Over the years I’ve made and deleted probably 40 - 50 toons over different realms I’ve managed to remember a few realms but when I go on there are only a few toons, is there any way to find all my old ones or have they just disappear into the void ?
I just restored 18 level 60 characters to farm mounts during the bounty collectors event and then deleted them again. It’s my understanding that you can only restore so many characters per year based on whether or not they get completely flushed away. So if they are there, it’s because they met the criteria and if they are not there, it’s because they didn’t meet the criteria.
The good news is there’s an entire support article on it that you can read right here on the site
Yup! You can certainly restore deleted characters in World of Warcraft. There is limitations however.
I recommend reading This Support Article. It shows how to restore deleted characters and how long you have until you can no longer restore them.
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It used to be that deleted max level chars were kept forever and you could use the self-help undelete tool to get them back. I think the cooldown is now 1 per day.
This year they changed the Retail policy though and Retail characters are no longer kept forever. Max chars you delete are kept for 1 year. Others are kept for less.
If you have old chars that were deleted more than a year ago then they are unfortunately gone. More recent ones can be recovered.
You can read more here
Limitations
- You are limited to one restoration per day
- If you have multiple WoW accounts on the same Battle.net account, the cooldown is shared between them
A character is eligible for restoration depending on its level at the time you deleted it:
| If your character is | Is it eligible for restoration? |
|---|---|
| A class trial, or an allied race or hero class at starting level | No. |
| Below level 10 | No. |
| Between level 10 and 49 | Yes, within 90 days of deletion. |
| Between level 50 and 59 | Yes, within 120 days of deletion. |
| Level 60+ | Yes, within 365 days of deletion. |
If a character doesn’t appear on your list, it means it was purged from the database because it was deleted too long ago. Purged characters cannot be restored by any means.
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Oh wow, so much green
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Not anymore. It is one per day now. They recently changed all of the restoration stuff.
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Well that is good to know thank you for the update. I haven’t restored a toon in a very long time and was unaware they changed it
I stand corrected. Deleted my comment to prevent the spread of misinformation
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What if a person undeletes a character. Then a day or two later, deletes them again. Does the ‘timer’ for Blizz to purge that character start from scratch?
Good question. Without testing it I would have no way to know. I don’t have any deleted chars to see if they have a “timer” displayed on them. I am not really excited about the idea of testing it myself.
I suppose if you have a throw away char you don’t might testing on you could do that. Just don’t forget to un-delete it when done!
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I recently deleted a character I no longer needed (a duplicate rogue on an “alt” realm). There’s no “timer” displayed on the character that I can see, and I would presume that the 365 day clock (she’s L70) started the day I deleted her.
Hovering over the button on the left says “Resotre”; there’s no timer anywhere (that I could see).
Thank you for testing that. A timer would be nice to show. At least I won’t be giving bad advice by telling people they can easily tell!
Disappointing but yet so typical of Blizzard. I quit WoW for 2 years during Cataclysm/early Panda because I hated Cataclysm so much.
I changed my mind and decided to give MoP a go and got my lvl 85 characters back (a few lowbie characters werent able to restored), including this one, and I liked MoP and stuck around since.
But if that was now my characters wouldnt be restored, I would never return and try MoP and Blizzard would miss almost 13 years of $ from me.