Why is this (arguably) the best expansion ever made? What exactly do people LOVE about wrath?
For me, it was the absolute beauty of Northrend and the music. I often times just go there and fly around, taking it all in, reminiscing as best as I can.
Also, my main was a Ret Paladin. We all know how crazy they were during wrath.
I prefered TBC to Wrath. However… Wrath was a good, casual friendly, family fun kind of expansion. Despite the undeath theme. Dungeons were easy, classes were easy, raiding was easy to get into. Tons of pugs aside from ninja looters.
The overall experience was really well done. The music, the villain, the world, the gameplay-- everything felt nice.
I think it was the epitome, or the perfection of what Vanilla wow started.
They had ironed out (most) of the less comfortable aspects of the game, without completely streamlining it and making it super intuitive; you still had to learn your class, learn your character.
The gearing system was well ironed, tried and true. The PvP had a rocky start. (Ret paladins were good for basically the first time ever, and DK’s = Existed.) but it all smoothed out.
It was also THE expansion. We were finally coming full circle, and bringing that basted Arthas his just desserts. I can’t remember the last time I felt eager to raid because I hated/loved that villain so much.
Go watch the Trailer for WOTLK. I bet you get chills.
Part of it was the story. The Lich King/Arthas story is what a lot of people fell in love with in warcraft3 and so a return to that in WotLK was a ton of nostalgia. Also there was a lot more interaction with the Lich King during the questing and leveling so it created a stronger connection to the villain compared to the previous xpacs
Death Knights was also the first new class and one had been highly anticipated.
I think a lot of people also consider it a really good middle ground between the QoL improvements made since Vanilla but not being overly accommodating how it is now.
Though personally my favorite was probably cata with mop being a close 2nd
The above pretty well sums it up, I’ll add to it a better dev team than we currently have.
Semper Fi! 
Wrath was nearly a complete 180 from BC’s design philosophies. The devs really wanted everyone to experience everything on the player’s terms. The initial offerings for raids and 5-mans were all pretty easy, tank threat was massively buffed, some minor DPS nuances were removed, and so on. Add in a solid questing experience, good storylines, a great big-bad that folks have wanted to encounter since forever, and a dev team that was really engaged with the community, and you’ve got a grand slam of a game.
The last expansion before burnout for a lot of people. Many were done after Arthas because he was the bad guy left behind in Frozen Throne. I think it was the last expansion you needed a physical copy of as well, so more of the old people lining up at midnight to buy the game at the local shop(I know I did for both BC and Wrath).
I loved the locales in WotLK, places like Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills were just the best.
Honestly though, the expansion wasn’t the best. It was definitely very good in an overall sense, however there have certainly been different expansions that simply beat it in terms of different aspects.
I think that’s probably why a lot of people liked it though, it wasn’t outstanding in any particular area (outside of story) but nothing was “bad” in it. There wasn’t much to hate.
I do feel like it was definitely the expansion that pathed the way for the design philosophy that has brought us to BfA. WotLK made the game more accessible and easier, Cata sought to change that and bring it closer to TBC difficulty and was swiftly opposed and thus the accessibility approach of WotLK was compounded upon.
Haha also played a Paladin in WotLK, not going to lie I swapped a bit to my Warrior though after everyone started to use the classic “Ret macro” and could just press one button and win.
Great story - Arthas’s story is probably the best story in Wow. People had been waiting years for what happened with him.
Fun classes - The trees were “bloated” but it made leveling fun and trying new things fun. Death Knights could be tank or DPS with any spec.
More rpg elements - Many classes still had quest chains to unlock spells. You could use different weapon types for several specs - 2H Frost, 2 1H for Fury, etc.
Great overall content. Northrend is huge. Awesome raids, fun dungeons.
there’s more, but some of the highlights.
Dark iron Dwarfs where not playable so it shouldn’t be.
I think it’s because of the narrative. The story stood on decades of good lore. We had the lead-up to the third war from the mid 90’s RTS’s (WC 1 and 2) and then the culmination of WC3’s story. It included a very identifiable big bad (Arthas) so the story was very coherent, compared to BC - which seemed to be a means to tie up lots of loose ends (Kael, illidan, the alliance expedition, etc).
