To the WoW players, when did you have your most enjoyable, memorable moments in World of Warcraft?

For me it was The Burning Crusade. I began tanking full time on my Warrior, who was my main all through vanilla. I rolled a bloodelf Paladin, which became my first alt, and learned tanking on that as well.

I had my first experiences tanking Heroics, and in my opinion, it was best then. The key system made sure that whoever you were with had thorough knowledge of the dungeon already.

Later, I did some Black Temple raiding as a healer on my Paladin, but that didn't last long. In the end, I used my gear from BT / Mount Hyjal to try the Shockadin spec. I lost sleep over how much fun I was having in PVP being an unkillable healer.

Wrath ruined WoW for me, when they introduced the LFG system. All of the friends I had made by being a great tank had no need to even message me anymore, and nor I them. There was little to no identification with anyone on my home server. I laid off WoW toward the end of WotLK and have been off more than on ever since.

I have many fond memories from BC and WotLK and it was Cataclysm that made me stop playing. I'll give my vote to WotLK, the raiding in that expansion was great.

I don't think it has hit its peak yet. The non-combat content in 5.2 looks like they are expanding on all of the interesting ideas they started with for Mists.

No doubt, the Burning Crusade. It really boils down for me that it's when Blizzard had an amazing blend of "hardcore" content accompanied by more casual content. Vanilla was just way to grindy and boring, while WOTLK took the game to lightly and suffered for it.

I will say that MoP is the funnest time I've had in WoW since BC, though.

Thanks for moving the thread to the WoW forums, it wouldn't let me make a poll outside of one of the main forums.

That feeling of discovery with a group of friends in the Vanilla version is one of the best feelings I've had playing games, and one that I don't think was replicated with subsequent expansions. That being said, I did really enjoy TBC.

I'm one of those weird people that enjoys the solo-combat of WoW, so since they haven't fucked that up yet in my experience, it hasn't peaked yet. I haven't played since WotLK because I don't think $15 every month is worth it, though.

First months of its launch. When everything was Vanilla and when everything mattered. When you had to stop purchasing skills around level 28-30 to save for your level 40 mount. When you had to grind some levels due to the lack of quests in some areas. When gaining a single mount was an achievement; a feat. You'd stop taking flightpaths and would start traveling on your own just for the cheer joy of it. When random world PVP was at its peak. When you gained military ranked within the PVP system. When there was a sense of discovery and challenge to the game.

That era lasted for two years. Burning Crusade brought some very good zones, same with Wrath. The carebear bullshit started with Cataclysm and the game never recovered for me.

I started playing half-way through the release of WotLK and stopped 2-3 months after Cataclysm came out.

Didn't get to experience Vanilla and Burning Crusade's endgame content in any form other than clearing the dungeons on my own at lvl 80 so i can't speak for those but WotLK definitely has my favorite story lines and environments. I quickly lost interest with Cataclysm when it became clear i wasn't willing to invest enough time anymore in the game to raid or be any good at the PVP. The new zones were pretty good though and i still want to level up a new character one day and see the (new) old world other than by flying over it.

Wish I'd played before Cata, then. When me an my friends group up and manually fly to dungeons/raids is the best time. It really helps make the world richer, and it's a shame so much of wow is kinda "Queue for dungeon/pvp/raid in stormwind/orgrimmar" for much of the experience. Granted, Dailies in Panderia have made it so that more people are out in the world.

Wotlk, its just a shitty game now.

I started playing when it was the end of BC (the entire Zombie event was killer to me when I was leveling. >.< ) Anyways, I had a blast with WotLK; raiding with my guild in Naxx, Uldaur, ToC, and ICC. When Cataclysm finally came around, I had fun wiping with my guildies. In the back of my mind, I just felt that I had experienced everything already and this was yet another race to 85. I quit after they nerfed every dungeon due to the shear difficulty that Heroic mode provided.

It has been two years and I have never once thought of returning back. Probably for the better as well.

It probably hit the peak during TBC but I was playing the most during WotLK due to arenas.

@psylah said:

Thanks for moving the thread to the WoW forums, it wouldn't let me make a poll outside of one of the main forums.

You can associate polls you create from the main broads to their individual forums. Just start a new poll on the Main Boards and once you do you'll see the option to associate them on their respective forum.

