Delete.

Hellfire at launch was a complete lagfest failure. Hopefully the dual starting zone idea will work, but it might not if everyone just goes to the same one. Blade's Edge was too spread out to enjoy before you got a flying mount. Terrokar/SMV/Nagrand were all really well done, Nagrand being my favorite. I never leveled in Netherstorm and really one quested there for gold on one toon and farmed herbs. I think that some respawn rates could have been tweaked more, but overall I think it was fine.

I think that the idea was good, to create a bunch instances that were similar to SM, because everyone loved SM. Except that lots of the instances were just PULL PULL PULL BOSS PULL PULL BOSS. After a few times though, they became really boring and plain. Pre-nerf heroics were actually a challenge and I liked them. All the nerfs to heroics just turned them into a no-skill jokefest. The badge system was a great idea but was broken. They seemed to address this by making tiered badge loot, which is something that many of us clamored for when the badge system was introduced.

I enjoy 25 man raids much more than 40. It requires everyone to be on top of their game and to execute their role properly. You cant really carry half a raid of slackers like back in the day. While I like the Kael/Vash fight, I think their complexity and difficulty were terrible placed in the progression of content in BC. The encounters were too difficult for the time you got to them. Especially considering you could mow down half of BT and struggle on Vashj/Kael. BT was too easy with too many brainless fights. Then Sunwell went the other direction and require perfect raid composition to complete. Blizzard was all over the map trying to figure out how to tune things and never got it right out of the gate at all.

Loot distribution is still terrible. RNG being involved in loot makes loot distribution terrible. The PVP system rewards you with exactly what you want given you spend the right amount of time to obtain it. The PVE system, even with the tokens they implemented still relies too heavily on the RNG, and when you are pushing content you hit times where the RNG is making it harder to progress because you arent getting particular items at all. (ie. tanking weapons).

I like the idea of Arena. It fails on some levels because of the inability of Blizzard to adequately test and balance the various builds and comps. Leaving Druids broken healers for 4 arena seasons just shows how much Blizzard was unable to address many of the balancing issues around Arena.

Still waiting to be able to sell enchants on the AH. But then now Inscriptors can discover them and sell them on the AH, so I'm not really sure what they are doing anymore. JC seems fine and implemented well, but making money with some of the other professions is very hard.

Zones and Quests
Leveling was obviously done a lot better then vanilla, Blizzard seems to have gotten it in their heads that running across continents for a questline wasn't fun. My favorite zone was definitely Nagrand, it had very epic feeling questlines and landscape.
5-men content
Heroics were a great success, having a reason to go back and do 5 mans, which are incidentally a lot more fun and challenging was a great design element. I think a one or two huge epic instances akin to BRD thrown in with the short linear dungeons would have been nice.

Raids
25 mans were a lot more enjoyable for me then 40 mans. Mainly because, sometimes your shoulders get tired and you get sick of carrying 10 other people. It's also undeniable I think that the majority of TBC had much more complicated and involved encounters then the majority of vanilla. Even Naxx had many fights that were horribly designed (Hi Loatheb) and some fights that were simple and unimpressive. Sunwell on the other hand was a lot more challenging and fun overall. It had hard, intense fights from start to finish and there was no being carried in there, for the most part. The move from insane consumable stacking was a great one and the implementation of daily quests completely solved the conundrum of how to make raid preperation un annoying.

PvP
Arenas are the greatest thing that has ever happened for PvP in this game. Late in the game it got a little more cookie cutter but at least for the first 3 seasons it was pretty dynamic and very fun. I think something like ranked BG's where you could Queue seperately for some kind of ladder would be awesome and make a whole new group PvP meta game. I burned out on Arena after s3 (this was more due to problems with teammates and possibly reaching a skill plataeu) but up until then I had a lot of fun with it. WoW is the highest paid esport in the world outside of Korea so it must be doing something right.
Professions
BS weapons and BoP Tailoring crafted items went a long way to making your profession actually useful. Would love to see things like this for every profession.

