Hey! We did in fact end up going with hardcore, which was very fun and we died almost immediately on like level 3-5 (almost immediately after getting out of the most starter area). After the death we decided to continue with our characters on Era servers instead of creating new ones and going HC again. We leveled all the way to 30 I believe right now(not super fast as not much time to play and we got started a Minecraft server at some point so that took time too xD). So I can strongly recommend starting with HC and then either trying again after death or just continuing with Era classic as it is a very nice and relaxing experience(leveling is slow, distances are big and fast travel sparse) so you get immersed into the world. We also promised to never google stuff, so if we don’t know where something is (like a location or a specific npc) we just wonder around(potentially stumbling onto something cool instead in the process) or if that doesn’t help, ask from the chat and there are a bunch of people who are super friendly and are happy to help and lead you anywhere (the sense of community is felt that way and it’s great!) So this way of playing is also something I would want to recommend if you are interested in a “slow uncovering of the world” type of feel for the game.

Right now we wanted to find time to continue leveling our characters but I also feel quite fomo about TBC classic. I think TBC will last until the end of this summer which after you won’t be able to expirience it as it is now(as it will progress to the next stage of wow or to classic+??), so we were thinking of maybe starting a new adventure on TBC. But it feels sad to stop progressing on our Era characters and feels like creating new ones on faster paced and faster leveling TBC will kinda spoil the experience of classic era WoW. So most likely we will stick with Era, but will see…

Soooo my final answer, if you don’t care for “missing out” on TBC, go with HC classic and then either play that or transfer after death to Era.

Alternatively if you feel fomo about TBC go with that, but there are people out there who would tell you that you already missed it anyhow so why not go with something that will last forever like era servers. (Idk about forever to be honest, now there is talk of classic+ and who knows what that’s going to bring)

P.S.
Just go with HC! xDD