TBC was where it peaked for me. It still had the sense of achievement/effort in things, such as to get mounts (and a flying one especially). There were interesting quests related to raiding such as attuning to get the key to go into Kara, etc. And by the end of TBC there was quite a decent amount of content to play through. You could play to 70, from there you had heroics and the later isle of quel'danas to help with gearing up. Followed by working your way up from the bottom with Kara all the way to the likes of the Black Citadel. There was a wealth of content, progression and people tended to communicate more, acknowledge the existence of CC in encounters, etc.

Pretty much after Ulduar in Wrath is where things went downhill for me. With the tournament offering fairly easy to grab gear and the retro-active changing of token loot it seemed to trivialize progression. Not only that but it completely invalidated prior content. Every raid prior to the tournament became largely redundant and seemed to mark a shift in WoWs design towards it being all about simply farming heroics along with the latest raid and that was it.

It also became frustrating when addons like gear score popped up. I tended to focus on raiding rather than farming heroics but I soon found myself outgeared by people in PuGs who would run around aimlessly and do nothing but auto-attack. It started to make me wonder why I was even bothering since everyone would later easily attain the same looking gear and all content prior to the latest content update would be redundant. The power creep just seemed to get progressively worse, rather than making content obsolete each expansion they were instead doing it each patch, tightening the content and gear treadmill considerably.

To make matters worse the most horrible and arbitrary of addons (gearscore) became an officially sanctioned unit of measurement for people. Nowadays you cannot even join a group on a character unless you surpass x average ilvl. Making it so that all of a sudden the content you need in order to gear up is no longer accessible simply because you have had bad luck with a trinket slot or two that is holding you back by a few average ilvls.

I miss the days of groups communicating, mounts being an achievement, skill books, talent trees, etc. All the extraneous flavour/variety that has been cut down to funnel the game purely into farming the most recent content patch and nothing else. I also find the design of making it quicker to lvl through lower level content kind of strange, especially since Cata changed it all. Surely it would be better to find some way to keep it all relevent, rather than just making it a protracted chore that they by design (and people on alts) want to get out of the way as soon as possible to get to farming the end game.

@Gravier251: I forgot to mention Karazhan. What an impeccably designed raid. I was still running it weekly (albeit solo, but don't think I didn't ask guildies if they wanted to tag along) all through my return in Cataclysm. I spent more time in Cata farming old raids and instances for Transmog pieces than I did in the at-level dungeons. The new stuff just didn't have the appeal after I started doing Dragon Soul.

Raiding ICC with my guild in WotLK. I still play and consider it my favorite game but not like I did back then.

Lich King was the peak. It was the time I played with real life friends. We would run dungeons together and we got into a guild and did all the raids. It was good times.

@psylah: I hated Dragon Soul, but the transmog system was a great excuse to go back to old content which was great.

The legacy of "Cata" is simply this: Don't listen to the hard core. It was well know they were taking in external advice from various high profile and visible sources complaining about how "too easy WoW has gotten...for Christ's sake people are pugging Heroic ICC!" It turned out that was a terrible idea to listen to them because Blizzard delivered exactly what they wanted in 4.0 and it sucked for anyone but the top percent of the players. This was an era where players left out of frustration of the lack of progress just in the general instance content.

Working backwards, "Wrath" had problems of pacing where I don't have the info in "patch history" in front of me but there were HUGE gaps in content release which lead to farming boredom. Although typical of the general period, there was a bit of wait between Naxx and Ulduar. Then it took too long between Ulduar and TGC and TGC wasn't that good. It too painfully too long between TGC and ICC where people where so bored they went back to Ulduar to entertain themselves. When ICC finally released, it was staged so some guilds would literally hit a wall and have nothing to do for the rest of the week on the first day which meant going back to TGC (yuck) or Ulduar (again?). This was an era where players left because they were bored which loops back to the paragraph above where Blizzard tried to address this by increasing the difficulty.

"BC" was some wild times where Blizzard was making up the rules as they went along. Some of it worked and some of it was pretty bad and on the border of disastrous. :) The biggest issue originally was the progression was all locked behind doors and gates. On paper it sounds great that it should require players who want to get into Raid C to first beat Raid A and Raid B but in execution it was a horrible logistical nightmare due to mixing of all of the content some of which was locked out for weeks at a time (analogous to "hot dogs and hot dog buns" problem). I remember raids being a bit time consuming where some packs required heavy use of CC and kill order. I thought Black Temple was the best of era while Sunwell was the worst.

