Just after some advice here. I’m starting fresh (Retail) and wondering the positives/negatives for choosing different servers based on their faction populations.
For example if we use the EU wowprogress website and sort by Alliance/Horde, we see all top populated realms are dominated by just one faction. Does this mean I should follow the trend of making a Horde on a Horde dominated server and an Alliance on an Alliance dominated server?
I’ve heard there are more opportunities for guilds/pugs on the busier servers but that auction houses are now cross faction and sometimes even cross-realm if certain servers are connected. I also know Blizzard is planning to merge low-population realms over the next few months - but will that equal out the massive faction differences or just make them heavier?
This website still has PvE and PvP tags but I understand realms are now just all PvE but made PvP through War-Mode. I do want to focus both PvE and PvP in Shadowlands so what do you think? Would it be bad to have all chars of both factions on the same server? Or should I split factions across two servers?
Nice to see everyone agreeing in General for once.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
We don’t know, for sure, but all the realms that are being connected are not ones you should be looking at anyway, because they will typically be LOW-pop realms connected into a MEDIUM-pop realm. You want HIGH-pop realms.
Any reason for a server to be balanced was destroyed long ago, when CRZ was introduced. Blizzard finally gave up on pushing faction balance when they removed PvP tags (which was, by then, a mercy) and instituted War Mode.
Split. I agree with the others. Alliance on Silvermoon; Horde on Draenor.
Those two are the largest realms, and may suffer some queues and lag for the first couple of weeks of the new expansion. Blizzard has gotten a lot better at handling that, though, so they may not. However, even if they do, the quality of life is worth the temporary inconvenience.
The only recommendation I can give is to not go into a Heavy one-sided realm and choose the wrong faction.
Also if you want to enjoy the game by making friends and find a guild to play with, I would suggest joining a medium/high populated realm and avoid “full” realm such as Silvermoon, Kazzak, Draenor etc…
It’s not common to understand, but on theese realm you will get drawned into the mass of players, you will get spam of guild invit, will probably join a guild with so many people in it that like you will most likely never talk with, your trade chat will be spam of Boosting Ads every 10sec etc…
On a lower but yet still high pop realm you’ll have a better overview of the community playing on your realm. I would recommend Sylvanas, Ravenholdt or Quel’Thalas for Alliance and Stormscale / BurningLegion on Horde, maybe Ragnaros/TarrenMill if you want a heavy pop realm, but definitely avoid Kazzak/Draenor.
You can make an alliance on a horde dominated server and vice versa.
you won’t even notice a significant issue, because sharding prevents you from seeing that huge disadvantage and pugs are being run on multi servers.
But the reason you choose a horde dominated or alliance dominated server is because you’re interested in trading with auction house, or you want to join a decent clan for high end content, or you’re a mythic raider.
If you don’t care about any of those, it doesn’t matter.
As for pvp, even if you join a 99% horde 1% alliance server as an alliance, sharding somehow will make you have the advantage or equal numbers.
PIck one with a huge population of the faction you want. This gives you a good pick of guilds to choose from. From my experience, faction balance doesn’t matter, because zones are sharded, so even if your server is 99% one faction, you’ll still get a healthy population of the other to kill.
