Poll: Your Favorite World of Warcraft Expansion

[4RM3D]

What is your favorite World of Warcraft expansion?

Before answering this question, please mention the following two things to get a better picture:
- When did you start playing WoW?
- When did you stop playing WoW (if applicable)?

I've played WoW since the beginning and I am still playing it (with breaks in between). Now that the 4th expansion has been out for some time, I got me thinking on which expansion I like best. It depends on what you look for in the game (e.g. PVP, raids, quests, lore, casual, etc). I'll try to look at the overall picture.

4) Wrath of the Lick King
It isn't bad, but out of the 4 it is my least favorite expansion. After The Burning Crusade it did introduce some interesting lore and quest lines about the Lich King. But most of the dungeons and raids where lackluster (reused Naxxramas) with the exception of Ulduar.

3) Mists of Pandaria
The Deus Ex Machina. Yes, I know the Panda lore has existed even before WoW. And yes, it makes sense that an island cut off from the rest of the world for ages didn't have any impact on the rest of the world (and lore). But nonetheless the lore, quests and the island itself doesn't hold my interest.

The dungeons are too easy and mostly boring. I don't like the raid bosses either. The challenges are a nice touch though.

Blizzard did add Pokemon and Farmville to the game for better and for worse. And they completely redid the talent tree, which I am still unsure off whether to love or hate.

2) The Burning Crusade
The first expansion. It didn't have the quest fine-tuning the newer expansions have, but nonetheless I really like this expansion. Outlands is an awesome area. The lore is interesting. The dungeons and raids were really challenging and for the most part well done. And I never forget the moment when we were all waiting outside the Dark Portal to continue our journey in Outlands.

1) Cataclysm
My favorite expansion. Blizzard redid the whole world and all quests. Each area has one major quest line which is pretty fun to follow, like the Badland quests and the Booty Bay quests. Also, the new areas were pretty unique, especially Vashj'ir and Deepholm. Deepholm might be my favorite area in the game. Furthermore the dungeons where challenging (maybe a bit too much). And finally, blizzard improved all talent trees.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Started playing WoW in beta.
Stopped playing WoW post WOTLK, shortly after Ulduar.

I preferred WOTLK to BC, although I was more invested in WoW during BC. Much, much better instance design. Better zone design. Better class balancing and all around state of the game at the time. It's fairly close though, I did enjoy BC. I just think WOTLK was slightly better in most respects.

 

[Sixcess]

I've played on and off since '08. Never really got into raiding or PvP - I just return every 6 to 12 months to level up some characters and see what's happening in the world.

Not much opinion on Wrath as I wasn't around for most of it, and I've yet to return and look at Mists though I'm not optimistic - it's a sidestep in the story, I've no interest in the pandas, and what I've seen of the latest talent tree revisions feels like another step towards over-simplification, or streamlining as they prefer to call it.

Cataclysm I loathed for reasons I've went into at length in other threads, so to spare repetition I'll just say - too many gimmick mini-game quests, too easy, too many out of place pop culture references and way too linear. I applaud Blizzard for moving the story onward, but I'd rather they hadn't done it at the expense of the 'classic' WoW gameplay.

So for me it's The Burning Crusade. Loved the zone design, loved the flying mounts, loved how weird and different Outland was. We shall not see its likes again.

 

[antidonkey]

Started playing 4 months before BC came out. Stopped playing a year after Cata came out. I'd have to say I liked WoTLK the best. I liked the themes going on in it and how most everything played out however, by the end of it, I could tell how they were going to handle difficulty going forward and I didn't like what i was seeing. I loved the concept behind Cata and the sweeping changes it brought but it just wasn't enough to hold my attention. I think it was because by then, I was blasting through things quickly so I hit end game fast and became bored with it. I enjoyed my time with the game and glad I played but I'm done with it. I have no desire at all to get back into it even if my former guild keeps pestering me to do so.

