What is your favorite things from each installment of WoW?

[unbound]

Vanilla - Just the newness of everything. So very much to do even if you weren't a hardcore raider.

BC - Raiding. Bringing in different classes to each raid made us try different things. I really miss how the different classes brought such different things to the raid.

Wrath - DKs at the beginning. It was so nice that you could do either tank or dps with any of the specs. Yes, I know people told you that only one was the proper tank, but I enjoyed Unholy tanking (and even did light raiding with him).

Cata - Very different starting zones. At least the first few times, starting underwater vs outside made for a more captivating approach.

MoP - Probably the Panda starting zone. It was a good tale at least. The rest was rather meh.

WoD - First time leveling and first time doing garrison. Those wore off quickly, but were interesting initially.

Legion - I appreciate the effort more than anything else. Nothing really blew my socks off, but it was a bit of a return of effort with the artifact weapon and artifact fishing rod. The extra 3 zones at the end also demonstrated some degree of effort that they haven't done since.

BfA - TBH, everything was just meh. Low effort on everything.

SL - TBH, just another meh expansion. Low effort on everything. Heck, it really feels like they smashed 4 unrelated ideas under 1 ill-thought out umbrella. No compelling system.

[monkfailz]

Vanilla: everything was new, you knew nothing, nobody knew what they were doing yet, now you can just google/youtube your spec and bam you know how to play your class
TBC: flying mounts and that fel reaver, flying is still awesome but i do admit it makes the world of warcraft feel small and easy since you can just fly over everything
WOTLK: lich king, op death knights, the peak of WoW when WoW had the most subscribers
CATA: heroics, blizzard knew everything was getting easy so they made dungeons heroics hard again but soon after everything will just get easy again of course as players get more experienced with the content and start learning what to do
MISTS OF PANDARIA: pandas are awesome, i still enjoy my monk
WARLORDS: that thrall versus garrosh fight cinematic
LEGION: the best pvp imo, i really liked pvp this expansion, it was the most fun i've had on my monk!!!
BFA: artifact power i liked it but soon became a chore to grind again
SHADOWLANDS: meh

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Classic: It was the nicest looking mmo I'd played at that point, graphically.

TBC: Flying, by far. Even my shitty 60% speed gryphon was preferable to being stuck on the ground. I'm pretty sure I didn't get epic flying until WotLK, because I can't remember ever having more than 2k gold prior to WotLK.

WotLK: Dual-spec and Glyphs.

Cata: Holy Power, it improved upon the previous "doing nothing but wait for buttons to come off CD" playstyle that had been Prot/Ret.

MoP: The world, story, soundtrack, and most importantly class design. MoP was the expansion that actually made Warlock fun enough for me to play at max level (WoD pre-patch immediately ruined Warlock for me).

WoD: Garrisons were kind of enjoyable for a little bit, the problem was pretty much the entire expansion budget seems to have gone into them and they didn't remain fun for more than a few weeks at best.

Legion: Artifact weapons, though the worst part of Legion was taking away your artifact weapons. I really wish they'd persisted with them into future expansions, even if it meant a power reset on the weapon each expansion.

BfA: Literally none of it.

SL: Legendary crafting providing motivation for making gold, as well as an easy method of making it.

[Beefhammer]

Vanilla: the newness of everything.
TBC: heroic dungeons and moving away from 40 mans.
WotLK: 10 man raiding.
Cata: pretty much everything.
MoP: the story and setting.
WoD: the raiding.
Legion: class identity, artifact weapons, order halls.
BFA: zandalar and the concept of Azerite gear.
SL: torghast.

[Krixooks]

Vanilla: Vanilla WoW was a perfect game in my opinion.
TBC: Addition of arenas, Isle of Quel'Danas, the story "twist"- Kil'jaeden being the last boss of the Xpac.
WotLK: I really liked the Drakuru questline and some of the zones. Class balance/talents etc. and PvP were great in WotLK.
Cata: Tol Barad Peninsula, Twin Peaks and Battle for Gilneas. Rated Battlegrounds. The Molten Front. Gilnean starting area.
MoP: Jade Forest, Isle of Thunder. Deepwind Gorge.
WoD: Ashran was ok. The ogre arena was fun, and some of the challenges.
Legion: Suramar was great. I also liked Argus a lot.
BfA: The zones are nice. the cities are the best they have ever built in my opinion, really fantastic.

