I am not new-new, but took a few years off and am returning. I’ve been told Realms have now been combined but I do not see what ones are combined. I also relied on a realm population site that is now gone that would show what faction percentage on what realm.
Are dungeons still faction based or do they mix both on the realm you are on to have shorter queues? Same for battlegrounds, are they still faction based or now mixed? I know that defeats the purpose of some lore - but I also don’t want to wait 20 minutes for a battlegrounds game if I only have an hour to play… I just want to pick a PvP realm (NA/US) that has either a balanced faction or one that I know has more of the faction I may play to make queue times reasonable. Is there a way to do this, or at least make sure I am joining a server with decent population?
If the battlegrounds and dungeons now mix realms, does that mean they’ve made it so any realm is a fine choice? Not sure how the instances pool players now.
Realm population is going to effect three things. How many people you see in capital cities, how many guilds you have to choose from, and how populated the auction house is.
Dungeons and BG’s are still faction locked mostly (with the one exception being mercenary mode for Horde players only), but the player pool it draws from now includes the entire NA region. There are no more battlegroups like in the old days.
The aforementioned merc mode lets Horde players queue as Alliance for battlegrounds because the faction imbalance region wide is pretty bad. This lets horde players get quick queues if they want, as well as helps fill groups for alliance. Note that it will change your race to an ally race for that game only if you merc.
Dungeon queues are still long if you’re playing as a DPS. There’s just no way around that because the majority of the playerbase plays as DPS.
So long story short, if you’re interested in harder end game content like Mythic raiding, or just want to make sure you can get into an active guild, you’re better off picking a highly populated realm.
As far as which realm to choose, probably the best way these days is to check out https://raider.io/realms/us because so many people use it to track end game progression at the moment.
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Wowprogress dotcom also has server pops and you can sort by population. Last time I checked the top four were Illidan and area 52 for horde, stormrage and Sargeras for alliance. Also, I think you would see more local players in zones on the high pop servers.
At the bottom of the main forum index page are realm forums. the name of each forum includes all combined realms in that particular realm group.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/
There are no PvP servers anymore. Players on any server can opt-in or out of “war mode” which places them in an instance of a zone that is only populated with other war mode players for PvP.
These aren’t fully updated yet from the recent realm mergers. Hopefully soon, but Burning Legion has been connected for years now and it still shows separately on the forum so who knows. 
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