so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just do ragchews and the occasional contest but lately ive been getting really into DX and i think i want to actually go for DXCC. problem is i dont really understand how the whole credit system works. like i know you need 100 confirmed entities but do ALL of them have to be confirmed through LoTW or can i still use paper QSLs for some of them? i've got probably 60 or 70 countries in my log already but most of them are just in my log, not confirmed anywhere.

also while im at it — is it worth going for WAS and WAZ at the same time or is that just going to make things more complicated. someone at the club mentioned that some contacts can count toward multiple awards which sounds great but i dont really understand how that works in practice. any advice appreciated, been lurking here for a while and you guys seem to know your stuff

paper QSLs still work fine for DXCC, you just submit them directly to the ARRL for checking at a hamfest or mail them in. LoTW is way more convenient though because once both sides upload the credit just appears automatically. honestly if you can get the stations you worked to upload to LoTW that's going to be the path of least resistance for most of your contacts.

on the multiple awards thing — yeah a contact can count for DXCC, WAS, and WAZ all at once as long as the mode and band count for each. so a 40m SSB contact with a station in say Texas could give you credit toward DXCC (if it's a separate entity from where you are), WAS for Texas, and WAZ for zone 4 or whatever. you dont have to do anything special, you just apply for each award separately and the same log entries get evaluated independently. i'd say go for all of them, the overlap makes it less work than you'd think

went through this same thing last year lol. one thing that helped me was just uploading everything to LoTW first and seeing what i already had confirmed, you might be surprised. i thought i had way less than i did and turned out i already had 84 confirmed entities just from casual operating. also check if the DX stations you worked are active on LoTW before you go hunting down paper QSLs, a lot of the common ones are already there