Misc
TBC was in general a lot more complex and fun then vanilla IMO. The raids were more difficult gameplay wise (I think everything died a lot faster simply because of the general increase in skill of the average player and the logistics of raiding were a lot more manageable).

Best and Worst
Best: Arenas, Sunwell
Worst: Some worthless professions, the game pre 2.1, huge gaps in content releases, undertuned and nerfed bosses.

Zones and Quests
All the zones were a step above vanilla wow, the atmosphere was incredible. There were some very good questlines that basically told the "story of the zone", i.e. naga draining lakes in zangramarsh, gronn in BEM, blood elves in netherstorm etc. Some of these storylines never got resolved properly, but it was fun getting there. Having only 1 zone as the starter zone sucked. Dailies were one of the best things to ever happen in wow. I remember farming SM graveyard for 900g so I could get my epic ground mount. Never again.

5-men content
The 5-mans were definitely much more challenging and interesting than vanilla dungeons. Some bosses you actually had to stand out of the fire, as opposed to straight zergs. The issue with 5-mans(heroics included) was that they weren't "created equally". Heroic mech was far easier than heroic arcatraz. If you wanted badges, you ran heroic mech or slave pens. You only ran heroic arcatraz if you needed to finish a quest. The other issue was, aside from the last boss, itemization for heroics was the exact same as the regular version.

Raids
Raiding was definitely much more interesting and challenging. I'm quite torn on this topic. On one hand, it was great to see new encounters, on the other the days of drunken MC clears were no longer here. Having karazhan/gruul/mag was the intro raids was a big mistake. While easy, it made the change from 40 -> 25 mans much more difficult. We all know the story on untuned instances. ZA was a welcome addition, if anything that TBC lacked, it was more 10 man instances. The timing of releasing instances was also an issue; sunwell came far too late, and BT/Hyjal came far too early.

PvP
I don't arena much, so I won't have a lot to say. I can say that arena was more frustrating than fun for some classes/specs. Grining AV/WSG/AB/EoTS for marks was a huge pain in the ass, total time sink. Eots still feels weird to this day for me, it just doesn't "flow" as well as the other BG's.

Professions
JC was a very good addition to wow, it gave something for everyone and became a profitable and important profession. Some professions were too good, i.e. tailoring and leatherworking. Gear that either lasted too long, or consumables that were absolutely necessary. Both became mandatory at certain parts in the raid game.

Misc
Getting rep was much easier than vanilla, although still painful for some factions. Shattrath...still doesn't feel like a city, very unimpressive. Doing quest chains that required a group to unlock dailies was a bad idea (ogri'la, netherwing and skyguard) Music was somewhat bland, I had mine turned off for most of my time playing TBC. The new tabards are incredibly ugly.

Best and Worst
Best:
More ways to have an "end game". It wasn't go raiding or go home like it was in vanilla. You could do arenas or do heroics for badge gear to progress. Easy ways to make gold now, no farming/grinding necessary. Badges: awesome idea. Gives people another route at gearing up missing slot pieces or gearing up alts without too much trouble.

Worst:
Raid stacking. From CC in 5-mans to shamans in Sunwell, calling raids because X player that had Y ability was gone, sucked. Unbalanced classes, from the mage damage tax to SB spam warlocks, why were such imbalances not fixed immediately? AoE tanking? Bring a pally or you don't AOE tank. Lore: TBC lore was horrible from the get go. Elves going to the horde? Flying space goats? Illidan is a huge threat, even though he's just bonkers and cooped up in his castle? A lot of interesting storylines were never completed (why the hell were the naga draining water?) and some had a horrible ending (archmage staff guy).


Good news is that wrath fixes a lot of the issues I had with TBC and having been in both betas, I was much more impressed with wrath beta than TBC beta.

This listing shit is dumb and it needs to stop.

While I'm going to allow the thread to stay open, this needs to turn into some sort of discussion rather than post after post of laundry lists that very few are going to actually read, digest, and comment on. The original post contains ideas for discussion, but what it's not is a post template. All replies that look like the original post will get an infraction. Pretty soon though, a tipping point will be reached and this thread will get locked for rampant stupidity. You've been warned.

