Best Realms & Guilds for Experiencing Entire PvE Game

Guides New Player Help and Guides
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I cannot find friendly, helpful guilds designed for PvE players who want to enjoy the entire WoW content experience.

  • Do any guilds still do low level dungeons (15-60) together?
  • Are there any active guilds that help new players understand the increasingly complex and convoluted systems around crafting, equipment, etc., especially at levels beyond 60?
  • Are there guilds that pride themselves on using clear English, instead shortspeak or teeny-bopper slang, so that an adult of any age group can understand them?
  • Do guilds bother with crafting any more, or are equipment drops all you need?
  • Which servers (realms) are best for finding a “we play all PvE content” guild?

I’ve looked mainly on RP servers, since in years past and in other MMORPGs, RPers tended to be more friendly and interactive. However, I’ve discovered that WoW’s extreme age has caused a very different dynamic.

Most guilds seem oriented toward max level characters doing either complicated, long-term RP activities, or working their way through end-game raid content. Even if guilds were once involved in helping lower level players and doing more “ordinary” dungeons, that is all in the past now.

I have found guilds of low level characters, but invariably they were founded and run by teenagers or college kids devoted to their own progress in the game. Guild members were simply people helping them advance. They would forget you the moment your usefulness to them was done. This resulted in a “guild of the month” experience that was quite disappointing.

I cannot find a realm that is friendly to people trying to play the game from level 1 onward. The server “population” rating is extremely unhelpful. A “New Players” realm just means the realm has very few people in it, with a smaller chance of finding a helpful guild. “Full” RP realms have very busy cities, but most of the traffic is level 110-120 characters. The few mid-level characters I’ve noticed in my RP guilds are all solo grinding to reach max level ASAP.

Yes, I have reviewed the New Player Friendly Guilds Check In Here! thread. In November and December 2018 just three guilds posted, and all were oriented to helping people into raids, or turned out to be oriented toward that once I talked to some of their membership.

Overall, for an MMORPG player who enjoys playing WITH other people, WoW is a lonely, isolated experience. I’m not surprised that the player population is declining, despite 14 years of game expansions and refinements. The “newbie helpful guild” lifeblood of any MMORPG appears gone from WoW. For a totally new player, WoW offers tons of great content and mature game systems, but no below-max-level guilds where someone can find a home.

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Check the sticky up above entitled “new player friendly guilds”.

You can also look in the guild recruitment forum.

Realms that wer formerly designated new player such as Darlaran or Aerie Peak now have thriving populations with many guilds who still recall their roots as a bunch of new players helping one another.

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The Sargeras/Illidan mega-guild “Currently Online” might be something like what you’re looking for.

They have guilds on both the Alliance side (Sargeras) and Horde side (Illidan), and an offline community on Discord where everyone keeps in touch.

As a community, they function on a fairly professional level. Community guidelines are enforced uniformly, as are Blizzard’s own community standards, and offenders are dealt with swiftly.

Due to their size (I think it’s up to 8 Alliance guilds and 4 Horde ones), there are always low level players, or people leveling alts who are willing to do dungeons or other content. All of their same-faction guilds are also connected with a passive addon called “Greenwall” which effectively merges all of their guild chats.

There aren’t really any servers that are especially good for that. Generally speaking, higher-population servers are more likely to have a wider selection of guilds. For Alliance that means servers such as Sargeras, Stormrage, or Dalaran, while for Horde Illidan, Tichondrius, and Area 52 are more or less the “go to” servers. Even with that, however, most guilds will still either be singularly focused on endgame progression, or quiet, casual guilds with only one or two players on at any given time.

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To expand upon Kéres’ comment a bit…
Playing old content as a guild activity is usually done when guild members are leveling alts.
When new content has just been released, they will usually be playing main characters in that new content.

So “we play all PvE content” can vary quite a bit depending upon what else is happening in the wow world.

