You actually want to play SOD.

If you're one of the many many people on this sub that I've seen recently asking questions about off meta specs when it comes to the new anniversary realms... "Is prot paladin viable?" "Is Enh shaman viable?" "Can I get a raid spot as ret?" let me tell you something that you apparently may not have figured out. What you want to play is SOD.

Classic Era is a solved game. The meta is the meta for a reason. "Will every raid be warrior/rogue stacks?" "Will I really not be able to get into raids as an off meta spec?" Yes. The answer is yes. We know this, we have known this for years. This is all on record, it was literally just 5 years ago.

If you want a different meta, if you want to try other specs, if you want to play a class that's not a warrior and top the dps meters, you want to play SOD. IMO SOD has a fantastic raid meta. Personally I consider it to be better than TBC raid meta, but that's debatable. What's not really debatable is that it's better than Era's raid meta.

"But is it too late to get into SOD now?" Depends on your expectations. Leveling content is pretty dead, if you want a world full of people running around everywhere doing quests and dungeons, you will not find that. But the XP buff makes leveling fairly quick, as well as some of the daily quest options that open up once you get to 25+ that give lots of good XP for the time they take. So if your goal is end game, you can get there fairly quickly. AQ is JUST starting this week. You have plenty of time to clear MC in one of the many pugs that run it each week on H1 which requires no FR, and then take that loot and join a guild that clears BWL and likely AQ by the time you are caught up. Then there's NAXX +whatever additional content they end up adding at the end. There's many more months of raiding ahead for SOD, IMO it's totally worth getting into even now.

If you wanna play FRESH era? Play it! Enjoy it! But if you want to play a version of classic with a good raid meta, and you want to try out different specs and classes that aren't the normal meta, You actually want to play SOD.