Yea, I think a lot of people who didn’t play back then either don’t realize, or forgot, that things were different. We weren’t playing on the same client with the same balance we had now, and people didn’t have BiS lists that they followed. It was a very differnt game.
There’s no denying that Paladins are very strong in Era now though. I played in Classic 2019 Phases 1 and 2 and Pallies absolutely crushed it on the healing front.
With that said though, SoD is a different beast. From what I can tell DPS (melee?) and Tank shaman are doing extremely well, right up there with Pallies. Horde should be in a much better position.
With that said, a couple things were raised in this thread so far that stand out…
- BFD has a lot of swords but no axes, so the weapon racials heavily favour Alliance. The actual scope of the damage difference here is unknown.
- Paladins get Blessing of Wisdom while Shaman don’t have Mana Spring yet. Alliance have access to a 15 mp5 buff and Horde don’t. So far as I can tell, Horde don’t have anything that Alliance doesn’t.
I’m not really sure either of these would have contributed to players choosing Horde at the outset, but I think it’s a fair bet that it would contribute to players not wanting to choose Horde after the fact.
While I don’t know the scope of the difference the weapon skill makes (I never play humans anyway :P), it’s easy to measure the difference BoW makes. It’s not a lot but at a minimum it results in a couple extra heals in a fight where players already don’t have a lot of mana to go around.
In a game where people will very much meta the ever loving crap out of things and pursue any advantage, I do think there may have been some Blizzard oversights here. Does that mean Blizzard ruined faction balance? No, I don’t think so… but an axe on the BFD loot table and some kind of mana regen ability would have been a good idea.
Taking a quick look at the runes, a “quick fix” might be to extend a portion of Water Shield’s mana regen to the group. That might be a separate thread thing though.