Never played Burning Crusade before. Will I like it?

Started playing WoW officially during Cataclysm, which was also the first expansion I did endgame pve and pvp in (I did way more pve). I had also stayed for Mists and started to main Alliance instead of Horde because my real life neighbor mained Alliance. As far as Warlords went, I unfortunately only played it for about a total of two months before quitting retail altogether. Throughout my entire time in Retail, I had mained a Balance Druid for PVE and Feral Druid for PVP. Retribution Paladin was my second most played class for both PVE and PVP.

Currently I am playing on Icecrown and it's been pretty damn decent so far. I'm not usually a fan of PVP servers, but overtime I've started to accept being a victim of ganking/camping as an inevitability on here because the endgame has been pretty interesting for me overall. I currently main a Retribution Paladin on Icecrown, but that may or may not change soon.

All that being said, will I like Burning Crusade? My cousin used to take part in PVE on that expansion and my old neighbor used to take part in PVP very religiously as well and they seemed to enjoy it.

Well, it will be a bit different. The main thing is how fluid the gameplay is. Casting times and global cooldowns were much longer in TBC, so there is a bit of a slower pace to it all. Haste was not as prevalent in BC/Vanilla. The talents are a bit different as well, like some goofy almost unusable talents will exist. Money will be more scarce and hard to come by, and things will cost more than they did in wotlk, and the reputations and killing mobs in general will be a bit more grindy. Overall though, the game will be more community driven. BC is less difficult and annoying than vanilla, but the opposite of wotlk. If you are willing to put the time in though, it will be an extremely fun experience. Missing, resisting, and dodges/parries will be more common as well. I may be wrong, but I don't think pallies had as many on use abilities like crusader strike and Templars verdict, more based on the seal system like in vanilla.

Yeah... compared to Wotlk and later Xpax's TBC has a bit more of a learning curve. Each class has a specialized role. For example: mage role is AOE and CC (as well as great dps), but DPS alone isn't really what groups look for. For a pally: Main tank single target healing (big heals) or AOE tank, pallies dont generally main tank, and ret.... yeah forget ret its broken and there is no gear for it, Unlike Wotlk our spell power doesn't scale from strength which means you would have to stack both strength and spell power which isn't really available on gear. But as previous poster says the pace is far slower, CC is a must, Mobs hit a lot harder in dungeons and tanks generally can't hold threat on more than one mob.

In short, TBC is a lot more tactical than Wotlk onwards