Cata, most classes didn't have a reliable CC. You basically had to rely on a mage. After mages, you had a second tier of CCs with hunters (which meant a combo of distracting shot, LoSing and feign death because remember, no trap launcher) and rogues (sap for one minute, and then your primary target better be dead because here comes the sapped mob!) Also your DPS better not be taking damage, because there wasn't much to speak of in terms of AoE heals! Druids (no Wild Growth) and especially Paladins (no beacon!) were relatively out of luck in that department.

I've gone on way too long here, so maybe you can just trust me when I say that BC heroics were much more difficult than current heroics.

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