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*wails* I miss old WoW. WoD better be a good expansion.

I'm going to go against the grain and say Wrath was the worst for me and BC was the pinnacle of expansions for me. I'm a earlish Vanilla player and the armour, look and zones of BC is just beautiful. The teir sets are my favourite and the weapons too. Nagrand is my all time favourite zone and I loved it when I could fly up to the one of the floating islands and claim one as my own

Wrath was a complete let down design wise. The armour was hideous and the borean tundra makes me violently ill (abit extreme i guess but i have alot of alts!) The bleak zones really got to me and the only one i liked was grizzly hills tbh. Actually my favourite part most ppl hated - Occulus! I loved the drake mechanic but sadly most ppl didnt share my opinion!

Cata was abit meh expecially the end end boss of DW. I felt Ragnaros was alot better end boss from a raiding perspective and yeah flying everywhere while lvling made it abit noob proof. I prefer being grounded for a while to take in a zone and add a lil danger to questing.

Pandaria would be a close second as the zones and design are just wonderful.

I'm also going to play Devil's Advocate here.

Being a Vanilla player, BC is my favorite expansion, while I absolutely hated Wrath for a lot of the same reasons as Castile. While Wrath had a nice soundtrack, the only zone I even remotely like is Sholazar Basin. BC had beautiful zones that stood out from one another, and my absolute favorite zone there is Nagrand with Terokkar Forest in close second. My second favorite expansion is Pandaria, but a few things story-wise kept it from dethroning BC as my favorite in the end. Cata wasn't too bad for me, but it wasn't exactly my favorite, either.

I also have to agree with those who said that the initial Alliance entry into Northrend through the fjord was by far the best introduction to a new area ever done. I did the Horde one too but the Alliance one was much better. It was awe inspiring. Wrath also had the first epic cinematic with the battle at the Wrathgate where the rogue Forsaken killed everybody. That was awesome too.

It's Wrath all the way for me even though my guild failed to kill Arthas before Cata went live. Deathwing was the first end boss of an expansion that I saw go down before the next xpac hit. I have defeated Garrosh a few times in MoP but only in LFR. Sadly, that's the only form of raiding I have done in MoP.

So, my ranking would be:
Wrath
MoP
Cata
BC

They all have something different and special. OK, I know that sounds cheesy

BC was probably the greatest in content, but they already said they'd never do one of that size again. I didn't start playing till BC was already underway so it's hard for me to gauge it as an expansion, rather than a part of the existing game. I imagine it must have been incredible for players who had been in the game for years. And it was beautiful.

Wrath was very epic, and the designers had a good eye for some key mood-defining scenes. I agree that the Alliance entry to HF was one of those. They couldn't have done better.

Cataclysm was kind of the "expansion we had to have" to update badly aging content. They never intended it to be as solid and coherent as other expansions and I doubt it'd be many people's favourite. But when you look at what they achieved with it, they did an amazing job. But it wasn't so much the ongoing story as updating the world. But having said that, the Harrison Jones quest chain is BY FAR my favourite zone-level quest chain ever. Whoever designed that deserves an award. It'll last in my mind longer than anything else from the expansion.

Pandaria is by far my favourite for art. That team have really outdone themselves this time. They captured the mood so beautifully. The quest and NPC encounters were also pretty memorable and beautifully designed. But two things taint it for me:
- I felt the mood faded dramatically before the end. Even the fall of Garrosh felt anticlimactic to me. Just more like "OK, it's done". Also, they saved it for the end to contrive a zone that brings out the ugliest in players. Both the "new PvP that encourages griefing practices on a PvE server" and worst in general chat. I've very literally put more players on ignore in this one patch than in the past three expansions combined. So it feels like the expansion is ending on a very unpleasant note.
- I felt that the encounter / quest designers weren't always on the same page, and that the moods and themes didn't always mesh. They set up some beautiful philosophies that could have led to some very unique stories, but I felt those were let down and instead later designers fell back on what they already knew, i.e. "kill everything and loot everything". Perhaps I got that wrong and it was all the same designers, but it didn't feel like it to me. The current patch is the worst example, for me. In one plot thread Garrosh is vilified for defiling the landscape, while in the other we rush to strip the Timeless Isle of every resource and kill every creature in sight and the returned wise Emperor just stands about and chuckles at it all. Because that's design is familiar territory and quick to set up.

I joined in WOTLK, so I cannot really say anything about BC, by the time I got to the BC content it was just yet another grind in areas populated by nobody really, and I hardly had to spend any time there before I was going on to Northend.

Between WOTLK, Cata and Pandaria, I have to vote thusly:

1st: Pandaria-Reasoning, the zones themselves are absolutely gorgeous and I love everything I've found in characters, zones, creatures, events etc. Music and overall design make it my favorite expansion, but that may also just be because I love the zones ridiculously.

