I enjoyed raiding during WoW as a tank; at first I thought tanking was going to be too much pressure, too much stuff to focus on and having to be on the ball in a way that requires almost a panopticon view of the rooms; instead you know what's coming and usually WHERE it's coming from, so keeping your senses to these areas is not an issue. Except in raids.
What drove me batty was how super time sensitive some mechanics were; there was a boss in a raid (Halfus wormbreaker for those who've played) who has an attack (shadow nova?) that has a literal 0.25 second cast time that you have to literally hover your finger over the interrupt button to stop him during the fight. IT'S A 0.25 SECOND WINDOW! THAT'S ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!
You also had rotations being so ridiculously important that if you didn't get the rotation just right, you dealt ridiculously reduced damage, and the rotation's importance had to do with stacking debuffs to maximize your damage and keeping the debuff running (rogue). On normal difficulty you didn't need to be this precise, on heroic you absolutely had to pull out all the stops (although honestly even on normal difficulty, unless every player was bringing some dedication we were going to fail anyway).
Then you also had adds that had to be dealt with in a specific order, or had to be interrupted or CCed while focusing on the boss, and bottom line, you had to bring your high tension frenzied DPS rotation to the fore if you wanted to beat the boss.
One thing I enjoyed about the game was that at least normal was doable for the casuals like myself, but heroic really did feel gated off, and that gear from there was just basically going to be unobtainable for folks like myself, and no farming for this currency or that currency was going to give me a longer route to the same items.
I play (played; I stopped playing years ago) this game to have fun, but some of these mechanics (which exist on normal too) and the need to bring your S+ game to the field was ruining the experience; I play to have fun, not to feel like I'm trying to dodge bullets in real life.
I remember asking someone who had played beyond cataclysm classic if raid mechanics got more chill and nope; they got worse.
I'm fine with mechanics that are like 'don't stand in the fire', or 'stop hitting him during this phase', or 'run away during this phase', not YOU HAVE 0.25 SECONDS OCCURRING EVERY MINUTE WHERE WE COULD ALL DIE UNLESS YOU STOP HIM mechanics, or playing whack a mole where if you miss one everyone dies, or where just one or two players messing up meant everyone in the 10 or 25 man raid was going to die.
I play to have fun, not a heart attack.
Apparently mists of pandaria started doing raids where DPS had important roles too that if neglected would also lead to a wipe.
I was curious to try retail cause I keep hearing the raids have gotten ridiculously simple, but I'm honestly expecting my understanding of simple may be wildly different to the average retail player's understanding of simple (so I'm still expecting extremely time sensitive interrupts and having to be an absolute master at your rotation).
Also small note on the aside: I loved DK tanking, it was awesome
Okay, I'm a wow classic player paying Blizzard money to play it. I've started with the classic vanilla then found a great guild with good folks and I'm riding the boat since. (The original guild leader was a Trans Woman and everyone was chill with that, hence the good folks part, we still reject reactionnary elements.)
So ATM the classic XPaC is Mist of Pandaria, Phase 3 just released after quite a lull since the beginning. I raid every week, we usually do normals for the first month or so and do progression on heroics. We are pretty much casual with a knack to seek our teeth in harder content.
Druid tank is the easiest one at the moment, you have a massive pool of HP, then dodging does the rest. You need to rotate some defensive, and that's pretty much it. I feel like normal raiding is okay difficult at the moment ? Nothing crazy, just some mechanics to learn, but yeah the tank and spam stuff is pretty much over. I heard some people say that MOP is all about mobility and the "oh shit blow CDs" moment. I play probably the hardest rotation class out there with feral, cat druid. I love it, I have to spin plates and keep an eye on timers while dodging stuff on the screen, my ADD brain is pleased.
Some people on the guild are playing Everquest on a private server at the moment, looks like it's pretty much straightforward for combat? It's super early MMORPG, so if old school RPG mechanics is your thing, I think you could have fun in there.
I've heard great stuff from turtle wow too!