 

[Fappy]

I really can't say which was my favorite expansion. I liked and hated all that I played for different reasons. I started playing around when Black Temple came out and really didn't become good raid material until Naxx in WotLK (though I had raided in TBC). I'll break down the pros and cons of the expansions:

1. Burning Crusade

Pros
- Outland was cool
- Had some of the most memorable raids and boss encounters

Cons
- Hellfire Peninsula
- Getting attuned to raids/heroics
- Extremely unbalanced pvp (druid/warrior Arena 2s and Pallies after 3.0 patch)

2. Wrath of the Lich King

Pros
- Fun leveling/questing
- Refined and balanced classes in pve
- Hardmodes
- Ulduar

Cons
- Naxx was boring and was the only big raid for far too long
- 50% of vehicle combat was awful
- The lore became extremely retarded, even by the standards WoW had already established

3. Cataclysm

Pros
- Added class/race combos
- The actual cataclysm and how it changed up the zones and updated 1-60 content
- Some of the new zones were cool

Cons
- Too much fire/dragons in every raid
- Most the bosses felt like rehashes and the raid content was boring

Quit before Firelands came out. Didn't play Mists of Kung Fu Panda.

 

[MarsProbe]

I started playing WoW at vanilla time, and continued well into The Burning Crusade. I returned for a bit when Cata came out so I pretty much stormed through WotLK to get to the Cata content.

My favourite expansion has to be The Burning Crusade. For starters, it was around that time I was most into WoW and had the most fun playing it. The environments in TBC have always been my favourite (Zangermarsh, Nagrand, Netherstorm in particular). Cata got close with the likes of Deepholm and Vash'jir, but not close enough in my opinion. Plus, nothing I experienced in WoW really ever matched up to standing waiting, Horde and Alliance alike, for the Dark Portal to open. Good times!

 

[teqrevisited]

I started playing about 6 months before TBC. Shortly before it hit I switched class and that character became my main focus throughout the rest of my time playing the game, until the end of WotLK.

I'd say TBC was the highlight of my time spent. I'd dragged myself up into the raiding scene and was part of a guild that cleared the instances that we could manage at a leisurely pace. Shortly after WotLK was released, I was asked to join a new, upcoming guild that met my aspirations. I was with them until Ulduar, when guild politics shattered the guild not once, but twice. The remnants consisting of the core that made the original guild rebuilt and together with them I cleared Ulduar, downing Yogg's best efforts in the process. Going from that to Crusaders' Coliseum made me quit. Such a terrible instance. Once I stopped raiding there wasn't really any way I could go back to the pace I kept before, so after that I just slowly stopped playing altogether.

So I'll always prefer my experience with TBC, with no guild politics, no stress and still a great deal of the wonder and sense of achievement gained from raiding.

 

[deviltry]

My favorite was WotLK, because of PvP.

Very close second is MoP. When they announced it I thought "well, it seems you can do worse than Cataclysm...". China themed expansion? Totally reminded me of cheap and crappy f2p mmos. And pandas?.. AND MONKS?! Monk is the uncoolest class ever, the one class I haven't even touched in Diablo 3 with their karate gimmicks, blergh.
But then somewhat final Warlock changes hit and... EHRMAGHERD MoP warlocks were the best thing to happen to WoW. Demonology finally viable in PvP? Demonology bursting for wtf damage when popping trinkets, using dark soul and sacrificing your demon? And it's AoE?? So two demo warlocks plus a DK with aoe grip - easy 2.2k rated battlegrounds achievement. And first time I forced other warlock to respec from Destro and start dual Chaos Waving... The laugh on TeamSpeak when 6 people died (with some help - warrior's shockwave and DKs howling blast) almost instantly. Too bad it later got nerfed by 33% qq. Anyways, even monks felt awesome to play, even tho they were underpowered.

 

[Karoshi]

1) Cataclysm
My favorite expansion. Blizzard redid the whole world and all quests. Each area has one major quest line which is pretty fun to follow, like the Badland quests and the Booty Bay quests. Also, the new areas were pretty unique, especially Vashj'ir and Deepholm. Deepholm might be my favorite area in the game. Furthermore the dungeons where challenging (maybe a bit too much). And finally, blizzard improved all talent trees.

Yes, finally I have found another soul who loved that expansion!

I absolutely loved the art style of the expansion, the new zones and the dungeons. I don't particulary like raids, but I loved hard heroics, even with the LFG system, and it was a shame, that they nerfed them all.

 

[IamQ]

Burning Crusade. It was the expansion when I did the most. I participated in both 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 Arena, I raided, and it was the one time I reached max with a profession.

I also feel, sorry when I say this, that the raids were harder in Burning Crusade. I know everyone and their mom says the raids were harder before, but I really think so. I never heard of PuGs going to Gruul's Lair or Magtheridon, and tearing the place up. The closest I got to that was when we sometimes invited a friend to a raid when someone couldn't come.

