If you could pick and choose parts, what would be your dream expansion?

[Deleted]

Suppose Blizzard hired you as a consultant to determine how they should put the next WoW expansion together. Now, they're obviously not going to let you decide every single concept, but they allow you to make high-level decisions about how the following parts of the game are implemented:

• Questing (just the quality and variety of quests);
• Story (the quality of the story and the role of the player in the story);
• Small group content (5 man instances and scenarios, how many there are and the quality of the bosses and design);
• Solo endgame content (how the solo endgame is implemented, the quality and how much);
• Raids (note: this is not about raid size or how many difficulties. this is about how much content there is, and the quality of the bosses).

You can choose on what expansion (or even other game) the above aspects are based on. Blizzard will analyse your decision and feedback and try to get that particular aspect to live and breathe the spirit of that game.

My personal opinion: Quests of WoD, Story of WotLK, 5-mans of TBC, solo endgame of MoP, raids of classic.

Clarification:
WoD had the best questing experience so far. Both the leveling quests, as well as the Garrison Campaign at max level, were immersive, varied, fun and didn't really outstay there welcome.
WotLK had in my opinion the best story: a cohesive world, the fight against the Lich King as the central element, and the last storyline that wasn't riddled with plotholes or trying to shoehorn an entire people into the overarching plot. The player also wasn't the hero of the storyline who solved all the issues on their own with all the leaders being incompetent without you. They were an elite soldier that supported the story, rather than the protagonist.
TBC had by far the most 5 man content so far: a large amount of 5 man dungeons, combined with every dungeon having a hardmode and every dungeon fitting the story. Bosses were really good for their time, with multiple boss concepts being reused later on in later tiers and expansions.
When I'm referring to the MoP endgame, I'm more specifically looking at 1 particular patch: 5.1, with the small set of daily quests that unlocked a storyline over a few weeks, reputation grind becoming faster at a higher reputation level. It also included the Brawler's guild, which gave players a chance to fight on their own against ever increasingly harder bosses.
Classic raids... I'm not talking about how many abilities the bosses have, or how easy they were. I am talking about how the Classic raiding, especially in later raids, had a lot of bosses with plenty of variation between them. How they sometimes required entire realms to work together to unlock them, The way some bosses had really unexpected mechanics and often turned the entire way some classes worked right around, like class calls on Nefarian; going out in a blaze of glory on Vael the red; dying being a part of Bloodlord Mandokir; That kind of stuff that is just that little bit different from usual.

So, what's your opinion?

[Arenis]

Questing; WoD quality, TBC longevity
Story; WotLK/vanilla-endgame
Small group content; TBC
Solo endgame content; WotLK/TBC
Raids; WotLK

[Odobisean]

Questing: WoD art with TBC quest design
Story: MoP
Small group: TBC + MoP scenarios
Solo endgame: MoP
Raids: MoP

[Feali]

Questing: TBC. Hands down.
Story: Wrath. Always Wrath. There always was the looming threat of the Lich King and everything built up to it.
Small group content: TBC / Wrath. More towards TBC. You had hard dungeons and easy dungeons but you still had to work together and communicate.
Solo endgame content: MoP actually. 5.1 was amazing, 5.2 was amazing, Timeless Isle was nice.
Raids: Cata. Yes, I mean it. Firelands is my favorite raid. Dragon Soul was fun (more for the people I played with and that I played Rogue) and I enjoyed T11.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Questing of WoD.

Story of Cata.

Dungeons of Wrath.

Raids of Wrath.

Etc Content is a mix of Wrath, Cata, MoP, and WoD stuff.

[TheTaurenOrc]

Questing; WoD
Story; WotLK
Small group content; MoP
Solo endgame content; MoP
Raids; WotLK

[Velerios]

Questing: Quests a mix between MoP/WoD. Art more like WoD. With a small touch of TBC.
Story: Wrath
Small group content: Dungeons more like Vanilla, with modern design. A big non-linear dungeon that feels very big and a chaos when you go in there with a premade-group. When joining with a LFR-Group, you need to kill 3 random bosses + Endboss.
Solo endgame content: MOP. Mop had the best endgame-content; it only got destroyed by forcing valor-gear behind daily-reputations. 5.1+5.2 was so amazing; i liked the design to move forward the story with 5.1, but 5.2 was also so good with a evolving isle. Sadly 5.3 and 5.4 was bad, althrough i liked the design of Timeless Isle. A questing zone with the TI-Design AND the mechanics of Isle of Thunder would be so good. Simply a daily-quest-zone with an additional way to get things done with farming a currency.
Raids: Uldum/Throne of Thunder/Kharazhan. All expansions had good raids and bad raids. Here it is easier to tell the good ones rather than the expansion.