The original game clearly doesn't exist and more where if anything it would be unreleasable by today's standards. It took way to long to earn money for the fundamentals like mounts or tradeskills. Molten Core is full of HULK SMASH style encounters. BWL started the trend of "you can't get anywhere without watching a video" because the effects in that instance were poorly described and took a lot of brute force to figure out on your own. AQ seemed to be a half step with an interesting "world event" that was neat but seemed to just grind the servers to its knees. AQ itself had some questionable stuff in it where they experimented in ways to deliver gear but it was a failed experiment. Not to mention AQ was way way way way way too big. The original Naxx seemed to be the prime time of vanilla but it turns out that having 8 piece armor sets with overlapping resource requirements is also hard to manage across a guild.

I won't comment extensively on "Mists" because things are still unfolding where I'm not sure about some of the features until they completely unfold but here are things I've noticed: Although there were big problems with content patches being released too slow, I wonder if "Mists" is too fast. There are serious but not hard core raiding guilds who still have not entered Terrace of Endless Spring on Normal where seeing new raids on 5.2. Although I feel LFR extends the game the broadest base that plays the game (now anyone can see and win the raid content) but I wonder if it is having a negative effect on the raiding guilds. I like that there is more ways to earn Valor than just raid bosses but I wonder if the Valor point cap, specifically the weekly cap, is set too low.

Definitely Lich King. Unfortunately my guild disbanded before we managed to beat the Lich King encounter (we were trying though, making good progress), and then someone stole the guild bank and that was that...I just didn't have the strength to find another guild and do it all over again. I played some Cataclysm but it was never the same after that.

The original game. I just felt the old raids - Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxramas - maintained their novelty a lot better for their time. The game as a whole just felt fresher back then, which is understandable, because it was newer. Never played past Wrath of the Lich King, which was a fine expansion, but I don't think there was any way to recapture that feeling for some veteran players.

The Burning Crusade is the most fun I had in Wow. Gave up in wrath after killing Lich King. Burning Crusade had the best raiding and dungeons.

3.1 our guild was at our prime and the most fun in Ulduar, I will never forget good times I had in that place

Up till now ive played a 4 month period during Lich King with a friend, which was amazing fun, and then another 4 month period during Catacylsm with other friends. Both times were just as fun as each other because regardless of what the game was, whether you thinks its better or worse, it was really all just a thing to do with my friends. MMO's are a genre I cannot play alone but if a friend asks if I want to play WoW again, or any MMO, im totally there.

I was most into Wow around the time that Lich King came out because I didn't have a job, school, or a girlfriend. Now I have the two lamer things in that list, so I don't play it at all.

I had a pretty short time in WoW, I started in Lich King, started raiding pretty quickly. I made it into the top server guild in a few weeks, and pretty much got burnt out farming Lich King. I played on though Cataclysm just as a social player with some friends I met, but after like 8 months of Cata I was done. Have yet to play Mist of Pandas.

Peaked Vanilla for me. BC was an amazing expansion too, albeit one that killed off Battlegrounds and made them into a stepping stone for the big bad Arenas - a grinding stepping stone.

The community has progressively gotten worse and worse, as has player skill, with the easy-as-pie instances and bullshit LFG system. The LFG system especially is guilty of the worsening of the community, as there is really no consequence what so ever to fucking your fellow players over through ninja looting or whatever. Oh the horrors.

I miss vanilla due to the difficulties, where progress actually meant and felt like progress and not some cheap slapped-on achievement, and I miss BC due to its content (Karazhan was and is by far the best raid instance Blizzard has ever deviced).

I'm probably atypical in that I never really got into the super late-game content, and was more into the levelling process and experiencing the different types of play/environments that the game had to offer. I started playing just as TBC had come out (I think, this stuff was a long time ago), and the world still had an unknown quality to it. The crucial aspects for me, playing a lot more of the lower level content, was the 'nerf' to the mount, which made the world a lot smaller, and the LFG tool. I actually agree with the implementation of the LFG tool in an arbitrary sense, it does a lot to keep MMO's relevant to a base that is sustainable. However, it killed the communal aspect of the game for me. Even though the process of getting a group together was often painful and laborious, that was half the fun, and brought you together with a cross-section of players, from which you could figure out who was cool and who wasn't, just by the very human process of co-operation (or lack there of) towards a common goal. Without that, it was far too robotic and automated for me. I'll always have the memories though, sweet, sweet memories...

I stopped playing after hitting 50. Too much grinding. I guess it's worth mentioning that this was before BC came out, so maybe it got better.

TBC was when i hit my personal peak interest in the game- jumping into that expansion just after it was released was both a mess and a blast.

It was back in Vanilla when battlegrounds first came out. I was in a casual guild and we all had trashy blue gear but we still queued up every day for Warsong Gulch. At the time, the Horde-side on my server was pretty abysmal in general. There was only one semi-regular raiding guild. The Alliance, however, had a huge full-time raiding guild decked out in MC and Onyxia gear. Of course, since they had nothing better to do in between raids, they all became frequent PvP'ers as well.

Needless to say, our guilds clashed more than once. In fact, it was more of a rarity for us to NOT be put up against each other, but despite the massive disparity in gear, we were skilled enough to give as good as we took. Our bitter rivalry gradually turned to friendship and we would often chat each other up on Xfire. A handful of us even rolled alts cross-faction, joining each other's guilds.

My favorite memory of that time is when I dispelled their druid's Nature's Swiftness spell while he had the flag before he was able to get a heal off. I had less than a one-second window to react, but I nailed it. He was so bewildered and angry that he immediately went to the boards and created a thread accusing me of hacking. It turned into a huge flame war between our two guilds but I just ended up feeling like a badass.

Second favorite would have to be when the top Alliance PvP'er shouted me out in a thread where people were asked to talk about the best players on the other side. In his eyes, no other character, either Horde or Alliance, could shift the tide of battle with their arrival the way my holy priest could.

TBC was the peak of WoW, there seemed to be a switch or evolution that happened towards the end of TBC; the game started feeling less like it was made by designers and felt more "manufactured", it may just have been me seeing through the veil but WotLK had a decidedly different feel, everything felt like a very obvious treadmill and all of the players began treating it as such. All of the imperfections of Vanilla and TBC really gave the game a unique personality and the community as a whole seemed to reflect that.

For me it was Burning Crusade when I was at my peak, Wrath was not bad either but nothing after that.

As far as how much I played it, Vanilla was probably the peak for me. But for quality, I think Wrath of the Lich King was the best time for WoW.

BC, but MoP is the second-best expansion they've had.

Vanilla WoW was the high point for me. I started playing not long after launch and played steadily until late Wrath (with a few breaks thrown in on account of life events; kids have a way of cutting into all gaming time, you know?). I came back briefly for Cataclysm and again for Mists, but nearly all of my fondest memories of WoW come from the vanilla days. BWL was my favorite raid instance of all time and between the people I was playing with and the content we were doing, nothing has topped it yet.

For me personally it peaked in TBC because I was playing daily and raiding 5 nights a week. The guild I was in was at it's peak, everyone was happy, the game was fun and challenging when it came to raiding. Wrath was good, what I played and Ulduar is still the best raiding content that Blizz made. Cataclysm made levelling an alt fun but the starting raiding content was enough to kill the game for me.

It's rough to decide between Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. I started back in Vanilla after spending a year or two referring to my friends unkindly as homosexuals for playing WoW. It came free with a laptop I got for college and I tried it, got hooked immediately. I leveled a hunter and had some of my most fond memories then. The one I love most was questing in Badlands after I hit 60. I was out in the valley with all the black drakes when a human warrior came upon me, decked out entirely in High Warlord gear. I about shit bricks but kept a cool head. I dismissed by pet before he could reach me and dropped an ice trap. I spent the next 20 minutes luring him over ice traps, feigning death, getting on my silly level 40 wolf and running a couple meters until he caught up only to go through the cycle again. Eventually I reached Kargath and managed to hop on the flight path to get out of there.