(not playing SL)

[Rustov]

Singling out my favorite feature doesn't convey my total feelings about a given expansion, but, in keeping with the thread topic:
Vanilla: Camping Stormpike Bridge. A.K.A. the HK Printing Press. Aimed Shot spam behind a wall of dumb melee, taunting the horde, mass producing 1000s of HKs a day. Good times.
TBC: Nagrand. Very specifically, solo kiting the Group Quest boss mobs in circles around Halaa.
WtLK: The environment. The opening chords of entering Howling Fjord, running all over Grizzly Hills, relaxing in Sholazar, or gliding off of Temple of Storms- Northrend was nostalgic when it was brand new, and aged like fine wine ever since.
Cata: The opening questlines of Vashjir- that shock and awe at the Kraken taking us under, the desperation of lacking even air, the slow rebuild of your forces to eventually take the war back to the Naga.
MoP: 5.4 Survival Hunter. The perfect spec. F.
WoD: The music. WoW has many great soundtracks, in every era. The ambience of Frostfire and the anthems of the Alliance Garrison still stand out to me.
Legion:... Mistweaver raid healing, I guess.
BFA: Mad World. Most fun I've had in WoW in a decade.
Shadowlands: Bluether.

[ifrah]

Vanilla: Going with the flow here pretty much. The world for quite some time seemed immense, especially while you still had yet to discover and roam through the zones. Experiencing pretty much everything (from core concept point of view) the game is still offering the first time. Massive PvP raids with no obvious goal than just mowing players down, be it in those weekend-long AVs, or out there.
TBC: The steps the game took towards more or less more professional way of things. Arenas were also fun for some time.
WotLK: Zones and their atmosphere were vastly ahead of TBC, and this is the only expansion I've gone semi HC on the levelling, oh god that was good stuff. Ulduar has a place in my heart too, as was doing those dungeon&raid achievements "while they still posed a challenge."
Cata...BFA: Not much to say, have been mostly a random tourist with very little exposure to anything. Legion artifact system was kinda fun when you progressed unlocking neat skills and the power curve felt nice, although until the AP nerf the grind was atrociously god-forsakenly awful from my post-WotLK uber casual perspective.
Shadowlands: M+ dungeons are fun.

[Varx]

Transmog is the best mid expansion addition wow has ever gotten.

It's so simple yet had created so much pseudo content for so many players. Between given us a reason to play old content for mogs, creating all the different sets, and holding mog offs. Yeah mog is the best.

Thank you 4.3.

[wysimdnwyg]

Vanilla: The friends I made. It's been 15 years since I played with my "new" friends, and I still keep in touch with some of them (including some on the opposite side of the world).
BC: Renewing my ties to my RL friends guild and raiding casually.
Wrath: The lore. This is my absolute sweet spot for game lore. Absolutely loved that part of Wrath.
Cataclysm: Old world flight. (OK, that's a bit of a love/hate thing, so... yeah, I got nothing else.)
MoP: Timeless Isle. Still the best version of a catch-up zone for the casual player. (It'd be nice if they added flight here though. And let those of us who missed out on the leg. cloak get to Ordos.)
WoD: Some of the best leveling story in the game. Rivals Wrath for the top spot there. (Meaning story. The mechanical and logistics are far superior to Wrath.)
Legion: Best pre-patch of any expansion. I loved the scourge invasion from Wrath, but this was just better. Especially if you wanted to level alts.
BfA: Drustvar. I disliked almost everything else, but my goodness, Drustvar may be the best leveling zone story in the entire game. (I feel for Horde players who didn't get the full experience from this zone.)
SL: I think they finally got the zone order issues resolved with this one. Play them in order the first time, then you can mix it up on alts (if you want).

[ceall]

Starting from wrath as a wrath baby:

Wrath: dungeon finder
Cata: pre-nerf heroic dungeons and shadow priest as a spec
Mop: spectral guise for shadow priests
Wod: the train boss in brf
Legion: m+ added to the game and dh
Bfa: the dazar alor raid
Sl: shadow priest finally getting dps Cds in PI and void form
Df: no matter what else is going to happen, the evoker, (initial) neglection of secondary max level progression paths (eg. Artifacts, azerite) as well as the comeback of traditional talent trees.

[Amariw]

fun thread, here goes:

vanilla/classic:
-An actual feel of a living world.
-TONS to explore, silly immersive stuff like warlock doomguard summon (you needed 5 people if i recall, and one would actually die upon completion).
-Grand questlines like pala/warlock epic mounts, hunter demon slaying chain, priests's Anathema.
-Simple but very engaging leveling design, where every new spell matters.
-Alliance Onyxia attunement chain.
-Ragnaros.
-Naxx

TBC:
-Arena, and resillience stat.
-Tempest keep attunement questline
-Affliction warlocks and dot classes in general actually becoming raid worthwhile.
-Netherwing grind being the first fun and well designed rep grind.

