Twinking and you — should you do it?



There is a lot to be said on this sub­ject. Many forum posts have been made, end­less top­ics have been writ­ten about why you should/shouldn’t twink and yet a con­clu­sion is still to be found.

What is a twink?

Let’s take the def­i­n­i­tion from wowwiki:

A twink is a player char­ac­ter that is dis­pro­por­tion­ately pow­er­ful for its level, pos­sess­ing potent items and high-end enchants that are gen­er­ally far beyond the means of other play­ers at that level.

“More pow­er­ful you say? ZOMG, I want that!” Hold on there junior, keep reading.

Twink items are acquired through rare drops, drops off of bosses in instances, as rewards from very dif­fi­cult to com­plete quests, as gifts, or from the Auc­tion House. Twink items on the Auc­tion House are usu­ally very expen­sive. The enchant­ments twinks typ­i­cally have on their equip­ment can be per­formed only by higher level char­ac­ters at the top of the enchant­ing pro­fes­sion and are usu­ally very expen­sive. There­fore, twink­ing usu­ally requires sig­nif­i­cant assis­tance from high-level alts, friends, and / or guild mem­bers. How­ever, there are exam­ples of self-made twinks that gen­er­ate the nec­es­sary gold from Auc­tion House trad­ing or other in-game methods.

“Awwww, rare drops and rewards from very dif­fi­cult quests ?! I can never com­plete those on my own. Oh wait, I also need the Auc­tion House to buy expen­sive items and then enchant them with even MORE expen­sive enchants ?!” Well what did you think, that all this is free?

Twinks are mainly used in PVP fight­ing or in Battlegrounds.

“kk, I like that. Can’t wait to own nubs.” What ever hap­pened to fair PVP?

Exam­ples of twink­ing include:

• Hav­ing a high level char­ac­ter pro­vide uncom­mon, rare, or epic Bind on Equip items to a low level char­ac­ter, or the gold to pur­chase those items,
• Hav­ing a high-level char­ac­ter farm an instance or accom­plish high level quest chains with a lower-level char­ac­ter for the sole pur­pose of get­ting some items,
• Enchant­ing or apply­ing arcana to a low-level character’s equip­ment with bonuses that require large amounts of gold or high-level mate­ri­als, and
• Send­ing mas­sive bulks of ingre­di­ents to a low level char­ac­ter so it can power level its pro­fes­sions, in par­tic­u­lar Engi­neer­ing, which allows the cre­ation and use of equip­ment with­out level requirements.
• Also lev­el­ing their fish­ing skill up to 150 and using shiny baubles to raise it to 225 and fish in Stran­glethorn Vale in the Stran­glethorn Fish­ing Extrav­a­ganza for a Hat and Boots.

“So much trou­ble to go through!” Yes, but you will be “the best” in a world of pixels.

Twink­ing is most often done in order for a level 19 or 29 char­ac­ter to com­pete in the 10–19 and 20–29 bat­tle­ground brack­ets. Two pop­u­lar classes for twinks in World of War­craft are rogues and hunters. This is because rogues gain the most from twink­ing, and hunters do well in bat­tle­grounds, espe­cially at low lev­els since many melee classes have no way to stop a hunter who can kite. Their dam­age is largely affected by the gear they have, so they can go above and beyond what other classes could twink to. Also, because many of the best items in the 10–19 bracket are leather and have agility and sta­mina on them, rogues and hunters gain the most from these stats.

Per­sonal insight

I have a twink. A level 19 NE hunter. Well, “twink” is too much to say in my case. I have most of the required items to call myself a twink, but I don’t wear them. I only wear the bow from WC and a few drops from DM and WC. That’s it. And I still top the meters in all aspects. So just imag­ine what a full-fledged twink hunter or rogue could do.

I wit­nessed a few pre­mades. I really felt the infe­ri­or­ity and didn’t like being 2-shotted. I also wit­nessed the purest form of stu­pid­ity out there: twinks ask­ing nor­mal play­ers to leave the bat­tle­ground. Not even ask­ing politely, but shout­ing and call­ing every­one noobs for enter­ing BGs at that level. God for­bit you being lower that 19! “OMFG, n00b, you don’t even have 1k HP. WTF are you doing?!”. I always stood and argued with com­plete morons about them let­ting play­ers to just play the game how­ever they wish, even if they don’t stand a chance. If you are level 15 and want to try a bit of PvP, why not do it? But nooooooo, turns out I was the retarded one, for not kick­ing peo­ple who want to have fun. Sigh..

Per­sonal advice?

If you really want to try and build a twink, be my guest. Spend a lot of gold on him if you don’t have any­thing bet­ter to spend them on. But PLEASE, don’t act retarded! Just play your game and let oth­ers play theirs.

Twink­ing is not for every­body! It’s required to have a bit of brain also.

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