Aspect of 25 man and semi-parallel gear progression through badges are probably the best thing that happened for the expansion. The problem for 40 man wasn't as much about carrying people as it is to actually find 40 people with proper class balance to begin with. While 25 man still encouraged some sort of raid stacking, as we have witnessed in Sunwell, 25 man raids are a lot easier to organize and allowed more people to enjoy raiding. Badge gear allowed casual people to get gear at their own pace as well as allow returning players to quickly gear up for raiding without the needs of being carried in raids to pick up scraps. It also bypassed the craphole that all of us hate that is known as RNG (unless they make bosses drop 1-100 badges in the future =P)

Now, the worst: the difficulty for raiding instances give people the feeling that the contents are NOT done and/or well-tested. Pre-nerf Gruul and Magtheridon were both brutal, and 30 minute respawn timer and Al'ar/Hydross being the "first" bosses of real raiding instances, as well as the bad quality of early epic raiding gear (ilvl 100 in karazhan, 110 in SSC/TK) discouraged raiding heavily. The heavy consumable usage sealed the deal for many guilds, although it was nice to see really huge numbers from stacking a flask and 20 elixirs.

Second: the spacing and relatively difficulty of raiding instance was very bad. The entire Mount Hyjal was too short in actual content, and too easy (yes, this includes Archimonde). The length of the instance was artificially bloated using repeating trash mobs, which got very boring and tedious very quickly. First part (4-5 bosses) of Black Temple were also too easy, although having 4 out of 9 bosses in BT being reward bosses for beating Kael and Vashj wasn't really too big of a deal. Vashj and Kael were too hard for T5 content. If you can kill Vashj and Kael for attunements, you can easily clear BT/Hyjal within a reasonable amount of time.

Now, for spacing. Out of the two years in this expansion, Sunwell would have been around for 8 months after Wotlk is released. This means that all the other instances together took about 14 months. This is very bad spacing, and in order to keep the hardcore player, who has been bored for over 6 months farming the same content over and over again, they tune Sunwell to be "the most challenging instance to date". and look what it did to a lot of raiding guilds. While Blizzard learned that an instance with Sunwell difficulty is probably not welcomed, I am still very afraid of their spacing for content release. For WoTLK, it seems like 3 major raids are planned: Naxx, Ulduar Keep, and Icecrown Citadel. Naxx is going to be wrecked by top guilds in one week unless they tune it like Gruul 1.0 again, and who knows how long hard mode Satharion and Malygos (if there is the option for him) can keep guilds occupied for.

I think TBC is a big jump from classic, however the raiding progression pace is just as bad, if not worse, than classic, and should be addressed.

I agree with david0925 regarding Badge rewards: Anyone who was stuck in the Captain Karazhan phase could get ilevel 141 upgrades, but it doesn't really matter because they don't need those upgrades for the content they're doing.

In fact, the overall effect seemed to have been positive, insofar as letting people who took a leave or rerolled alts get caught up in the gear game that much faster.

Furthermore, by making items without tier set bonuses, otherwise 'bad' stat allocations and key slot upgrades (tanking shoulders?), Blizzard still made the Hyjal/BT items worth their weight in gold in the midst of the Badge rewards.

If anything, the problem with the TBC Badge was that you never actually wanted anything except the Badges. This lead to the Mechanar Problem where nobody ran anything else. This appears to have been mostly addressed in WOTLK, both by giving heroic items their own tier of itemization between normal 5-mans and the first raids, but also by implementing dungeon dailies from day 1, encouraging variety in run selection.

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On the topic of raiding: I have nothing but praise for the 10-man model. As someone who plays in Asia but unwisely rolled in a non-Oceanic server, I can't fit my schedule around 25-man raid times, but the small scale of 10-mans coupled with the gradual dumbing-down of the difficulty via Badge/PvP gear allowed me to raid Kara by jumping with 9 other random people and giving it a go, Battleground-style.

I liked the way they made each zone makes sense internally, with HFC being the best example of this. Quest givers lead from node to node, and back again. It was a massive, massive step up from Azeroth. That said, on a pvp server, it never felt like pvp was going on. There was (thankfully, but sadly) no "I survived Stranglethorn Vale" experience.

