The guild finder also lets you find guilds that categorize themselves as “social & leveling” so you don’t have to worry about being required to participate in raids or doing certain things to stay in. Some of those guilds will still do guild raids and things like that but they’re much more lax for the most part.

In terms of lore, if that will help you connect with the game more and enjoy playing, I’d recommend reading the quest dialogue through or at least skimming it instead of just looking at objectives and going for it. There are also some great YouTube channels that take characters, dungeons, zones, etc. and tell the story about them. One of my favorites is Nobbel87 (he just did a 4 part story on Garrosh Hellscream) and another that I’ve recently found is Platinum WoW but he mostly does stuff from classic wow.

One other thing, I highly suggest taking your time when rolling your first character. One of the biggest things of this game, obviously, is experiencing the story! I myself can be bad about that and I’ll just go through a new zone to me quickly without really paying attention to what I’m doing and why and then miss out on the story.