I’ve come to grips with having a base power that’s around end-of-expansion level in SoD with the availability of beneficial stats on lower level items.
The thing that will never feel at home in a Classic environment for me is the level of AoE damage and threat we have. Besides 20 man raiding, it’s the only enduring complaint that I have have about SoD.
Otherwise 8.5/10 good content for the game as a whole in phase 5. Will give rating on phase 6 later.
But AOE all the things is so much fun…drool…
The problem with this is all classes become homogenized because they all get AOE/cleaves, just like how M+ in retail made it necessary for all classes to have AOE/cleave, self heals, defensive cooldowns, sprints, etc to be viable. Besides, none of the content other than raids with hard mode have been tuned to the new power curve. So if you are even pre-raid BIS with runes, you end up being able to blast through any instance. Previously, you had to include some forms of CC in your group comp in order to succeed. You had to think a little bit more about pulls.
Is one design philosophy better than the other? I’m not 100% sure. there’s pros and cons with both. But lack of class differentiation is something that drastically reduces the fun of playing the game IMO. What’s the point of rolling a mage, rather than warlock, spriest, or hunter, if they all have more or less the same tools.