2nd: Cata-because it introduced LFR. I was in a raiding guild in WOTLK, and we were starting to stagnate. About that time, I managed to convince a friend to join and she wanted to play alliance, as she hated the horde character designs and zones. My main had been Horde then. I mentioned to the guild that I would be on, but I would be working on leveling an alli toon in between raids and the like. I also mentioned that I was going to make a bank guild on the alli side if anyone had an alt they wanted to play there, they were welcome to join. Apparently that was the gravest of sins because I was kicked from the guild with no by your leave. *shrug* Ticked me off enough to switch all my toons to alli heh. I missed raiding, but with the little bank guild of my friend and I, raiding was not an option. With LFR, at least I could see the raid content without having to scheduled my life around the time dictated to me that we would have to raid. I could go and raid when I wanted and it wasn't the end of the world if we wiped once or twice. I know a lot of people hate LFR, but I adore it, simply because, sad to say, WoW is not my life and I refuse to spend all of the time I do play prepping one character for high raid content. I'm not that devoted to it. /end rant (stop it Shade you are babbling)

Shade wrote: 2nd: Cata-because it introduced LFR. I was in a raiding guild in WOTLK, and we were starting to stagnate. About that time, I managed to convince a friend to join and she wanted to play alliance, as she hated the horde character designs and zones. My main had been Horde then. I mentioned to the guild that I would be on, but I would be working on leveling an alli toon in between raids and the like. I also mentioned that I was going to make a bank guild on the alli side if anyone had an alt they wanted to play there, they were welcome to join. Apparently that was the gravest of sins because I was kicked from the guild with no by your leave. *shrug* Ticked me off enough to switch all my toons to alli heh. I missed raiding, but with the little bank guild of my friend and I, raiding was not an option. With LFR, at least I could see the raid content without having to scheduled my life around the time dictated to me that we would have to raid. I could go and raid when I wanted and it wasn't the end of the world if we wiped once or twice. I know a lot of people hate LFR, but I adore it, simply because, sad to say, WoW is not my life and I refuse to spend all of the time I do play prepping one character for high raid content. I'm not that devoted to it. /end rant (stop it Shade you are babbling)

Wow thats kinda harsh! 0.o They don't sound like they were worth your time tbh. And I have to agree, LFR is a great thing. Now I've finished my progression raiding days after 8yrs I'm glad I can still see end bosses and get teir loot (watered down version anyway) without the hassle of a raiding "scedual". Its so liberating to feel I dont have to log by x time and can raid whenever it suits me basically!! Excellent point!

Wrath is probably my favorite simply because it is when I started playing, and that sense of nostalgia always wins me over.
I remember the first time I raided; I pugged into a guild's group that was missing a DPS and the rest was history. Raiding became my new favorite thing to do. I was super nervous back then, though.

Being a scrub in a game that you've never experienced before and discovering everything on your own without the aid of Wowhead or other such resources adds a sense of mysticism to the game that is lost once you become better acquainted with it, which is why Wrath will always hold a special place in my heart. That, and I think Dalaran is beautiful (not to mention Wrath had arguably the best villain).

I didn't dislike Cata, but as Wain mentioned, it seemed to be more of a necessary expansion than a particularly dynamic one. I have really enjoyed Pandaria overall, though I agree that Garrosh's defeat was a bit anticlimactic. Either way, I am very much looking forward to WoD

This is a hard one for me.

I know my favorite is not Burning Crusade. I don't have too many memories of BC because I played it when I was like 14. I think most of the things I enjoyed about BC stemmed from the fact that the game was still relatively new to me. Even today, Outland has a lot of very distinctive areas. However, there's one thing that just killed BC for me: attunement quests. I still hate that I never got into Kara as my Hunter because Dungeon Finder didn't exist and because people were quite stingy about helping with attunement quests, especially one as convoluted as Karazhan's.

Wrath changed a lot of stuff for the better, like making leveling a lot less grindy by shifting toward a more quest-based system... And the quests began to have a much clearer storyline this time, and now with actual changes to the world! It's also when I rediscovered the game and created my own account. And I loved the Argent Tournament because I was a mountaholic back in the day. Also Dungeon Finder. THANK GOD FOR DUNGEON FINDER.

Cataclysm is when I really started to experiment with multiple classes, and making the game more alt-friendly was a godsend to me. I was getting a bit bored of playing Hunter and Shaman all the time. Cata also had some beautiful instances, like the Halls of Origination and Vortex Pinnacle. Oh, and LFR gave me some raiding material when every single raid I join always seems to fail.

Pandaria: Not only is Pandaria beautiful, but it defied the trend of ever-increasing stakes by giving us more local conflicts and light-hearted quests. They also broke the cycle of constantly killing off lore characters by creating new lore for once.