Now is a great time to pickup Classic Era, imo. With SoD out, you have a lot of the “new shiny” group over in SoD land, and you’re left with a lot of the Vanilla/Era forever purists.
I don’t play on the two primary clusters (Whitemane and Mankirk) but from what I read, there are guilds on both who run non GDKP, but I have no clue what their guilds look like or capacity etc is. I know GDKP seems to be the primary loot system on those clusters.
I play over on Grobbulus, which is not clustered due to it being an RP-PvP realm (and per the spirit of this forum post, we prefer to remain unmerged and unclustered!). Since we’ve remained by ourselves, our population is tiny (about 35 active raiders and 5-10 folks leveling most times), but our guild has a great community going that we’ve steadily built over the last two years.
We are currently 11/15 in Naxx and would love a few more dedicated raiders to help clear the last few bosses and then continue on our quest to play Classic Era into the future! We do not have any GDKP systems here.
Check it out if you’re interested, otherwise I would say Whitemane and Mankirk are your best bets!