WoW was a great MMORPG, but its expansions? Hardly "great expansions". I'd also argue that the frozen throne in 2003 wasn't a great expansion for wc3 either.
Grubby's talked about War 3 prior to TFT, and it doesn't sound very good. Mass kodo Orc mirrors, mass ancient of wars as a viable NE strategy, all kinds of whacky junk. Human could call militia at any expo so people would expand into their opponents base and call militia for a really dumb early game rush, I've seen a couple team game videos like that. I wasn't playing back then but it sounds like what we have now is better than what we had then. Really the only bad thing about current WC3 is some of the matchups suck. UD is an underpowered race, and Orc vs Human is just dumb.