I just installed Retail wow and wanted to start preparing for Dragonflight. To my surprise I am missing characters. I am missing my main which I had since Legion. Fully raid geared, done Mage Tower on all 3 challenges. Can someone give me any pointers whats going on?
Thank you! 
Try everything here:
Commonly players login the wrong account/game license (note the wow1 etc) and if characters were on Ragnaros realm, you must also log onto the realm itself to make them appear after a long period of inactivity.
If you cannot find anyone you may have to make a ticket to figure out where they are.
Hey!
Thank you for the reply, I tried this and it did not work. I made a ticket so I hope Blizzard can help. Something must be wrong since I cant find them.
Sounds like you may have been hacked if it’s not on the realm you left it on, or you are mistakenly looking at the wrong realm, if you are not logging into the wrong Warcraft account.
Did you check the restore option at the bottom of the character screen?
Also did you actually open all the realms to check? If you’ve been away a while the number of your characters on each realm doesn’t always show.
I did everything. Even created a character and deleted it to see if something updated. Now I created a ticket for Blizzard to fix it. It must be a code error on their end. I hope its not gone. Some fail safe must be in place. Fingers crossed.
Blizzard would never ever delete your characters so one of two things are certain, you are looking on the wrong realm or you are logging into the wrong Warcraft account.
A third could be you were hacked, depending on when you last used the account.
Unless it’s classic then it gets complicated.