[Aetha]

Questing: WoD art & TBC quest design
Story: MoP hands down
Small group: TBC & MoP scenarios
Solo endgame: MoP content. 5.1+ was amazing.
Raids: WoD stylised

[Mathayus]

Questing: WoD art & TBC quest design
Story: TBC/Wrath
Small group: TBC/Wrath
Solo endgame: MoP
Raids: TBC/Wrath (apart from Naxx)/MoP (raids were amazing, just crapping timing of patch release)

[Deleted]

Questing: WoD
Story: A mixture of everything that's old god based, which is everything so far.
Small group: Wrath/Cata
Solo endgame: MoP
Raids: WoD/MoP

[EXORAD]

Questing: Vanilla (I love random rewards and story arcs). Not everything has to be streamlined!
Story: MoP (very big scale, many facets)
Small group: TBC (hard dungeons)
Solo endgame: WotlK
Raids: WoD

[logintime]

Questing: Wrath, both in terms of diversity and length
Story: Wrath
Small group content: Vanilla/TBC.
Solo endgame content: MoP
Raids: I've never given a damn about raiding, so Wrath, because it was the expansion where all of the non-raiding endgames were also viable.

[Ciddy]

Questing: WoD. That was one thing WoD got right. The 90-100 content was a lot of fun to me. I also like how Cataclysm redid the 1-60 content and would like to see stuff like that happen more often.

Story: Wrath. I know we won't really be able to experience that again, but I loved how Wrath gave us some closure to the Arthas/Lich King/Scourge story that had been building since WC3.

Small group: BC. BC introduced heroics and just did dungeons better than any other expansion, I thought. Classic had amazing dungeons too (I particularly loved the ones like Maraudon or BRD, where they were so huge they almost felt like 5-man raids). Wrath was "lolburstAoE" when it came to dungeons, Cataclysm went back and forth between one extreme to the other with difficulties, MoP's dungeons were just forgettable, and WoD's dungeons weren't much better.

Solo endgame: Tough decision. MoP had a good bit of stuff to do at level 90, so I think I'll go with that.

Raids: Tie between BC and Wrath. I also liked how Cataclysm introduced LFR. Raiding became less of an exclusive club and more of something that was accessible to everyone.

[TheWindWalker]

Rather than go on a long-winded explanation of the details, I'll keep it straight forward: My answer to all of those is "Mists 5.0-5.2 era excluding 5.3-5.4." They're almost different expansions in how much the last ~70% of Mists became pre-WoD so it's hard to just say "Mists."

[Derpleton]

Questing: Similar to WoD in terms of the flow and narrative but remove Bonus Objectives and implement them as actual quests with gear rewards. Bring back Group Quests.

Story: Wrath Style Single Villain Focus with 1 side villain before the final raid patch (I.E. Yoggy) WoD style Cinematics while Leveling and at the end of raids and big quest lines.

Small group content: Group Quests while leveling. Bring back Scenarios as queueable content that expands the story and helps train newbies for Dungeons and Raids. REMOVE LFD FOR 5-MAN DUNGEONS (Use the new Group Finder Blizz just implemented and try actually talking to people).

Solo endgame content: ToT/Landfall Style Daily Questing and Progression of Story complete with Cinematics at major checkpoints. Class Quests with bosses at the end that require a decent amount of skill but reward either a class mount/spell/cosmetic.

Raids/Dungeons: 8-12 Boss Raids every other patch with 15 Bosses on Launch across 2-3 Raids. Dungeons based around these raids with 12 Dungeons MINIMUM at launch. Even if they have the same art style and are based in a similar location more dungeons and bosses and loot = more content similar to how TBC did it. No killing of Major Lore Characters (Ner'Zhul) in 5-mans only in Raids. An encounter with a character like Ner'zhul may be acceptable but have either them or us escape like in HoR and have a final battle with them in a Raid.