Edit to add: the narrative and enemy didn’t need the Xe’ra treatment. Eg it didn’t need to be forced or the player didn’t need to be told about why the Lich King was bad (compare that to Xe’ra’s PR to sell us that illidan was good, which felt very forced at times). Wrath was just silky smooth. Even though we knew what, most likely, the outcome was. We were along for an adventure that didn’t rely on plot twists to hook people: just good, straight-forward good v evil.
I am THIS CLOSE to downloading a private server not gonna lie
A lot of things can be said, from the fact that there truly wasn’t any other really decent MMO out there, to the time, to the hype to a lot of cool things going on.
With that being said, the main reason I believe is the story.
Wrath was the culmination of a story that spans more than a decade before it. From Warcraft all the way to WoW:Wrath. He has been (unquestionably) the most iconic villain this game has had and the connection it made with players hasn’t been matched since. The grandiose feel or this epic battle for the world against the scourge is one that not even Legion could replicate.
A lot can be debated, but to me there hasn’t been a story as in-depth, developed and nurtured in this franchise as the one of Arthas. That’s it.
And that moment when you first stepped into Ulduar, man, still to this day, my most favourite raid instance out of all raids in the game 
Continuation of Arthas story. LFG and AoE dungeons = instant queues for all with tokens that allowed for predictable and grindable increases in gear.
I keep hearing people say Wotlk leveling sucks… myself included, how could “Northrend” be a positive point on how good the expansion was? I don’t get it.
It was my introduction to WoW so it will always have a special place in my heart. But I think the reason the game grabbed my heart within days of starting to play it was the great story.
We knew who the villain was in Wrath. We could see his work all around us, we knew he was sitting there up in Icecrown Citadel (which I thought was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen, graphically). He was the true End Game, the ultimate target for all our efforts, the reason we worked so hard to get to the point of being strong enough to take him on.
It was a time when achievements meant something - hell, they sent us a congratulatory ingame mail when we hit 80 along with fireworks. It really did mean something to get to cap. I was so excited and my guild held a party for me in the Filthy Animal Tavern and we had chocolate cake.
Those days are gone, of course. Now its hit cap, meh, onto the next less-than-exhilerating thing. No expansion will ever have that same Sense of Wonder for me.
And so beautiful, a huge complex with amazing mobs and bosses around every corner. I can’t think of any raid that really surpasses it.
It was dark and serious with a sense of doom and gloom everywhere. The Scourge was a constant threat. There was no “ook em in the dooker”, an “Iron Horde” that threatened to wipe out all life on Azeroth but couldn’t manage to organize themselves enough to take out one small garrison, or “Hey let’s go help these moose people and completely ignore the Legion threatening to wipe out all life in the universe”. It’s like they hired Uwe Boll as lead designer.
I tend to agree with this. Story was killer, you really bought into and those from the Warcraft genre really felt they were coming full circle and completing a story.
Even little things like the argent tournament which seemed a little out of place was roped into a convincing expansion plot.
I personally think the statement of WotLK being a really good middle ground is really accurate. It’s something I look back on and regret due to what eventuated, but taken as the experience itself it totally holds true.
I feel the systems in place but with a slight increase in difficulty of dungeon content would have been perfect.
I was also a fan of Cata even though I know a lot of people really disliked it, for me it was more the initial difficulty of the heroic dungeons along with their generic design where mechanics were meaningful, I also really loved the troll dungeons when they were redesigned.
MoP too felt really good with it’s PvP design (minus EMfH), and just in general making enemies feel more important, I really loved them adding really punishing abilities to trash mobs like the big Mogu cleaves. Plus the environment things like the falling statues were neat.
I kind of wish Blizz held onto WotLK design as it was, didn’t change the talent/spec setups and simply increased the difficulty to Cata design and then added in the things like punishable mechanics on trash mobs and the environmental things from MoP. I think that would have made for a really solid design, that would probably be my perfect version of WoW.