I can remember three distinct points with extreme clarity.

My first character ever was a night elf. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I quickly abandoned it and started an undead warlock (the guy I was playing with was horde and he chastised me for starting an alliance on that server). As I wandered through Tirisfal Glades, I thought "man, this place is huge!" I was about level 12 when I discovered Silverpine Forest. It was probably 6:30pm server time when I wandered out of the gloomy dreariness of Tirisfal Glades out into the open sky of Silverpine Forest, and I'll never forget how it felt to see the real sky without the clouds.

Later on with that warlock, I got a quest to go to "Orgrimmar". Not knowing what this was, I asked my friend and he said it was on "the other continent". I remember thinking "there's another CONTINENT?" because I had thought Tirisfal Glades was huge! When I finally discovered the other continent, I felt so small.

The most epic experience I remember early on, though, was going from Desolace to Feralas. It was about 3 in the morning, and I had been in Desolace for days (leveling was slow and I didn't know what I was doing about half the time). As I crossed over into Feralas, I went over a bridge with a waterfall to the side, and I turned the camera to look at the waterfall and FELL OFF THE BRIDGE because I was so taken aback by how gorgeous this zone was.

Those were my really early moments of "wow!" (no pun intended), but a fourth deserves honorable mention because it affected me in almost as great a way ... when Wrath first came out, two of my friends and I picked up our copies at midnight and leveled straight through the weekend (I slept for eight hours once; one of my friends slept for eight hours twice). I was a healer, one of them was a tank, the other a DPS, so we would go do the new dungeons as soon as we could, and we did them without knowing any of the strats ... we did Gundrak at 72, haha. That was the most fun I've had playing WoW, including the very beginning.

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