The burning Crusade
Wrath of the Lich King
Cataclysm
Legion
Mists of Pandaria
Split for worse: Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth
Right so no surprise there, The burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King is pretty difficult to say which one is the better. TBC did a lot of new things over Vanilla while Wrath did improvements on TBC as well as added new things of its own. Wrath also brought Ulduar out, which is by far the best raid in WoW in my opinion.
Cataclysm took a step in the wrong direction, and started the infernal pruning of basically everything that makes and RPG tick. Talents cut down, spells removed and things simplified. While it revamped the whole world and brought a good story to the mix, the changes to the game wasn’t all positive.
Legion started quite promising when Chilton was at the helm, then Hazzikostas took over and things went sour quite quickly. Legion ends above Mists though because of the stellar beginning of Legion. If Hazzikostas hadn’t taken over, it might even have ended on rivalling Cataclysm or surpassed it. But Broken Shore, time gating galore and Argus just felt like meh content.
Mists comes next here. I just can’t like this expansion, simply because it all feels like a joke (like the one Didier made those many years ago). It continued the pruning of the talent tree, pruned away some more spells and told a rather boring one sided story of “HORDE BAD!”, which is so far away from Warcraft story that you can get.
Lastly we have BfA and WoD. 2 of the worst expansions ever made. Warlords started with a bang, literally, when the developers decided to funnel everyone through the same bottle neck. Could have been forgiven, if it was a new company, but Blizzard should know better than this. The entire of WoD’s story line was boring and made no sense what so ever at the end of it. It also brought Garrison, the worst thing ever introduced to WoW, and it still plagues us to this day. I might put Battle for Azeroth just a notch above WoD, simply because the initial story is a bit better, but the whole story of BfA makes no sense, and Sylvanas is basically turning into Garrosh 2.0, while Anduin can’t win any battles without Deus ex machina saving his behind.
So that’s my list of expansions.