Blizzard has announced they will be closing character copies to Classic Era (Vanilla Forever) servers on July 26th 2022. Starting today the service has been discounted to $5 per character with free transfers to the active realms.
I would also like to update you on the state of Classic Era.
There are currently two active US Server Clusters. Whitemane for PVP and Mankrik for PVE. Both of which are free server transfer destinations.
Whitemane currently has 5 active 40 man raiding guilds. 2 on Alliance and 3 on Horde
There are several pvp discords. Battle grounds are cross region with AV queues popping on AV weekends.
Pug dungeons can be found at all times and pug raids can be found at peak hours.
GDKPs are rare on alliance, but occur once or twice a month. Horde have weekly GDKPs
Alliance guilds:
Phase 7
Pasta Sauce
Horde guilds:
Forever Classic
Rampage
Not Prepared
Gold buying and bots are completely non-existent. Account purchases still exist, but have greatly diminished as the market for this service is entirely on TBC and SoM.
As frustrating as the $5 fee is, donât miss your chance to make your clone. Even if its just for your level 60 trophy case. Classic ERA is alive and growing, and free of the worst qualities of classic. Come be a part.
Clone en route, the original price was too damn steep for me to justify for ghost servers but iâll pay the discounted for a quiet walk through kalimdor if nothing else.
Is the pve server Manrik a free transfer from either Shadow Strike or Obsidian Edge? Because I have several alts on both those realms. I see that I have no recourse to character transfer from Obsidian Edge other than Shadow Strike. There is no free character transfer available from Shadow Strike at this time at all. At $25 per alt, itâs not worth doing.
In a round-about way, yes. Take my realm cluster for example. I have Horde toons on Incendius but Alliance on Faerlina. While, technically these arenât on the same realm, they are both connected to each other and the other 3 realms in our cluster (Benediction, Heartseeker, and Netherwind).
Pagle is connected to Mankrik, which is the realm Blizzard chose to receive free transfers from all other Classic Era PvE realms, so yes: Pagle is in the same cluster as what is most likely the highest population PvE realm in Classic Era.
SoM characters havent been afforded Classic Era realm transfers yet. No one know exactly where they will end up but Blizz has stated that youâll be notified of your free Classic Era transfer options before Season of Mastery concludes.
I donât know what retail cross-realm is like, but there is a very common misunderstanding between the terms âcross-realmâ and âconnected realmsâ. To the best of my knowledge, Classic Era realms are not Cross-Realm. They are connected realms.
Cross-Realm allows characters to temporarily play together. They cannot trade items, form guilds, or use each others proffession services.
Connected Realms are server merges in all but name. They are permanent links between the connected servers that permit their players to share all aspects of the game with one another. Players in connected realms can trade/share the same AH, form guilds/raids, and use each other profession services.
Edit: for the purposes of Battlegrounds only, all of Classic Era is the same battlegroup. This may be where the confusion is coming from. You could technically call Classic Era âcross-realmâ if you look at it only from a BG perspective. However, outside of battlegrounds there are no cross-realm features in Classic Era only merges of same-region servers that blizzard likes to call realm connections.