The quest rewards made more sense, but, I gather left some classes unhappy. But then again, getting rid of strength/agility cloth quest rewards shouldn't be applauded. Rather, expected.

My mine gripe with BC is the art direction. It was awful. The original wow was really interesting because you were inside warcraft. The zones were different, and well designed (from a graphical point). Desolace stands out for me, purely because going there depressed people. What more perfect emotion could a desolate wasteland inspire.

BC, on the other hand, was the weird space crystal thing. It worked in HFP. Was totally abandoned in Nagrand (which is one of the reasons the zone is so favoured, I think). But everywhere else just ratcheted up the ugly. The gear was ugly. The weapons were ugly. Draenai are ugly. I think it's no coincidence that people still yearn after their Tier 2 gear. (Looks wise, at least).

The "let's make everything neon" philosophy gave us the "city" of Shattrath - and it's no coincidence that the only interesting parts of that city are the muddy, dirty, refugee camps.

As for people's comments about 5 mans being too short, or too long. Um, I don't know. When I first him outlands and did Ramparts and BF, I war really enthused by the pared down, trash lite feel of them. Maybe I was burnt out from running Scholo and UBRS for a year and a half, but the speed appealed to me.

Yet here I am now, after the brewfest boss, and wandering through old instances for the Scourge invasion bosses, thinking: these were real instances. We didn't need a rep grind to come back in here, because there was so much to do. So much loot. And so much of it in stages, that you had reasons to come back. Nevermind that a burning Stratholme will always be more interesting to look at than another purple eye-sore.

The raids were okay - I really like Kara, though I understand that it was probably too difficult for a starter encounter. Plus, of course, really making putting together your first 25 man difficult. I kinda wish there were more stand-alone bosses.

Oh, and one of the big things I think everyone is missing that should go on the Blizzard "gold star" list, is the reduced potion requirements for raids. Man that was painful.

The length of 5 man is about right for semi-competent people in TBC. For people that needed to look for pugs, the amount of time spent in the instance plus the time needed to find a group was simply rather annoying and long. This is probably why Blizzard is tuning the 5 man instances in WoTLK to be even shorter and easier, at least at the moment. Sure, it allows the over-geared and the better player to blow through the instances in record-setting time (and most hardcore players will probably level like this on Wrath release to get away from the lag hell that is going to be known as Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, or farm badges at a very fast pace), but for a typical player that has about 10 hours of playtime a week, this allows them to progress themselves in 5 mans at a much more comfortable pace.

I'm still not very optimistic about raiding in WoTLK, but that has nothing to do with class balance, but rather that this is a very matured game already. I sincerely doubt that they will be able to come up with very original concepts to make fights interesting and challenging. TBC was already significantly easier than classic raiding because of the fact that a lot of concepts were recycled in TBC, just forcefully made harder in terms of numbers (healing, dps, tank dmg, etc). Now with raid stacking almost eliminated by greatly limiting cooldowns on enhancement abilities as Bloodlust/Heroism, potions, and stones, the amount of variance a raid can change by bringing different classes becomes extremely limited, which allows for more proper tuning.

Edit: To avoid confusion about the seeming contradiction I have with my previous post. What I mean about "raiding being too easy" is that the concepts are old, even in TBC. Raiding in early TBC is more tedious, if anything. Al'ar required a lot of execution, which was very refreshing until they changed it. Hydross had unreasonable crushing and high HP. Aside from those two, the fights weren't hard; they were just tedious to farm for with the 2 million consumables you use every night, which lead to the "1 hour of raiding, 3 hours of farming" type of jokes. In MMOs, things are very "hard" when you expand the timesink into an even bigger one for no good reason.

