tldr im small anxiety girl
I want to experience Classic WoW so badly, but I am having so much anxiety and trouble with picking a realm. I’ve probably made a character on every US-EAST realm at this point. I keep thinking to myself “okay, this is the one” and then I second guess myself and worry that I will not find anyone to play with and I end up leaving and trying another realm.
I feel like it doesn’t reeeeeeally matter, but I still worry about a realm just outright dying and it being impossible to find a group to clear a dungeon with, as dungeon running is by far my favorite thing to do in all of WoW.
I don’t have this problem in BfA due to the group finder existing, and realm choice really doesn’t matter there due to that.
Due to me being rather late to the party from constantly starting over and making new characters, I worry that there aren’t many others out there that are playing casually at lower levels, and instead just a bunch of veterans leveling their 10th alt.
All of this combined with the bizarre drama I have been seeing recently regarding realm transfers and population issues, I am just at a complete loss in regards to what realm to join. Everything just seems like a mess and I am afraid of being ridiculed for joining an unbalanced realm or something.
I am lost. I know this is silly.
I am also aware that this has been asked thousands of times already and I am sure a lot of you are sick of it at this point, but, which realm(s) would you all recommend? Preferably a US-EAST PvP realm. I am looking to heal, but I still can’t decide on my faction either.
GAHHH 
2 Likes
just pick the biggest one
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Don’t stress about this, you’re just overthinking it. Just pick one, you’ll find someone in your 20s or maybe 30s doing a quest that needs help. Pick a medium pop server and you’ll be good. Trust me there are plenty of people out there that would enjoy questing with another person and you aren’t going to find them till you start leveling.
In Classic, you will have those times when you can’t quickly find someone that needs the same dungeon or quest that you need. That doesn’t mean your server is dead or dying. This would happen to me from time to time in Vanilla on Bleeding Hollow, which was always a pretty well-populated server. You can do your part to keep the game alive by playing, being active, making friends, and being fun to play with.
I tried a few different servers at launch before I settled on one I really liked and stuck with it. You seem like you have a pretty good idea of what your criteria are, which is good. Think about what kind of population size you want to be part of, and whether you care about queues or layers.
I recommend logging on to a server during the times you’d normally play, and join all of the main chat channels (/join lookingforgroup, /join world, /join lfg, etc). Listen in while you play around on your character. Notice how many (or few) advertisements for groups you see, for what range of dungeons, and for how long people are needing to advertise. Think about the level of banter and what you want to see from that (quiet vs twitchchat). Do this for a couple of sessions and you should be able to develop a pretty good impression of the server culture.
Even though I’m the opposite, I understand all too well the crippling anxiety and indecision you’re going through, because my partner is exactly like that. I would love to invite you to play with my classic guild, but sadly I think it’s not quite what you’re looking for in terms of time zone and activity. Still, the offer is there if you want it.
If you’re going Alliance go to sulfuras:)
Medium population realms are kinda ideal for new players to learn the ropes, don’t worry so much about getting random groups, just find a medium server start a character and then start questing and while you do actively look For a decent raiding guild of you would like to raid. Don’t be put off by raiding, it’s easy in classic and extremely fun of the team is chill.
For your faction choice, that’s harder and asks some questions. Do you prefer to PvP in groups of solo? If you’re a solo PvP play them horde is going to be a better experience, but this will come with the added cost of some very long waits for battlegrounds that is according to the forums. If you don’t pvp, then either faction will do, but from what I have learned here if you are pve only and horde you are rare and it could be difficult to find a chill group. For pve only alliance has a better variety of servers to pick from. Just talk with the players in game and investigate your options.
No one runs dungeons anyways. Everyone just buys runs these days. If you weren’t leveling back when everyone was good luck doing many dungeon runs until level 55+.
I would just go to pagle PVE if your alliance. Lots of players leveling regardless of the people buying and selling runs. If not just choose a pvp realm that isn’t completely one sided population wise and I’m sure you can still find people if you make friends and find a leveling guild. Me personally, I’m still leveling a bunch of characters and if I can’t find a group from spamming LFG I just switch to a different leveled character if I want to do a dungeon. I don’t buy runs either.
If you’ve made a Horde character on Faerlina, then come check out our leveling guild <Social Distancing>. We have a few of our core members starting to gear up Pre-BiS and will be getting ready to raid over the next couple of weeks.
We also have members who are just getting started, and a great group of people all around (I may be biased) 
If you have Alliance on Faerlina, do not delete them thinking you can then make Horde with the same name, as with the server locked, you will not be able to make any characters.
K we’re all thinking it. Your helm looks ridiculous OP.
It’s much worse on a tauren.
Have you tried Deviate Delight yet? It’s one of the smaller servers, yes, but the community is so friendly here that most of us are willing to help people run dungeons if you ask, whether on our alts or being run through. And you wouldn’t be the only person freshly starting over, I know of a person that leveled an Alliance character back in phase 1 and quit and he just recently rerolled Horde on the server.
The roleplaying label tends to engender a (slightly) more mature and less toxic community than some of the other servers. It’s a US-EAST server, so why don’t you give us a shot?
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PVP i could not tell you.
In general though, does anyone you know play?
If yes, is it on one of the really high pop realms?
The high pop realms, you may run into login queues when the real is busy
those can be long sometimes.
Do you want Horde or Alliance?
May want to look at the website ironforge pro and make sure the PVP realm you pick has a faction balance of kinda close to 50/50 or things get lopsided and you are either getting ganked over and over, or you are competing with 10 other people to fight the same enemy person.
You want to heal, healers in general, do not live long in PVP
No one really watches out for you, and as a healer you dont usually take a punch well, or do exactly phenomenal damage.
So you die, a lot.
If you are sure you want that, that is fine.
If you are not sure, and you know you want to heal, you may consider at least testing the water on a PVE realm and playing some battlegrounds for the PVP part, and if you decide you really like PVP healing, then you can always roll a healer on a PVP realm.
just pick Pagle Alliance. it’s PVE, it’s biggest PVE on Alliance side and there’s tons of groups.
PVP and Anxiety seems like a bad combo…
You really should ask if they have a character there first, since pagle is locked
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you’re right…
i think that lock is du-du-dum-dum-du-dum-d-dumb.
I guess since you’ve already tried several realms, have you thought about which ones you liked best/least and why?
My main is Alliance on Skeram, the worst possible state it could be for Alliance but thanks to my active guild I can still run dungeons.
Hope that’s says something to contribute towards your dilemma, if I can get groups on Skeram. You should be fine on any other server given you find a good guild to play with.