Edit: The four pieces of armor in WOW Classic TBC Gold tier 10 which allowed your character to receive chain heal crits was healed for an additional 25% in time. This was added to the insane output you can achieve as a resto-shaman.

Chainheal isn't gear-dependent. This is a game-changer however, holy moly! It takes you from "really excellent healer" to a straight-up "god tier"

The gear for phase 1 is certainly a bit more boring, in comparison to the phase 1 Classic which had a very small amount of choices, you've got a much larger available loot pools to choose from or to farm for. I owned two healing weapons for all of Classic because the KT Hammer was never dropped. While we're only in Phase One, I have several healing weapons to choose from. Each phase has an individual weapon. Every upgrade, even though there's not a lot of famous items like Benediction or the Xerox, will bring good memories back.

This is mostly because items in TBC are more balanced and provide various options available for each slot. Vanilla gear is less memorable than TBC. However, people will still be able to recall broken items, such as HoJ Reju gemstones and edgemasters that are more powerful than any other slot-specific item.

It's more involved than declaring "they weren't aware of what they were doing at the time." They deliberately created low-level, or end-game bis-objects, they were both terrible, in order to allow players to buy WOW TBC Gold make rewarding and enjoyable decisions.