Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!

So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!

What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the "fly" in the right direction and wait ... Soo funny).

And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you "had" to walk everywhere first, before getting your "fly", but that just made it worse because now you'd be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.

Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.

Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game...

TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.

WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience what was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.

And it's extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I've had with the game.

For me it's kind of like if you love cheesecake but can't buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago but will never get to have again because the restaurant closed.

This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn't do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game's life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that's it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)

As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.

In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn't join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.

The game needed a reset so that people who hadn't been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.

That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren't behind.

What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they'd then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you'd have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical "rotation" would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.

The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn't the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren't an archdruid, you were the archdruid... and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn't yet exploited.

The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard's choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren't good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they'd be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they'd get known for that too.

These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there's no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you... but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn't something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.

Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you're not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.

I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don't think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.

I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn't must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn't revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven't wanted to play an MMO since.