This sends you to Zangarmarsh where you kill minions of Illidan/Lady Vash. After a lot of questing, you get a quest about “what is happening at Cenarion Thicket?”. Which you find out in retaliation to the events in Hellfire.

This leads to the whole mana bomb chain. Eventually the Mana Bomb leads you to the southern horde/alliance hubs, which send you to the camps. During the chains there, you fight the orcs that are allying with Illidan and the Blood elves that actually made the mana bomb.

A translocator trip to the top of the spire in the same location leads you to a dialogue between Pathaleon and the leader of this belf camp. It explains the whole deal. Pathaleon turns out to be the last boss in The Mechanar.

It’s not amazing story telling, but it sticks out as good in my mind. You also have the rather long chains in Blade’s Edge and Nagrand (Rexxar, and Earthmother) if you’re horde.

Finally, big bosses in TBC. You run into Illidan twice in shadowmoon, once during the tabard quest chain, and once at the end of the Netherwing dailies. Where he actually shows up in person to kill you. I’d also like to point out one Mr. Kael’thas and his many set backs.

Regarding WOTLK, it is hard to explain… except the christmas-tree-questhubs in Zul’Drak I think the zones were much better done than in TBC. If the flying mount only zones of the Storm Peaks was great other than for visual awws and owwws is another question, I did not love ground combat there.

But in the end the piss easy boring dungeons annoyed me the most in WOTLK and made me quit early. After I was so excited about it for months.

I guess I just had enough of WoW, and no phasing trick or Wrathgate event could sway my opinion.

Thinking about it a moment, I think part of the issue is that in TBC, the overriding story wasn’t everywhere. The space goat vs. demons thing flavored a lot of the content, but I didn’t continuously have the big bosses visit me in a mini-cinematic as I was doing some quests. (I can’t even think of any of the big boss names from TBC, even.) I was driven by the Explorer instinct to see all the different bits of content out there.

Compare this with WotLK where the Lich King appeared quite a few times. It got so silly that I kept /yelling “Ozzy is cooler you poser.” for the amusement of my group of friends. By the time I actually got to Icecrown I was well and truly sick of the Lich King. The overarching story was supposed to keep me interested, but frankly I didn’t care. This might be because I thought the whole “Arthas had to kill everyone to save them but oops became a bad guy instead” in Warcraft III was one of the dumbest story elements I have seen in any media, let alone a game. (I figure other people who love Warcraft lore probably want to burn me as a heretic now.)

So, I guess that’s one of the dangers in trying to pack too much story into a single line is that if the storyline fails to capture someone, it can be a waste.