How often should you have to relearn your class?

Generally speaking, World of Warcraft saves its most class-altering changes for the patches that introduce the systems for the next expansion — changes like the loss of Armor Penetration, or the introduction of Holy Power, or the removal of Stances from Warriors. These changes are almost always kept for expansions and we don’t usually see them until the current expansion is just waiting for the next one to launch — like when I spent a month running around at level 70 on the Isle of Quel’danas using Titan’s Grip constantly to murder everything, just before Wrath of the Lich King went live.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that and how it works out — I know a lot of players who simply stopped playing Paladins when Holy Power came into being, whereas I actually started playing them more once it was an established part of the Paladin’s class design. Similarly, I really lost a lot of my interest in playing as a Shaman at the end of Warlords of Draenor because of the changes to Maelstrom that I just couldn’t get into. Playing Enhancement without access to the Artifact for that month was deeply unsettling and not something I enjoyed.

But that has me wondering — is it actually better for the game to keep major changes to classes segregated to the every end of the current expansion and the beginning of the next one? I personally believe that it is — it keeps the disruption to a minimum and lets us practice with the new designs while the content is essentially on farm, waiting for the next leveling bump to come along. One change that comes to mind is the level squish at the end of Battle for Azeroth that altered pretty much every single class at once — you wouldn’t want something like that to drop between patches. But as always, I’m keen to find out what you all think. Would you rather classes got more iterative alterations during an expansion, instead of after it? How many times would you be willing to tolerate relearning aspects of your class?