I’ve been pretty busy these last few weeks, what with attempting to move house and starting a new job.  So my play time in wow has been cut quite a bit, as a result I’ve spent a lot of what little game time I have doing things that don’t require waiting around for other people to show up.  This means, no grouping, no heroics, no dungeons, no raiding, no group based pvp.  What is left you ask? Well basically one of three things:

1. Level an alt
2. Pvp on a level 80 main or alt
3. Pvp on a lowbie alt

Number 1 was quickly removed from the running, partially because I actually have no spare character slots any more, and more so because I know that really I have too many level 80s as it is and I’ve barely logged in 1/2 of them for more than 5 minutes in the last few months.  Option 2 would be where most people turn to in times like these, after all if you enjoy BG pvp it’s pretty quick and fast paced action at the touch of a queue button.  However, this really depends on what characters you have at level 80 and their gear level.

The choices I have on my level 80 characters are as follows: Druid, Deathknight, Warrior, Hunter.  To the untrained eye it might seem at least 3 of those characters would be pretty awesome in BG pvp and should provide some fast fun for a few hours or so right?  Wrong, and here’s why:  My druid has only pve gear, admittedly very good pve gear but pve gear nonetheless and only spell damage pvp gear at that.  If I try to join a BG and heal I’ll get 2 shotted by pretty much any class with decent burst dps, If I try to go boomkin and do some damage it’s even worse mainly because of Blizzard’s utter refusal to even try and make boomkins viable in any kind of pvp.   So that’s the druid out.

The deathknight is in a similar situation to the druid,  full pve tanking gear and no pvp gear used to be reasonably fun in BGs like WSG as flag runners – but that got nerfed a fair bit so now you just get killed in a few seconds by any kind of focus fire and the abysmal damage you output in return just makes it feel like you’re hitting people with a particularly fluffy pillow.  I’m not complaining about my lack of pvp gear on any of these characters, more just the fact that If I want to just go and have some fun in a BG – I can’t without spending endless hours farming pvp gear and respeccing, which is precisely what I don’t currently have time to do.  So that’s the deathknight out.

Now the Hunter is my most recent level 80 and again, has no real pvp gear.  But actually on a hunter this doesn’t seem to matter because they’re so deliciously overpowered you can just stand around and completely rape whoever you like from 45 yards away.  Killing casters with a hunter is rather like killing flies as one of those blue electric fly killer lights.  It’s quite a funny situation when the sheer amount of push back to their spells coming out of your auto shots and  pet attacks is enough to reduce them to gibbering wrecks of around 40% hp before they even get 1 cast off.  But it is precisely this reason which causes me to become very very bored of playing this character in any kind of BG, it’s just too easy.  So that’s the hunter out.

Finally my warrior, he actually has pvp gear – albeit mostly hateful and deadly but still it’s not too bad.  The problem with warriors in BGs that I’ve always found is it’s super fucking boring unless you have a pet healer.  If you’re in a bg where there are no, or few, healers then the amount of fun you can have is severely handicapped.  This is probably down to personal preference but, although warrior was my first ever char to reach level cap in vanilla, I just find them to be too dependant on other people in the BG to be particularly fun to play for some relaxing ownage.

Cows started life as a twink in BC

This pretty much rules out the whole of option 2.  In conclusion I’d say that none of the current level 80s I have is good for some quick fun action, except the hunter – but with the hunter you just feel like you’d get more of a challenge out of playing ping-pong against a guy with no arms.  So what about option 3?  It looks like an attractive prospect and before I start I should have a slightly disclaimer that I have done twink pvp before and really enjoyed it.

