This, this, this. Seriously, anyone who says that vanilla WoW was the best game ever is either the biggest Blizzard fanboy in existence, a nostalgia gamer that is completely blinded by their past, or a flat out liar. Open beta/stress tests were an absolute joke. I could list on one hand the things in the game come release that weren't bugged. It took ages for Blizzard to patch all the problems with the game, and even then it was so inaccessible and poorly balanced that many believe it to be a miracle that the game lived this long. Memories of the flight master bugs and the Burning Steppes still give me nightmares.

I think the intent was to give PvP dps assassins more resilience before having to run away or use defensive cds. But it's really not useful for that either.

True that. WAR's largest problem was that it wasn't WoW, and people never gave it the time to fix the problems it suffered from at launch. I think TOR won't suffer the same fate so long as Bioware keeps at it. Everyone I've talked to who has actually played the game seems to love it so far.