I honestly can't remember my first real "wow" moment in the game, since I've been playing for a good while now (remember back when Naxxaramas was floating over Stormwind? No? GET OFF MY LAWN!!)

It's not the huge massive things that get to me. It's the little details, the little things that Blizzard put into the game to make it feel like a living, breathing world.

One moment that may seem silly to everyone but me... My friends and I were in a dungeon. I don't recall which one, but were going through a section that was like a mausoleum. After clearing out the zombies in the area, I was looking at the caskets lining the walls. One casket had a doll on top of it. The same doll model used by most every child in the game (and the same model you can buy from Joybuzz in Dalaran).
To me that moment where it clicked in my head that "This one was just a child when he/she died" filled me with a sense of sadness to the point I was tearing up a bit. Even though it's all a game and the person supposedly in the grave never really existed, never had a living NPC, never even had a name or a footnote in any part of the lore of the game, I still felt sad for this non-existant person who died before their time.

That's when I said "wow... these guys are good..."

One less wow-worthy moment where I must applaud Blizzard's attention to detail is in nagrand. If you go around the floating islands, you'll see a small one with a single tree and the ground covered with apples. Leaning against the tree is a skeleton with an axe embedded in his head. I don't know the story, but the thoughts of a guy realizing he was stuck on a flying 100-square-foot island with nothing to eat but apples for the rest of his days and killing himself with his own ax makes me chuckle.

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