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Because I’m really lazy right now, here’s some stuff on communities that may be of interest to you.

Take it from a guy in his 50’s who has played wow with gals in their 70’s… if you need to communicate in combat “proper english = dead you” because while you’re trying to type out a sentence the bad guys are going to continue beating on you and you simply don’t have time to type. That predilection for abbreviation bleeds over into every other chat communication. You do pick it up eventually. Try investing in headphones with a microphone and download discord voice chat. It’s free and nearly every guild uses it. Communicating (properly) is sooo much easier when you don’t have to type.

I don’t have as much play time in wow as Nok, Jakjak, Keres and others but my perspective is this:
Most players see levels 1-119 as a stepping stone to 120 where the “real game is at”. You’ll still have people leveling new low level characters and they may even run dungeons with 1-2 other members from their guild but usually this is a ad hoc “pick up game” situation and rarely as a planned event.

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I think it should also be pointed out that the primary places to look for guild recruitment are the Guild Recruitment forums, followed by the server-specific forums. The guild listing in this forum is only supplemental and generally ignored or overlooked, so it makes a poor gauge for the state of all guilds. Communities are a new feature that focus on cross-realm interaction, and also have their own Recruitment forum.

As to the propriety of listings, that’s on the author. Blizzard doesn’t investigate the veracity of recruitment posts, not to mention the current iteration of these forums is only two months old and has very different moderation priorities, and some people are attention hoores who’ll spam their contact information anywhere they can.

Regarding professions: use the profession to increase your skill. With crafting professions, skill points are advanced by making things, and when a thing no longer gives skill points, learn to make a new thing. Trainers provide many recipes, and several others are acquired from certain vendors and other sources. Many players learn a crafting profession and the corresponding gathering profession that provides the materials they’ll need. However, crafting really isn’t as beneficial as it was a few expansions ago so it’s become more of an addendum for guilds than a common focal point.

As of BfA, recipes are divided into separate skill bars per expansion, and are independent of each other. You no longer start with Classic recipes and work your way up, or make several hundred skill points’ worth of useless catch-up items to reach the current crafting. Instead, you choose which expansion’s recipes you want to make, and learn those recipes from the appropriate trainer when you’ve reached the appropriate level. If you only want to make BfA items for example, you seek out the profession’s trainer in Zandalar or Kul Tiras at 110. Frankly the most complex thing about professions now is explaining how they work.

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Thanks for attempting to answer my questions. Here are my conclusions based on comments to date:

REALM CHOICE:
It appears that unless I want to spend half a lifetime sorting through posts in https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/recruitment/guild-recruitment to discover which realm has the most actively posting guilds conceivably appropriate to my needs, in non-RP servers I’m best off with Sargeras or Illidan due the multi-guild setup Keres mentioned. In RP servers, I’m best off with Moonguard or Wrymrest Accord due to their large size.

GUILD CHOICE:
My realm choice determines my guild choice, and I’m best off looking for a realm-specific “guild recruitment” thread within that realm’s forum. At that point, I should look for guilds with lots of people working on lots of alts, to maximize the chance of other people at my level. Overall, leveling seems more about the “race to 120” than “enjoying the journey” or “learning skills important to the end game.” Nobody mentioned ANY guilds devoted to great training on the way to 120, (unlike a game like EVE, which has a number of famous “teaching” guilds).

GUILD DUNGEON GROUPS:
I should forget this, especially at low levels (such as 15-60). The dungeons in the level-up process are like everything else in leveling: a race to 120. No guilds have organized programs to teach good tanking, healing, or DPSing techniques at lower levels, so that their members work well together at higher levels. Team play camaraderie is reserved for end-game activities.

CRAFTING GUILDS:
I should forget this. People do crafting, and may provide benefits as gifts to friends. Guilds don’t coordinate crafting to benefit all.

