Originally Posted by
Kalisandra
And yet people laughed when Paladins complained about losing Sense Undead.
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It took a while for BfA, while it was current, to make itself more disliked by me that WoD. It managed it, but it took a while.
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Funny you should say that, because Cata broke my favourite two specs, Retribution and Elemental and did a pretty good job of ruining Restoration Shamans too. Now, they were (mostly) fixed in Firelands, but to start with Ret had a non-functional mastery and was really bad - as in needs help to do Tol Barad dailies in less than twice the time it takes anyone else bad. Elemental just hit like a wet noodle in all content. Resto went oom constantly so all you could afford to do was snipe with ST heals.
Now Firelands fixed up most of that, with a reworked Ret mastery and Holy Power system, buffed Elemental (too late for the full-time Elementals in my guild, though - they left for other games), and buffed Resto with the same mastery they still have (which was really useful in Firelands and Dragon Soul because the fights lent themselves to letting the raid run low on health and then using the Mastery plus a CD to bring them right back up) and mana regen off Lightning Bolts. Oh, and this was when Ele and Resto got to cast Lightning Bolts on the move. I miss that almost as much as I miss Gust of Wind.
So, in my experience Cata did indeed get the rotations, etc. feeling good, but it took most of the expansion for some classes. The heroics and raids being hard at the expansion's opening wasn't the only reason Cata bled subs. A story many weren't terribly interested in was another, and so was some fairly terrible class balance and design early on.
It also introduced the version of Combustion that made me hate my Fire Mage, so there's that. On the plus side, my Sub Rogue felt really good to play (not that I did more than farm ore and skins and murder people in random BGs with them).
One thing Mists did fairly well was that it didn't completely gut and rebuild most specs, so a lot of them still worked okay to start. Before they were nerfed MoP Shadoiw Priests were amazing fun, too.
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Having Karabor as an actual functional place, and a proper story for the fall of Shattrath, etc. would've made many Alliance players a lot happier, too.
It also brought the start of the 'bare-bones' spec design, though the added power in the Legion style wasn't there yet.
By the way, one reason BfA was so badly received was that without the Legion artefact weapon the BfA specs weren't just bane-bones, they were positively skeletal. Some were barely functional whilst levelling, especially once the legendaries turned off. At least in Legion characters started with most of their WoD abilities still there (and set bonuses), and the weapon added to that usefully right away. BfA gave you a couple of (usually awful) azerite powers that usually had nothing to do with your character's class or spec at all, and you didn't get the good stuff until well into end-game gearing.