When Burning Crusade came around I decided to start a paladin. I had always wanted to try one, but all my friends played Horde and I stuck with them. They told me that paladins would be restricted to heal-bots, but I tried it anyway. As it turned out, I was one of the first 10 paladins on Maelstrom to hit 70, and I was the first successful protection paladin on my realm. I really made a name for myself in my guild once we got to Serpent Shrine Caverns. The fight with the demon hunter was always an issue after he finished his darting from one person to another. I was the only tank that was able to time my Avenger's Shield to get agro immediately after he finished and I held it the rest of the fight despite being woefully undergeared compared to the other tanks in the guild. Burning Crusade was also when I met my girlfriend (now ex, but we're still friends) and played together. That gave it a lot of life, teaching her different classes and theory crafting with her.

Wrath of the Lich King was the pinnacle of raiding though. It's not like I or my guild made great strides in raid progress, but we had fun. A long time friend started a guild and made me an officer. Instead of having strict rules about who gets into the guild and having to do a bunch of try outs to make sure people were up to snuff, my friend had one rule. All you had to do was send him a picture of your butt. This was fantastic and hilarious for a few reasons. First, it rooted out people that we really didn't want to hang out, it was a great filter to keep stuck ups out of the guild. Second, we ended up with a bunch of female applicants for some reason. Perhaps because he and I both played female characters and were constantly flirting with men in trade chat. Third, it rooted out most kids. Except for one, that went by "Arthas" only every character was a special character. Turned out later he was only 13 and we all shat bricks because we had a nude picture of a 13 year old on his phone. We wrecked through Naxx, but by the time Ulduar had come out my friend's interests were dwindling. I still played, but mostly I just ran dungeons and taught people how to tank.

Cataclysm was the start of the end for me. The changes in the old world were great, the story was great, but the people... I didn't like anyone that played the game on my server anymore. I tried hard to get into raiding and did well in helping guilds that hadn't made progress yet. It was all short lived though. Eventually a few of my friends came back in and I tried to help them get to 85 and geared so we could do stuff but it didn't last.

Mists of Pandaria... I had pretty much checked out, but I got access to the beta. I really enjoyed the new content. I also discovered that I might be a furry. Never had I been so into chubby Chinese girls, but damn if I didn't love these panda's asses. I played long enough to get a monk to 90 and do some tanking there too. It was easy, monks are pretty effective, but the game just seems dead to me with no one to hang out with.

I really miss WoW though. Sometimes I load up the log in screen just to look at it. I'd play if I had the friends to play with, but it's just impossible for me to make them on WoW anymore.

An interesting thing to note: WoW now supports soloing "classic raids". At least everything pre-Wrath can now be entered solo without forming a raid and can be attacked and cleared with only one player. "But couldn't you do this before?" one may ask but the answer was "Sometimes". Stuff like the Razorgore and Twin Emperors could not be attacked solo no matter how strong due to mechanics in the game where now they've removed and tuned timing and abilities to make it all doable by a max level, reasonably geared character. Along with any old gear they still drop, Blizzard added new stuff like pets (like Gluth can drop a mini-version of himself). It is actually fun and worth while to go back. Now you can have a nostalgia trip, feel overwhelmingly powerful, and get some goodies.

I never thought I would have played WoW so much, but when I got into WotLK, I had an entire summer playing pretty much nothing but. Me and a couple of friends would log in every day and got multiple characters up to the cap. Even did one or two raids, which was new to us. Plenty of daily heroics, leveling and loads of fun. Cataclysm just never quite did it for me, and I steered well clear of Pandaria from playing the beta. Sure, the quality of a beta is not indicative of the final product, but from what I can tell from other people's feedback? I made the right decision by not touching it.

Probably peaked in terms of that sense of "magic" for me late BC transitioning into LK (with LK having what I consider to be the best writing, zones, questing and seamless integration of the dungeons in the game). It peaked in terms of my playtime, number of characters I was raiding with and obsessiveness during patch 3.3 (the patch with dungeon finder, icc, icecrown dungeons) because of how easy dungeon finder made it to roll alts and gear them up to start raiding. The amount of stuff to do in patch 3.3 (Icecrown dungeons, ICC, alt runs in ToC, Argent Tournament dailies, farming mounts elsewhere, Wintergrasp, VoA) felt almost overwhelming but at the same time a workload I salivated to take on every day.

