Posts with tag twink

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth making with the stabby and turning people into frogs.

So we're getting to that time in the expansion. People are winding down a bit, relaxing their playstyles, taking a break from raiding after getting their last targets down and killing a certain dragon on whatever mode takes their fancy.

So what do you do? Why, PvP! Of course, you can take your beloved max-level main, convert all that valor you don't need after completely gearing yourself in 397s or better into conquest, and get on the PvP train. Your justice points, of course, convert to honor (not at quite such a good rate), and that legendary staff you got when Firelands was still cool will do just fine. Better than fine, in fact. (Grumble, grumble.) But my residual bitterness about PvE gear in PvP is not what we're here to talk about today, nor is max-level PvP conversion. No, my lovely reader, we're here to talk about twinking.

What on earth is twinking? Well, it's when people level a character ... then stop. They might lock their XP or just not actively level at max speed for a level or two. In PvP, twinking centers around Battleground brackets and Arena levels, and it's really good fun!

First and foremost, you need to know how to lock XP, if you want to. Simply visit Behsten for Alliance or Slahtz for Horde. Bring 10 gold with you. It should be noted that locking XP is definitely not a requirement for twinked PvP! On certain battlegroups (my main battlegroup sadly included), XP-locked Battlegrounds leave you with a wait time that is "undetermined" -- you're not getting in any time soon. Exploits that get you around it are just that -- exploits. Blizzard may well borrow Adam Holisky's Ban Hammer!

Twink Info, a depository of great information and blogs for twinking out your characters at any level, is giving away some great prizes this season including a 7-inch touchscreen tablet. All you have to do to enter into the drawing is create an account for Twink Info's forums and post a minimum of 15 times before the new year. Learn about twinking out a new alt, how to survive in the Battleground brackets, the best transmog sets for your level, and more, while being entered in a cool competition.

Read all about the contest over on Twink Info, and then enter the contest.

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From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

PvP twinking is a fairly well-known, widespread phenomenon in World of Warcraft. The idea is that players stop leveling at the very top of a particular PvP level range bracket, dig in with all the mix-maxed gear and enchants they can muster, and proceed to mop up the battleground kills. Anyone who's run a few battlegrounds on the way up through the levels has encountered that shockingly strong player who tears him a new one. We've even profiled a prolific, multi-level twinker (twinkie?) right here on 15 Minutes of Fame.

What you might not be as familiar with -- we weren't! -- is the idea of PvE twinking. Allow us to introduce a hardy band of adventurers on Blackwater Raiders (US-H) that's running each and every instance at the bare minimum level that players are eligible to enter. Ragefire Chasm at level 8? You got it. Deadmines at level 10? Aggro Magnet Central -- but yeah, you got that, too.

"It's surprisingly fun playing these classic instances that we've all done hundreds of times at such a low level compared to the mobs," gushes party leader Gilgalad. "It can take hours to clear an instance that typically takes 20 to 30 minutes for an appropriately leveled party. Some of the boss mechanics that are typically a trifle to a normal party become incredibly difficult to deal with when you are 10 levels below the boss. Arugal in Shadowfang Keep was particularly tough and required quite a few attempts before we came up with a strategy that worked."

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• This week's EU forum watch brings you the best of the official forums, European style.
• OutDPS has a cure for the lagging hunter pet, increasing their DPS by a bit.
• Shields Up really likes the two piece tier 10 bonus on the resto shaman set.
• Killing 'em slowly looks at his elemental shaman twink gear.
• The German WoW fansite buffed.de is collecting photos of the players and their avatars for a large gallery. Go check it out and contribute if you want!
• Cynwise's Battelgrounds takes a look at heirloom gear for the lowbie battleground player.

From a lore point of view, everyone loves the endgame. Illidan, Kael'thas, Yoggy, Arthas/the Lich King; it's great but not everyone actually wants or has the time to spend hours in raids. A friend of mine once told me that 'WoW starts at 60' although that probably should be switched out with the current level cap. I'm sure for some players this is not the case though, far from it. As Blizzard makes the game more friendly to twinks and leveling toons by letting you disable XP gain and supplying mounts ten levels earlier, it makes me wonder if people are going to shun the endgame in favor of enjoying everything else Azeroth has to offer.

Let's imagine for a moment that you can't/won't raid any of the Wrath content. What would you do instead? I'm talking the little things in life like rolling a new toon and exploring all those newer locales that you missed since leaving to Northrend. Are you going to turn off XP and just see how it feels? Rather than do the endgame, are you going to give PvP or PvE a go? Go for that really tough achievement? What about a little role playing? Would you finally level up that second profession or give first aid, cooking and fishing a go?

