Your experience is what people need to remember: The playstyle of shifting smoothly between dealing and mitigating damage. The damage numbers were just lowered, and not even drastically.
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WAR is still more fun to play though. I get bored playing pally with the 1...2...3 combos all day
I think DRK was animated that way so that the combat would appear as seamless, nonstop sword strokes. Much like how Paladins "stab, wait, stab again" is masked by their frequent blocking (so we can assume the PLD is taking a moment to watch the opponent and counter their blows.) War gets to appear slow because its an axe.
PLD also has quicker autos, so in-between their 123 are sword pokes that make it seem more seamless. DRK is just a million oGCDs, then you run out until Low Blow resets or something comes off CD, at which point you look a bit slower. WAR is generally slow moving as we only have one real oGCD and our autos are slow (but strong).