To put an arbitrary day to the beginning of the end for me was the day the Celestial Steed popped up on the store, I think it was March 2010. It shattered a sense of "innocence," magic and progression that the game seemed to stand for to that point. Ruby Sanctum as sort of a hint of things to come in CATA didn't do a whole lot to boost my confidence about the game going forward since the recycling of themes was starting to finally wear thin. It didn't the help that the guild I really enjoyed raiding with was starting to disintegrate that spring and I never really could find another raiding guild that I really liked. In the end though, Dungeon finder, in my opinion, killed the sense of community on servers in that game, and made A-holes of everyone you never had to see again in dungeon runs when the fresh content got challenging again in CATA.

I was in my senior year of high school during the Burning Crusade, that was probably the best time I've ever had gaming in my life. I didn't have job, responsibility, I was in a guild with awesome people I could talk with every night, the raiding was incredibly fun, WoW's never been the same to me since then. I'll acknowledge though that it was factors outside of the game itself making it such a great experiences. The Panda expansion looks totally awesome, and my brother (who just graduated high school) seems to be having the same experiences with it now that I had then. WoW's as good now as it's ever been, even if I don't have the time or patience for it anymore.

WotLK was the only time I got serious about raiding. Our guild had two raid groups and we sort of competed to see who could clear things first. Ours almost always won. We even managed some server firsts since we raided on Tuesdays. The end of WotLK was also when I got the most burned out. Four hours a night, twice a week may not sound like a lot to more dedicated raiders, but I absolutely hated how long it started to drag on when we weren't clearing new content. Still, I have some really fond memories of particularly hard-fought boss kills and some fun times with my guildies.

In retrospect, I think I would have enjoyed BC a little more if I had taken it a bit more seriously at that time. It didn't occur to me at the time how cool some of those dungeons were and that a bit of challenge in heroics was a good thing. Really wish I could give that x-pac another run.

Vanilla was great, but burning crusade made wow what it is now. Which is both a good and bad thing. It was amazing when it was new, and by far the best expansion, but they've just used BC's ideas over and over and now it's stale.

Hated LK. Pretty much started playing casual when that came out. Get my warlock to cap, do the raids, unsub.

But BC without a shadow of a doubt was the best WoW ever has and will be.

Everyone on the server, gathering around the Dark Portal on release night. Never will that happen again. Alliance won control. Those smelly horde never got through! Bahahahaha!

I remember, back in the day, getting my warlock epic mount in DM. That shit was amazing. Now they just give that shit to you, literally. I still have all those items in my bank.

@EXTomar said:

An interesting thing to note: WoW now supports soloing "classic raids". At least everything pre-Wrath can now be entered solo without forming a raid and can be attacked and cleared with only one player. "But couldn't you do this before?" one may ask but the answer was "Sometimes". Stuff like the Razorgore and Twin Emperors could not be attacked solo no matter how strong due to mechanics in the game where now they've removed and tuned timing and abilities to make it all doable by a max level, reasonably geared character. Along with any old gear they still drop, Blizzard added new stuff like pets (like Gluth can drop a mini-version of himself). It is actually fun and worth while to go back. Now you can have a nostalgia trip, feel overwhelmingly powerful, and get some goodies.

Holy crap, really? I remember trying to solo AQ40, getting to Twin Emperors, and having to call in a friend to help. We still couldn't do it (our inexperience with the fight didn't help). Most of my time in Cata was dedicated to transmogs, and I'd probably be willing to give MoP a shot if it meant I could play dress-up some more.

But I doubt I'd find anything that looked better than Warrior Tier 6 for my undead female.

Personally my fondest memories are from the classic World of Warcraft pre-expansion days, the game had a bit of a wild west feel to it back then but creatively I think it had the best mix of stuff going during Wrath of the Lich King.

After ruining PvP with cross-realm and arenas in TBC the game just took a nose-dive when they ruined PvE in Wrath with seperate raid-modes. Combined with the fact that the raid content at Wrath launch was utterly lacking (1 re-hashed raid and 2 single-boss encounters) and Ulduar (which was supposed to be out at launch) took almost half a year to come out I just lost all interest in the game. Late-Vanilla to mid-TBC was easily the golden years of the game, which can also be seen in their subscription numbers. The period between 2006 (launch of AQ) and 2009 (launch of Wrath) was their big growth period and since then the subs has completely plateaued out.

After I turned into an owlbear the whole game went downhill.