There was a big announcement today on upcoming Battleground changes. However there are two critical pieces of PvP information that people everywhere, especially twinks, are going to go crazy over.

• You will be able to level through PvP Battlegrounds
• You will be able to turn off experience gains
  

This means that you'll be able to level your character simply by competing in PvP in battlegrounds and completing objectives, such as capturing the flag in WSG or securing resources in AB. Not from killing other players. This opens up a whole new way of playing the game at the earlier levels, one that will add a significant dynamic to it.

The second major change is the ability to turn off this experience gain in Battlegrounds and the rest of WoW (at a cost of 10g). This means that twinks are a viable and supported option in WoW, and lets those players who want to sit in the 30s bracket enjoy it to their heart's content.

Additionally, if you have turned off experience gains, you'll be placed in separate battlegrounds from those that have them turned on. That means that twinks will play against other twinks, and not against those players who are just interested in the bracket from a more casual perspective.

The floodgates of Patch 3.2 are wide open now. Enjoying it?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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The twinks were a little doom-and-gloom before the patch, but it seems like the end of the world has come and gone, and they're still interested in twinking. As Drayner over at Twinkinfo predicted, all of the changes on the PTR went live: enchants have level requirements, as did profession buffs, and those aren't scaling either. At this point, it sounds like the only way to twink out your character (which means make it super powerful at a certain low level) is to fit them out in the best gear you can find for the level.

If you can keep them at that level, that is -- apparently there's a bug in the game with queuing up for BGs where you are sometimes accidentally transported to a graveyard when you queue. And for some twinks sitting just on the brink of leveling, that extra few points of exploration XP could ruin everything. Be careful with that, though we're sure a hotfix is incoming soon.

But nevertheless, people apparently still twinking -- while there are good numbers of people ready to leave twinking (or even the game), the majority of answers on their poll over there say that people are still going to try ruling the lower level battlegrounds. Which is about what we expected before the patch: these people live to bend the rules as far as they'll go, and a few more probably won't stop them.

Ishh over at Twinkinfo has some pretty big news for lower-level players: the enchants, librams, and even jewelcrafting trinkets that used to work for almost everybody ingame have gained a few level requirements on the PTR. Twinks especially love these items, as they can be used to give big buffs to even low-level players, but Blizzard isn't down with that any more, apparently. Even applied enchants and Leatherworking leg armor will apparently stop working if this change goes out to the live realms -- they have pictures, as you can see, of enchanted stats turning red due to level requirements.

Most of the time, when Blizzard makes changes like this, they aren't actually targeted at twinks -- they're just designed to keep the game from becoming extremely easy at a given level (I'm still bummed that my Leatherworking drums have no effect after level 70). But obviously twinks are affected by these changes, and as you can see from the comments on that post, they're not very happy with having even more limits placed on how they can buff up.

But then again, as I said a little while ago, twinks have always dealt just fine with limits. Twinkinfo has a poll up on what twinks will do if these changes go live, and the majority of votes say that they'll just keep twinking. They've gone around level restrictions before -- a few more won't be the end of the world.

Our friend Drayner has posted an open letter to Blizzard over at Twinkinfo.com in which he basically laments the breaking of WoW's twinking game. We've covered twinking quite a few times before here -- it's the game-within-a-game of beefing up lower-level characters to their maximum power using enchants, low-level items, or whatever else they can find. Officially, Blizzard hasn't endorsed or condoned twinking -- if you want to do it, you're free to, but you've got to live with the rules they set on items and enchants, and so forth.

And that seems to be Drayner's main issue with Blizzard: they aren't consistent on twinking. They'll make changes that level the twink field, and then they'll ignore bugs that almost completely break it. They kept the latest enchants off of players below level 60, but then they grandfathered in players with the 450 profession buffs. He's got a whole list of changes they've made for and against twinking, and basically asks Blizzard to either support twinking, or (and obviously he's less happy with this decision) end it for good.

Unfortunately for him, he probably won't get an answer. There are plenty of players twinking, but not nearly enough for Blizzard to consider making changes based on twinks alone (and while twinks are howling at some of the changes, the rest of the player population either dislikes the whole idea of twinking, or couldn't care either way). And considering that twinking does draw some players into the game, it's not likely Blizzard will ditch it anytime either. Twinks, they would likely say, are playing a meta game already based on made-up rules, so why should it matter that they've also got to abide by other inconsistent rules? Based on what we've heard from them in the past, it seems twinking is a player creation, not a Blizzard creation, so it's up to players to deal with the issues, not Blizzard.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Although patch 3.1 is still a few months from going live, it is already shaping up to be a positive force on the professions front. So far, we've been made aware of the following changes:

• Two new Engineering enchants (attn: tanks and spell power users).
  
