Burning Crusade! I'd go with WoTLK 2nd, I just loved the world zones and especially the music in that xpac. Of course vanilla holds a special place in my heart. But fuck cata, seriously.

I think the game is getting better and better each expansion. If we're talking my personal golden age I'll go with Vanilla/BC. This was a time when the game felt new and there was so much to discover. It was a time when WoW was a more lively social experience for me, I made great friends and had a succession of active guilds I was involved with.

My old guild has been a ghost town since Wrath and I haven't kept a constant subscription since shortly after the launch of Cataclysm. Now I play it as a much more solo experience for a couple months each expansion. I hardly, if ever, go to instances and spend my time questing, crafting and chatting with the couple of friends who are still around. I like to experience the worlds blizzard creates, but I've never been interested in getting caught up in the loot grind.

My vote goes to Vanilla because one of my favorite things to do back then was get into trouble with my rogue and druid friends stealthing instances or horde cities for fun. Discovering just how big the world was and testing the boundaries of its rules was exciting. Somehow managing to rogue tank ZF with a group of friends is not the same were everyone just uses the dungeon finder. Things like world PvP were thrilling in the early days, but it has become a tedious time waster now.

for me I think it was Wrath but that was really just because it finally delt with Arthas and I really liked that, but sense then I feel like it just keeps going down hill. Some of the previews I have read for the new expansion do not sound good so there may be just no coming back for this game.

The first year or two of your first MMO is your personal golden age. Anything afterwards is not quite as special, so this is very subjective. WoW was at its absolute peak at the back half of WotLK, however, TBC for me will always be my favorite. The sense of wonder and exploration WoW had back in 04', 05' can never be attained ever again, that's for sure. But people seem to forget how unbalanced and broken a lot of vanilla was. If you wanted to do damage as a Paladin, you were shit out of luck despite there being a dedicated spec for it, Warlocks were almost useless across the board compared to mages, Alliance didn't have access to shaman totems, horde didn't have access to Blessings from Paladins, etc. I could go on, but that would be 5 pages long.

TBC was the peak for me because it was my second year of WoW, which was my first MMO, and the content was amazing. I've always been a PvP guy, so the addition of arenas was the most incredible content I ever saw. The dungeons were actually difficult, you couldn't just run in and expect to ace every heroic, you needed to find capable and geared people appropriate for the dungeon/raid. Which brings me to the big problem WoW has now, community. In TBC and the 2/3s of WotLK, the game had an incredible sense of community. I knew who the best players were on my server, everyone did. If you were PvPing out in the world and one of the best players on the server showed up, it was a real "Oh SHIT" moment, because you knew you were gonna get your ass handed to you. Or maybe you didn't, maybe you served him up on a platter. Maybe he tells his guild about how you tore him up and then he calls in backup, and so do you. Now your guild is fighting his guild out in the middle of fuckin' no where, and after the fight the whole server is talking about it. This is just a fictional scenario, but this happened all the time back then. That sense of community is just gone now, part of the reason being cross-realm phasing, which is a great feature, but it sacrificed a lot of server side community.

In the end, TBC was the peak for me with vanilla coming in second. It really just comes down to the first two years of playing your first MMO, like I said, so this is entirely subjective. WoW was an incredible experience to have back then, something that I don't see being attained anytime soon. It was the right game to make at the right time for a lot of people, exposing the general public to the magic of MMORPGs for the first time, in a user-friendly way. Writing this I'm tempted to re-up for a month of WoW, just to run around the old zones that were left untouched by Cataclysm, but I know it would just be kinda sad, seeing those areas deserted. For me, that is one of the saddest things to see in gaming; an old MMO city hub after all the players have left the game.

When I was in high school and Burning Crusade came out, even the "cool kids" were playing WoW. It was still a novelty and, regardless of the content of that particular expansion, that seemed to be about the time it was getting its largest influx of new, non-gamery people. People would openly talk about it in classes, contrasting with a few years later when it became taboo to admit you still played it.

I just got to level 14 with a Worgen thing. Thanks Dan.

I played the most in Vanilla, after that I feel the endgame got too difficult (BC etc.) but the rest of the game got better. I quit during WotLK but I feel the game reached its highest point with that expansion. Awesome area design, great music, tons of fun quests, etc.

Never played Cataclysm or Pandaria but I've heard negative things about the former and mixed ones about the latter.

I swear we have this conversation like every year.

And the consensus has always kinda been Vanilla/BC.

Vanilla was great. It was incredibly different than anything else out there - it really was a paradigm shift in the genre, and it was all for the better. Molten Core, BWL, AQ, Naxx, it was all pretty enjoyable. Having people ooh and aah at me because I had Ash'kandi and full judgement was kinda neat. Helping other paladins get their epic mount was a lot of fun.

I never cared for the raiding in Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King was pretty all right. It was nice going back to Naxxramas. Wintergrasp was fun. I did a lot of the ten man raids and had a fun time.

Then Cataclysm. Holy shit. I quit two levels in I tried rolling an alt and felt like the 1-60 experience was ruined. I've leveled 4 characters now to 90, and I -hate- doing the Cataclysm stuff. That includes 1-60.

Pandaria's been all right. It was nice coming back to the game as a non-raider and having things to do at the Timeless Isle. It may be all dailies, but they're quick and the rewards are all right. I had a very enjoyable time doing the fel fire quest for my warlock.

For me it's BC just barely above Vanilla. BC's raid encounters had more demanding mechanics from them and I thought the tier progression was smoother and more rewarding.