<snip>

Zones and Quests
Much more efficient locations for quests : they were placed in "node", so you could take them all at the same time, and then go to business. More efficient, and many times quite logical, but in retrospect, it's also a bit damaging to immersion compared to the previous large pre-TBC zones where you could explore and discover an unknown quest-giver.
The zones were interesting and beautiful, at least at first (expect with Blade's Edge, which was quite boring). But somehow, they lacked the immersion of pre-TBC zones. The atmosphere was strong, but somehow I wasn't as drawn into it than in Westfall or Stranglethorn. Can't really put my fingher on what went wrong, but it definitely feels like there is a lack somewhere. Probably lore.
Daily quests are basically glorified farm. I don't really see what point they serve except alleviating farming on one hand while creating a vicious circle of farming required on the other.


5-men content
Definitely meh.
I hate the "tunnel" effect. Short, boring, follow-a-corridor-with-three-boss-chekpoint and completely devoid of personnality. TBC instances definitely lack the background and verisimilitude of the pre-TBC ones. They are too formatted to fir the same mold.
The heroic system was a great idea, but too many nerfs made it lose its very concept, and it became another boring farm.
The saving grace : mobs and bosses are much more varied/complex/interesting than pre-TBC ones, which were basically tank'n'spank with a special ability thrown here and here (if they had any at all).
The reputation system was annoying, but at least it gave you a reason to come back later, so once they lowered the heroic key to honoured, it became rather a good point.

But all in all, I won't remember fondly TBC 5-men, except for the CoT ones, which, not coincidentally, went a bit away from the simplistic design (though both had still the three "checkpoint bosses", but at least in a more creative way).


Raids
The change from 40 to 25 was great in my opinion. More game, less logistics.
Karazhan was the best instance in all WoW history, bar none : lots of lore, superb atmosphere, lots of boss, varied fights.
There was a lot of improvement in TBC raids compared to vanilla, but with a lot of hiccup on the road : it was basically shitty before 2.1 (insane flasks/elixirs costs, far too hardcore from the start, horrible gear progression...).
After 2.1, it was better, but still with good and bad mixed. The bad was, basically, that the instances weren't very interesting in themselves, the insane attunements, and lack of background in general. The good was interesting bosses and new raid dynamics : much more spec were raid-viables, which was a welcome change from pre-TBC, with a single spec (healing) for all "hybrids".
I also much prefer the token system to the infuriating and frustrating "random tier piece".


PvP
To be simple, I HATED with a passion the TBC PvP. Arena has severaly damage the whole game, taking a much too important places in balance and gearing, and it was probably the worst addition in the whole expansion.
In my opinion, PvP in TBC was simply a disaster.


Professions
I loved jewelcrafting. It was not a lot, but it was really fun. And it didn't require mind-numbing farming.
Many professions were too annoying to level with primal requirement bonanza, and not useful during leveling, as usual.
At least, they were all interesting for the special patches/thread/enchanting/slots they could produce, except for blacksmithing which was left in the dust once PvP gear offered as good weapons as they could craft - the "upgrading" idea was great, though.


Misc
Badges were initially an excellent idea, like arena. But, like arena, they took such a place that they damaged and depreciated the rest of the game. They were good at the role of "getting catch-up gear", but they spilled from this role and became "get your high-level free raiding epics".

FAR TOO MANY EPICS. Purple has completely lost its meaning. Too much gearing in general. The old pre-TBC instances offered usually green items. The largest bosses of the instances offered blues. Some extremely rare epic drops on the end bosses of high-end instances. ZG and AQ20 still offered largely blues, and some epics. In TBC, every guy and his mother drops truckload of epics, and you can get epics in one million and a half ways.
Giving things away too readily drops its value, and purple is really the "regular" color of gear. Sadly, it seems it's even worse in the expansion :-/


Best and Worst
TBC was too much "game mechanics" and too little "immersion and atmosphere". The instance layout was terrible, and I was rarely drawn in, and felt disconnected from most of what happened. Lore was pretty horrible (the whole Blood Elves in Horde, the whole spaceship delirium, please...), or at least horribly butchered.
The mechanics and metagame were quite interesting, though, and there was many improvement in many parts of the game.
Sadly, the prominence of arena and the frenzy epic loots availability, destroyed many part of the game (again in immersion/atmosphere, but also in progression and accomplishment feeling).

Edit : how could I forgot this ? I absolutely LOVED the flying mount. One of the highest fun-point in my whole WoW life.