• An engineered bind on equip blue trinket.
• A +hit elixir for the level 19 twink community.
  
• A deliciously ridiculous number of new glyphs, along with glyph changes.
  
• New Blacksmithing bind on equip epics covering spell plate, dps plate and tanking plate, as well as a spell dagger.
  
• New juicy, expensive enchants.
• Finally, a productive use for Black Diamonds.
• A new Jewelcrafting trinket.
• Lots of new Leatherworking goodies.
• Several Tailoring items, including a 32-slot herbing bag.
• Many current recipes, including Old World and Outland ones, are being rebalanced and updated.

For details and analysis, follow me through the break. Keep in mind that these are subject to change, and that we will likely see even more developments in the future.

Our inbox has been absolutely flooded with reports of this mysterious twink, Aigni of Ner'zhul, that appeared on the official forums in the last 24 hours. If you look closely at his Armory, you'll notice some pretty big oddities. For one, the character is wielding a weapon he really shouldn't be able to have. Two, the character has some other items equipped that are normally far out of the reach of a level 10, such as the Violet Badge. Three, he has the achievement for downing Gruul the Dragonslayer.

A lot of people have called 'hax' on it, but how it went down was probably more innocent than that. Not completely, entirely innocent, but more innocent than hacking Blizzard's Gibson. Our first instinct when looking at the items is that he must have simply completed a few bugged quests that had no minimum level requirement. Looking at his achievements killed that theory pretty quickly, though. The sword he's wielding, the Combatant Greatsword, is from a quest in the Borean Tundra. According to his achievements, he's never been to the Borean Tundra.

This is interesting -- our friend Drayner over at Twinkinfo.com recently took a survey of his site's readers, and after picking up almost 1,000 replies, he's posted the results. They show a little bit of insight into the kind of person that plays a twink (a character maxed out at a certain level before 80, usually to run around in PvP battlegrounds). Specifically, they're male, under 21, play for 21-30 hours a week, think their gear rates a 5 out of 5, and are probably level 19 and in Warsong Gulch capturing flags. I'm not sure if that's suprising or not, but those are pretty safe majority votes, even given the smaller sample size of the poll.

Twink players are also more likely to not have more than one account, which kind of makes sense -- they only need one account and just have lots of characters on them. 66% of twinks are actually in twink guilds, and most have at least more than one twink to play around with. Hunters and Rogues top the class choices (though not with a clear majority at all). And perhaps most interesting, over 50% of twinks say Blizzard is serving them just fine -- they're not ignoring them, and they're not giving them any more love than other players. Still, as Drayner pointed out to us, about 36% of twinks said they'd leave the game if Blizzard shut them down with an additional 30% saying Maybe, so Blizzard does have a little incentive there to keep twinking happening.

Quite interesting -- twinks might be one of the only groups of players who are completely fine with how they're being handled in game. 2.3 obviously gave them lots of new items to play with, and while there is some frustration from other players, Blizzard has made it so easy to level that if you don't want to play with the twinks at 19, you can move on pretty quickly.

This is an interesting bug (a bug that twinks might not be so happy we're shedding light on it, but it is a bug nonetheless): apparently Toughness, which is the bonus that comes from the mining profession, is giving a much bigger buff than designed at tier 3 of the ability. Instead of giving a bonus to health (as it's supposed to, and as it does for miners not within the 225-299 range), it's actually giving a bonus to Stamina. So level 19s with mining between 225-299 are actually picking up about 700 health, instead of the designed 70.

Apparently twinkinfo.com has been waiting on a hotfix for this one for a while, but apparently it's not fixed yet, and twinks who have leveled past 300 are a little angry that the lower-leveled miners are picking up a couple hundred more HP (not to mention, you know, the people being killed by the overpowered twinks). Hopefully Blizzard will get this fixed soon -- it seems like an obvious bug and a fairly easy hotfix.

Seska of Ysondre has posed the challenge of twinking to players who hate this style of play. She stated that the joy of playing a twink is in planning how to get gear for the effort. To her twinking proves that gear is more important than skill. To do it right, twinking requires considerable time and effort (not to mention cash from higher level characters), but is a valuable experience. Seska is currently a level 16 Shaman, and plans to keep that character as a twink.

She was met with agreement by some other twinks, but also a lot of resistance and resentment. Some people say that they have tried twinking and gotten bored with it soon afterward, like playing any other video game with cheat codes. This practice can also be frustrating for other players who would like to battleground as they level up but become demoralized by twinks.