While I did enjoy RvR, most of my time playing back in the day was PVE and I would love to revisit that experience of camps, dungeons, and even quests. Is this shard a good place for that or is it primarily just RvR?
Old Midgard PVE'r here from way back when. I think PVE is great here. Lots of XP bonuses, etc. I see a lot more people playing than the last time I got on live, which was several years ago, so I don't know what it's like there now.
Quests don't really exist here as they did back in the day. You can see the complete quest list on the wiki (there are not many).
PvE generally (for leveling) is easy and okay here. The bonuses for mob types mean that you will find yourself leveling at camps you would not have used back in the day since the mob type bonuses mean it is more beneficial to find monsters of particular types rather than just the old school fast repop lvling sites. Depending on the realm/class you play you will have varying degrees of success finding groups. Hib is pretty welcoming. Alb is pretty exclusive. Mid is the most casual friendly of them all.
End Game PvE has kind of been trivialised here.
Most people will do an encounter once (Dragon, Legion, Etc) to get credit for the boss kills (this is saved account wide) and after that you just farm feathers to buy any drop you want from the merchants in the capital cities. This is typically done in Dark Spire (8 man instance dungeon) or the realms SI Epic Dungeon (Zerg BGs). So there is no real need to do any particular PvE piece more than once, if at all. Except that which can make you the most feathers in the shortest amount of time.
That said they did introduce extra rewards for legion/dragon kills that are accomplished with 24 characters or less, but I have yet to see this being done (on alb) and I dare say I'm online a fair amount. Maybe there are some of these on other realms.
Dark Spire is good fun, but probably the only real challenging/interesting PvE content end-game and after you have done it a few times, there is not too much variation. They have announced a new pve dungeon to be released soon I think. Perhaps they will add more of these over time.
Really, the rewards for any PvE are 'feathers' or RoG. So if you enjoy PvE for the sake of farming and getting great/rare drops then this isn't really done here as you just get feathers than buy whatever you need. Indeed most original game items are lowish utility and not really worth it when you look at the availability/price of RoGs.
I think if you love PvE, any version of DAOC is not the best choice. It's end game is realm vs realm. Pve was more fun on Uthgard then on Phoenix simply due to the higher resist rate, so a grp wipe could happen more often there.