I will say though, that even if BC is my favorite expansion, WoTLK has the best music of any expansion.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I also feel, sorry when I say this, that the raids were harder in Burning Crusade. I know everyone and their mom says the raids were harder before, but I really think so. I never heard of PuGs going to Gruul's Lair or Magtheridon, and tearing the place up. The closest I got to that was when we sometimes invited a friend to a raid when someone couldn't come.

BC was definitely the hardest point of WoW raiding, which was good for raiders and absolute shit for everyone else. There were way too many raids, many of which didn't even get touched by the bulk of the raiding community. Non-raid end game content was deeply repetitive and rather light on the ground. The "raid or die" atmosphere of BC giving way to the "welfare epix" atmosphere of WOTLK lead to the peak of murderous shrieking between the hardcores and casuals, and was not a small contributor towards my loss of appetite for the entire exercise.

 

[The Madman]

I was in the WOW late Beta and stopped playing a bit over a year ago now, although I hadn't been playing even semi regularly for a year or so years before that, not since Wrath of the Lich King. So I never played the newest expansion obviously and can't really comment on that beyond the fact I genuinely don't give a shit about the Pandaren and think it was an idiotic move on Blizzards part to make the joke race from Warcraft 3 the focus of an entire expansion when there's so much more interesting stuff in the Warcraft lore that could have been explored.

With that said Burning Crusade was probably my favourite, although the area design is WotLK was brilliant and when last I played was still my favourite in that regard. But Burning Crusade just struck all the right notes with me in terms of content and design, it's also when I was playing most regularly since it was when I was in a small guild with some real life friends and entertaining folk online and we genuinely had fun with raiding. We were pretty good at it too! All the boss fights were challenging but entertaining, the lore was interesting, the settings spectacular, plus BC introduced Karazhan which actually remained right up till the end my favourite instance.

Seriously, Karazhan was awesome. I must have gone through there well over a dozen or two times and yet I still got a kick out of it every time.

 

[TilMorrow]

Geez I forgot that there was already four expansions out for this game. Guess I really didn't care much for it after I stopped playing.

I started playing WoW... Oh goodness I'm having a hard time remembering... Wait I got it. I started playing a couple of months before the Burning Crusade came out. I then stopped a couple of months before the Wrath of the Lich King came out due to Blizzard continuously messing around with the game's exp system with each subsequent patch they released. Also they nerfed Blood Elf Paladins like crazy not long after TBC was out. So I guess my favourite was the Burning Crusade as it was the only one I took part in.

 

[Eddie the head]

Wrath of the Lich king. I found Cataclysm boring, the fun I had in Cata was when me and my guild just went "fuck it" And ran into Org killing everything in our path. There where like 10 of us and we got like 300 of them. Or when I got "For The Alliance. with 6 people. Ok the point was cata was boring I dicked around a lot in that one then I quit.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I started playing in vanilla and generally dip my toes back in for a few weeks at a time. Generally I'll buy a month at the launch of xpacs and then another one after a couple of content patches. I enjoyed Cata hugely, because the levelling experience suddenly became a million times less crap. The dungeons were good fun, and I enjoyed tanking them. However, I think the heroic dungeon nerf early on set the whole expansion off on the wrong track, and I didn't like the Moonwell/CoT dungeons or the deathwing raid at all. The moonwell dungeons felt more like normals than HCs.
So in other words, Cata started off my favourite, but fell at the last hurdle.

I enjoyed BC. Vanilla was alright, but I think that was only because it was before the novelty wore off. Everything that has happened since has made it seem crap. I didn't like Wotlyk much (admittedly I quit before ulduar came out and didn't come back until Cata) and I haven't played Mists.

On that basis, I think I'd put them in this order: (ascending)

Wrath- Didn't like it much
Vanilla- Was ok at the time, but only due to low expectations.
BC- Liked it generally but raids were boring after Kara
Cata- Liked it, last content patch let it down


And Mists is N/A

 

[X123Lewis123X]

I started around the release of burning crusade, and am still playing (just, getting bored, had a few breaks of 1 or 2 months).
Wrath of the Lich King was my favourite, mainly because the story behind it really captured my imagination and child-like wonder, about how a good guy gone bad goes super bad and ravages the world (i know its actually Ner'Zhul, but let's ignore that).
On a whole my order would be WotLK>BC>MoP>Cata.

 

[Comocat]

I haven't played a lot of WoW, but I loved the idea behind cataclysm. Totally revamping large sections of world really creates a sense of permanence in a genre that is sorely lacking in consequence.