I was a bit surprised in recent discussions to see so many comments that said (paraphrased) "you can't make raid boss encounters easier, because they require strategy". I think you got that one backwards. Raid boss encounters require strategy, because they are so hard. I've been to Molten Core with a level 70 raid guild, and the same encounters that needed a lot of strategy at level 60 suddenly were a lot easier and left far more room for error. It wasn't as if good strategy wasn't helpful any more. But if lets say somebody was turned into a bomb by Baron Geddon and exploded in the middle of the raid instead of in a safe corner, it didn't cause a wipe any more, because people had more health, and were faster healed back up to full.
The difficulty of raiding is basically the about the degree of perfection that a raid group has to achieve to beat the boss encounter. And that degree of perfection depends very much on numerical values, both those of the boss mob, and those of the raid group. You can see that by the equally backward comment of "you don't need to make Karazhan easier for noobs, because Karazhan is already much easier now than it was at the start". Of course Karazhan is much easier now for a raiding guild; not only do they have more experience with the encounters, but they are now wearing epic gear from many Karazhan visits, and that makes a big difference in difficulty. A group of 10 players who never visited Karazhan before and who are wearing blue gear from non-heroic 5-man dungeons will still find Karazhan to be very, very difficult.
Just like you can make Karazhan easier by equipping the whole raid group with epic gear, you could make it easier by by reducing numerical values of trash and boss mobs. If a boss has less health, deals less damage per second, and his special attacks have less effect, the encounter would be easier. If you take some raid boss and reduce for example his health, dps, and damage from specials all by 20%, suddenly many groups that would wipe at that encounter before would be able to do it. This is probably more evident to people with experience as raid healers, because they know how much of a difference it makes if the boss mob needs 5 seconds longer to reduce the main tank from full health to zero.
The importance of numerical boss stats is very visible in heroic 5-man dungeons. The heroic bosses do not have any different abilities than the non-heroic ones, they just have higher numerical stats. If you have a group that can kill the first boss of heroic ramparts, and take the same group to the non-heroic version, they can afford many more mistakes and strategic errors and still win.
So I still believe that labeling the current raid dungeons as "heroic", and then creating a mirror copy where everthing has lower stats (and maybe some trash is removed) would create "easy mode" raid dungeons that would be accessible to a far larger number of people. People would still have the hard version with better rewards to aspire to. But they could train how to do raid encounters in a less unforgiving environment, and earn something like raid points and raid badges that could then be used to buy equipment. Players wouldn't be forced to do PvP even if they didn't like it much, just for the rewards they get there from honor points and BG badges.
It is unlikely that Blizzard will do these changes for the TBC dungeons. But they still could introduce "normal" and "heroic" raid dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King, just like they introduced "normal" and "heroic" 5-man dungeons in TBC.
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