[bloodkin]

Questing: a combination of Cata and pandaria, but with some more cohesion and a better flow, like wrath had. WoD was nice, but the landscape layout sucks, traveling by land is often inconsistant in difficulty and useless barriers are placed. Even thoug it looks cool, traveling is often a chore, not a joy.
Story: Wrath, the way they treated arthas, and how he molded the player to become a scourge leader was awesome, Cata 1-60 was done very well, and 80-90 was good too, but a bit too fragmented. Pandaria also had some really nice quest chains and stories to tell.
Small group content: TBC and (early) Cata style, with 5 man progress being viable/relevant and somewhat hard, mechanics of hard trash packs should matter (CC) even when geared, same for bosses, with maby 1 or 2 easy dungeons.
Solo endgame: Isle of thunder/Timeless isle was pretty awesome, though tanaan is cool but as I said earlier, bad lanscaping, though better than the rest of WoD.
Raids: There are at least a few really good raids that blizz should use as blueprints a bit more, such as: Kara, Black temple, Sunwell, First Lich king raids, Ulduar, Icecrown, First Cata and Firelands, First MoP and Throne of Thunder. I dislike every raid that (heavly) features orcs outside of vanilla raids, shit like SoO and blackrock foundry sucks and not fun at all.

[Kharum]

Questing: WoD
Story: MoP
Small group: MoP
Solo endgame: not sure
Raids: Wrath

[Arcangnom]

Questing: WoD
Story: WotLK
Small group: WoD. My rose-tinted goggles told me TBC was awesome, but during the timewalking event, I realized how bland the instances really were. The fact that you outgear them instantly in later patches is a bit annoying though, but Mythic mode does something to make dungeons still relevant in the gearing process - though I do feel that it's kind of odd that the Mythic Dungeon gear is 685 (non-WF) while the apexis stuff is 695 for 20k crystals.
Solo endgame: I like the catchup-mechanic of Timeless Isle/Tanaan Jungle, where you kind of run around and do your own thing. I suppose MoP had more to offer, while at the same time being very grindy, and not very alt-friendly in the beginning regarding rep, but I didn't play at this time, so I don't know how that felt. I think I'll go with MoP.
Raids: WoD. Atmospherically, I really enjoyed Vanilla, TBC, WotLK and WoD. I didn't play MoP for the most part (only late SoO, when Mythic was easy enough to pug), and when I visited the raids, they looked kinda 'meh' for the most part. With the accessibility and the group finder tools available, I find it easier to raid on alts when I feel like it.

[zoefschildpad]

Questing: WoD. Questing just gets a little better each expansion, for the most part.
Story: Wrath, the clear presence of the lich king and/or Yog'Saron in every zone really made it feel like a cohesive whole.
Small Group: TBC. The dungeons were hard, but they were fun, became easier with gear and remained relevant throughout the expansion, which I really liked.
Solo endgame: Vanilla and 5.1-style dailies. I really liked the 5.1 dailies that were interrupted by story missions every couple days. What I liked even better than that were some of the large quest chains in vanilla, such as the Onyxia prequest and there was a quest chain in the blasted lands. They wouldn't need to be atunements for anything, or provide great rewards, but they should mostly take the time to really get into a few characters, and spread over multiple zones and/or dungeons. Also class quests like the hunter and priest quests from MC. That hunter quest was hard, but doing it felt so rewarding.
Raids: 10-mans set in environments that are not obviously made for a raid. Only a few raids don't look like arbitrarily connected boss rooms with corridors between them, and the best example is Karazhan. Karazhan was designed as a mage tower first and a raid instance second, and it really shows. It just feels so much better when the environment makes sense. Unlike any raid boss that I can remember (and I may be missing some) Medivh had a bed, a kitchen and a dining room for basic living needs, a stable for horses, a library for studying an opera house and an enchanted chess set for entertainment. In other raids bosses have to be kings to get a chair, otherwise they have to stand around in an empty room for no apparent reason.

[Deleted]

- Questing; WoD
- Story; WotlK
- Small group content; TBC
- Solo endgame content; TBC (I liked professions most here and the dailies were not only about rep but also about gold which was a lot more worth then. Also the questchains lead you though quests, dungeons and even heroic dungeons or raids - awesome even if it was attunement)
- Raids; TBC/WotlK best memories.