WOTLK,
hoy boy there's a lot:
-edit to add: The pre patch zombie event. Felt like a real plague, in a very cool way.
-DK intro questline
-Leveling having more concetre story telling.
-Leveling being designed around flight, especially Storm Peaks
-Really cool end talents and new spells for most classes (Haunt, Titan Grip, Deep Freeze)
-Storm Peaks, such a beautiful zone and such engaging story. The feeling of a mystery being slowly uncovered is too rare.
-Icecrown, especially Matthias Lehner questline
-Friggin ulduar, still one of wow's best raids.
-Vehicles (liked them a lot unlike most players. First ulduar raid boss, malygos vehicle portion, the vehicle quests...loved them all).
-Wintergrasp
-Prolly other stuff i'm forgetting.

Cata:
-Vashjir. I'm still hoping they'll do another underwater zone but it will be hard to top that one.
-Twilight Highlands, hard to explain but it had a cool vibe.
-Most raids beside final one were very cool, if lacking in interesting story. Firelands in particular had many memorable bosses who used their environment like Alyrazor and that fiery spider boss.

MoP
my favourite:
-Warlock revmap. It was so unfairly fun it would top all the rest on its own, but the expo had so much more.
-Seriously, warlock revmap. I'm begging blizz to bring Xelnath (designer who made it) back. All three speccs were amazing.
-Talent revmap. It was a long time overdue and made sense for its time.
-Soulburn for affliction warlocks, such an awesome iteration in MoP. Using up combat resources for utility or burst dmg instead of sustain dmg. Golden.
-Timeless Isle and Thundering Isle, till this day my favourite outdoor zones, where you were encouraged to fight interesting elites solo. God those chinese fire dragons were fun.
-So much rich lore everywhere you go. The essence of an mmo in my eyes is exploring a vast land where there's lots of background lore to uncover. No expo did this better than MoP and only WOTLK got close. Those readable scrolls and monuments were amazing
-An actual impressive lore twist in Mogu being titanforged who lost their way. I didn't see it coming and it was a blast.
-Amazing raids, all of them really.
-Green fire warlock questline, prolly my fav solo quest.
-The amazing music.

WoD
not a lot really:
-It kept most of mop's class mechanics, meaning combat design was superior to Legion and upwards, didn't know how much i'll miss it till it went away.
-those 1-100% zones provided for some nice solo combat, with fun elites. Something i'll miss from legion onwards where outdoors stopped having anything challenging.
-Good raids.
-Nice leveling zones, though bland story.
-nice music.
-That's kinda it that expo was empty as fuck.

Legion:
-Pvp templates, the only time in wow's life where you could simply queue for pvp and not worry about anything else.
-Artifacts
-m+, in an easy enough version that gearing up alts became the easiest its ever been.
-Suramar
-Warlock combat wasnt as good as mop, but still original and fun. Again it stands out in comparison to the next expo, which will remove even the complexity affliction artifact gave the specc, in return for nothing.
-Dampening and removal of spirit meant healers mana mattered both in pve and pvp, this is seldom mentioned but an amazing change. It allowed rot comps to actually be worthwhile in arena rather then everyone trying to burst during cc, meaning Legion is the first time i got to be truly competitive with a rot comp. It also made healing wayyy funner as spamming the quickest spell was no longer wise.
-Resto druids got to flourish in pvp as suddenly a class that could funnel big healing over time was valuable now that everyone had good versatility.
-Mage Tower
-Antorus raid, lots of memorable fights. Easy enough that you could spam m+ on alts till they were geared enough to go there.

BFA, i really hated that expo but trying:
-Horrific Visions actual gameplay was fun. The retarded grinding and timegating sucked as it made failure too punishing, as did the fact you were forced to spam them for legendary cloak, but the combat design in itself was interesting.
-Dazaralor raid, especially Jaina, Mekkatorque and Rastakahn on heroic were amazing fights. Made some good friends there.
-N'zoth invasion zones finally brought back outdoor elites that you had a reason to fight, as Legion mostly avoided those.
-Music was stand out awesome.

Shadowlands
another hard one:
-Revenderth leveling.
-The return of a pvp stat (should be a given but BFA somehow wrecked that).
-Kinda drawing a blank here. Here's hoping Dragonflight will actually be good so i won't learn to miss SL.