Players who have played in vanilla 60s will find that now WOW is now ezmode because to get epics in vanilla, you needed to have at least 40 committed raid members to raid MC and BWL... Think about it, 40 committed jokers to wake up at 8am in the morning and raid till 2pm...

Besides MC and BWL, other obtainable epics were from pvping to rank 12 and rank 14 for Marshal > Grandmarshal items. Or getting exalted with AV/AB/WSG.

Then if those were a b**** to do, you can run 10-15man raids like UBRS/Scholomance/Strats.. (before they were tuned down to 5 man groups. (Back then if you had a full set of tier0 aka Magisters Regalia, Valor set, etc you were pretty hardcore and ready to do raids...)

Thinking from an oldie mindset, yes acquiring epic now is ezmode... But it has been ezmode eversince they stopped pvp ranks and made all marshal > grandmarshal gears accessible via honor points... Before outlands it's already been ezmode...