CLEAR ENGLISH vs AGE-BASED SLANG:
Keres suggestion about the “semi professional” guilds looks like the best bet for me. Tinkerizmo couldn’t know that I’ve used discord for a couple years now, and Skype/TS/Vent before that, primarily for voice in MOBAs. I know all about the importance of voice in complicated dungeons/raids, and its superiority to text for on-the-spot explanations. However, people still use text, both in discord and in forums like this one.

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I think this is a little un-nuanced. My guild, a raiding and social guild, on a relatively low population Oceanic server, coordinates crafting primarily for raiding purposes. That is, in the lead up to a new raid opening up, we make sure that raiders are contributing materials and designated (usually self chosen) people make sure they have learned the appropriate recipes for raid consumables so that all of our raiding needs are covered. This can extend to gear as well. I honestly don’t think Wow’s crafting game is sophisticated enough to sustain a guild entirely devoted to it. I’d love it if Blizzard put more thought into making crafting an enjoyable and interesting game experience like it is in other MMORPGs but I don’t think, at this late stage, that it will ever happen.

The people in my guild range in age from 20s to 70s and most are comfortable using gaming slang as most of them have been playing for years. I honestly don’t think it’s an age related thing. Communication is communication as long as all parties understand one another.

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Hello,
I really loved this post, since I’m facing precisely the same issue: ok, I get it, the game only starts at lvl 120, but what about aaaaaaaaaall the road to get there? There are tons of little bits of information that simply isn’t covered in-game. And unfortunately, Blizzard fell into the “pwning trap” in WoW: high-level players dominate the game, so the developer caters only to them, which prevents new players from joining because ALL content is directed to those high-level players.
This is shown in little things such as - how can I search a guild by name? There isn’t an obvious command for that; someone must mentor you and teach you that you must use the “/who” command. But even this is finnicky: if no guilds are found with that name, does it mean that there are no guilds with that name or that there are no guilds in your realm with that name?
Well, now that I laid my complaints, my question: did you folks get to find a new player friendly guild? It seems Cermaa found The Crimson Caravan, but it’s located in a realm whose population is “full”. I don’t want to risk going there just to find it out because it’s not easy to switch characters from one realm to another. :sob:

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It means there are no guilds on your realm (excluding connected realms) with that name. For example: if you tried to do a /who Currently on Dalaran server, you wouldn’t find Currently Online because that guild only exists on Sargeras and Illidan.

I mentioned the Currently Online guild/community earlier in this thread, but I’m sure there are others around if you keep an eye out for them.

The “Full” realm designation doesn’t actually have much meaning or impact on gameplay aside from potentially having a log-in queue during high-peak hours. If you want to try things out, just make a new character over there and try getting in touch with the guild you’re interested in. Don’t worry about moving your characters (which is costly in real-world money) until or unless you think you’ve found a good home.

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Hey! Thanks for the tips and sorry for having taken forever to reply.
I’ll definetely try this out. I was a bit intimidated by that “overpopulation mark”; I’m glad to see it does not mean that much.
I look forward to enjoying the game! It’s really a shame that it’s so rough on newcomers. :frowning:

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Since my original post that started this thread, I get in-game whispers about once a month from people asking about my current guild. They assume that my guild is oriented toward helping newbies because I’m a member, and because of my original post.

Unfortunately, this is not correct. I’m on an RP server, and my current guild (The Crimson Caravan) was an awesome RP guild during the first third of 2019. Unfortunately, it then ran into leadership difficulties in mid-2019 and right now has very few active players. Most of the members are 120s, like the vast majority of WoW guilds, with all the usual limitations that entails. It does have one or two very helpful people, but then, many guilds have that.

If I could find a guild oriented to truly newbie players, run by dedicated, experienced, service-oriented guildmaster and officers, I would join in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, despite searching on multiple servers, both sides, multiple forums, etc., etc., I have not found a single guild of that type.

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Dread Pirates - Chromaggus(sp?) is pretty dope and welcomes all levels (: