is it worthy or possible to play era right now from an endgame standpoint?
I skipped vanilla and im itching to try it
hows the economy doing? and raiding/pvp scenario?
Thanks in advance
1 Like
I think it’s always worth while to play Era, if that’s content you enjoy. Possible… definitely, but you should go in eyes open.
Era is very meta-focused for most guilds. You’ll want to play the best classes, have the best gear, have all your world buffs, have the best consumables, etc… If you want to go hard, this shouldn’t really be a problem for you, but if you were looking to be more casual or play a non-meta class, you might have more difficulty. This isn’t to say that non-meta guilds don’t exist and that you can’t find a home, just that it will be harder.
Also, the economy is a bit messed up. Rampant gold buying (and the activities required to support it) have been going on since 2019, which means massive inflation. If you want to be a part of an end-game guild who expects you to be fully buffed every raid, it will be very expensive and so you should be prepared for this. Of course, the flip side is that is if you want to approach the game more casually, you can farm your mount costs with a fairly trivial amount of work 
As noted, there is a lot of raiding going on. I believe there’s also a pretty good amount of PvP happening too. On the Mankrik cluster as Alliance, I could usually find an AV game on non-AV weekend within a 30-45 minute wait, which is pretty consistent with my Vanilla experience. I can’t speak to world PvP. I believe most servers have become mono-faciton but I think there was a server/cluster somewhere that someone said still had a pretty active world PvP scene. Don’t quote me here though, definitely do some research or see what other folks say in this thread.
I think you can have a lot of fun in Era, especially if the type of gameplay it offers is appealing to you. It’s not going to be the same game you would have played in OG Vanilla due to shifting player expectations and motivations, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. Lots of guilds are recruiting to so some digging and ask some good questions to try to see if you can find a good fit/alignment.
Oh also, I think you can also expect to invest a minimum of 5-7 days /played in getting your character to 60. If you play a class that can tank (warrior, druid, paladin, shaman early game) or even just play multiple roles, you’ll find you’ll have a much easier time finding dungeon groups. In Era you don’t have to be the right spec to do the role in the leveling game (ie, tank to tank), but you do need to understand how the game’s mechanics work and play accordingly. It also helps to have some role appropriate gear floating arond your bags.
Good luck in your search, I hope you do find something that fits for you. Era is a lot of fun imho
1 Like
Do it! Era is bis. When you get endgame items they are forever, you can login in a year, two years, or whenever and the gear will still be strong Take a couple month break, no problem, login and jump straight into a WSG with same power level as when you left.
As Tubbly mentioned the economy is a bit wild, however it is possible to get started as a new player. You can make a lot of gold with gathering professions while leveling, take some time to get your prebis and sell BoEs (the gold you earn will go further than gained power level). If you plan to play a warrior you can buy a kroll blade for under 100g probably (same price as two mana potions hahaha) and that is a good starter weapon for raids.
Also if you plan to play a warrior, you can rank while doing early raids / getting prebis - there is no longer decay and the ranking has been nerfed hard - a rank 14 warrior will be in demand in nearly every group and if you know how to play that is enough gear to attend any non-naxx GDKP as a carry (with decent pve off items you got while ranking of course).
When you are doing AQ40 / BWL and even lower raids you can get big payouts and that will earn you plenty of gold for consumes.
Now if you want to get naxx bis - you can find a guild and run with them. Or you can save your gold and go with GDKPs, though naxx items are a tier more expensive than items outside naxx (sometimes things are very cheap depending on the run, but contested stuff is expensive).
Take your time and give yourself a decent timeline to gear your toon, enjoy the journey, and Era will be very rewarding. If you expect to be full naxx bis in a few months that just isn’t feasible. But if you take some time and enjoy being the underdog, then in decent raiding gear, than slowly growing towards bis - you will have a great time at all parts of the journey.
1 Like
Yes 100% possible, still tons of activity, and loads of players doing end game and dungeons to gear up.
2 Likes
Thank you very much for the replies guys!
1 Like
My advice to you is to play outside the unfortunate norms of Classic Era right now. You can find progression guilds that do not do GDKPs, etc. This allows you the experience of actually doing the challenging content before its on farm, and it allows you to get more of a feel for Vanilla WoW as opposed to this abomination of GDKP stuff going on right now. The guild im in is a Soft Reserve Loot system guild that is in AQ40 Progression right now (Have twins on farm, haven’t got passed that yet). I played Vanilla as a little kid, but I never made it far to raid and what not, so I wanted to experience the raids, especially AQ40 and Naxx in a more normalized way, its been good fun so far.