The problem with twink pvp nowadays is, you can’t actually do it.  Since blizzard decided that they’d allow xp in BGs when levelling (a good idea btw), they allowed a ‘turn off xp gain’ option for twinks.  They cited that twinks wanted this option, which is technically true – it certainly makes it easier to gear your twink up when you don’t have to worry about gaining a few xp in a dungeon from a boss kill which drops an item you really need.  And of course since BGs were going to give xp, this option was needed for people who wanted to remain in their twink bracket.  However what they weren’t bargaining for was the massive level of retardation that Blizzard decided to inflict on this section of it’s paying customers for no apparent reason.  In a bid to make ‘normal players’ (read: casuals) able to level in in the BGs without the nasty mean twinks from killing them, Blizzard decided to make anyone who had turned their xp-gain off have a separate queue from those who had it turned on.  The consequence of this being that no-one who has their xp turned off can get any BGs to proc because in most brackets (except for 10-19) there aren’t enough people with it turned off to create even 1 WSG.  I can’t imagine them being unable to see the consequence of this change, and so I can only conclude that they intended to be total cunts to the twink community from the start.

Beefsausage showed rogues who was boss

The whole thing was nonsensical anyway, does it really matter if twinks completely rape non twinks in lowbie BGs?  Not really because both sides will have their own twinks, and xp gained in a BG is not based on kills, but based on objectives such as flag captures and winning the match.  Most WSGs before the change in 40-49 bracket, where I used to have a shaman, were about 2-4 twinks per side.  Now that bracket is totally dead except for 1 WSG that sometimes appears in peak times for a few hours.  If you turn your xp back on, you see there are actually 7-9 WSGs open.  This means that often these brackets are completely unplayable and twinking is now broken.

The only alternative for people like me is to level chars up in BGs and just go from bracket to bracket while dinging and never turning off XP.  However,  there are a few problems with this, mainly that the brackets themselves are far too big.  Because of the 10 level breakdown, when you first enter a bracket at level 10 – you are completely useless and get 1 shotted all the time until you are about 15.  Then you have some fun from 15-19 and then ding 20 and back to being 1 shotted for the next 5 levels, this is not fun.  Ok, doing the ‘leveling up in bgs’ thing is a reasonably alternative to twink pvp, but the brackets need to be in 5 level granularity rather than 10.  BGs of 20-24 and 25-29 and etc would make this much more fun than it currently is.

Twinking was always very popular

But why do I want to pvp at low level anyway?  Im sure some people reading this are asking something along those lines, and the reason is quite simple.  Low level pvp is more fun because there are less abilities, less cooldowns and overall a lot less damage flying around.  Fight last a lot longer in general, and require you to do way more things.   Look at level 80 pvp, a warlock casts 2 spells in under 2.5 seconds and hits you for 10k.  Burst damage is king and far too much of it has been added to classes that never really needed it in the first place.  But it’s not only this, another reason for low level pvp being fun is that you’re still leveling – as you level through a bracket you’re gaining new abilities and becoming stronger.  At level 80 this character progression is severely limited, you no longer ding and so you already have all the abilities you’re ever going to get – nothing new and shiny on the horizon.  Coupled with this it’s basically just a grind at level 80 to gain the honour items you require – gear is the only progression, and it’s a limited progression because you can’t even get the best gear in BGs you have to arena for that.

But what if you don’t like arena?  Large swathes of the wow population have been saying this for a long time – Arena sucks, participation in an active arena team has dropped to new lows, barely 30% of players even bother doing their 10 games a week while even less actually play it actively.  Arena’s problems stem from the fact that this game will never be balanced, often certain comps are vastly superior to others – coining the notion that arena is 90% comp 6% lag and 4% skill.

Omg mojo on a level 39 mad hax

As a result, it is not uncommon for people to play lowbie pvp and then delete the character and remake it once they hit lvl 30.  Why would people who already have level 80s do this unless it was more fun?  So why did Blizzard kill this? Why did they ruin a perfectly good and fun part of the game?  I think it was mostly down to the bad press, twinks were the evil people who ’spent too much money on lowbie characters’ and ‘only liked killing people who were vastly lower geared’.  These were typical of the nonsense statements bounded around on the forums by people who had their grey-geared level 10 rogue 1 shotted by  someone who actually spent a bit of time on their gearing.  Afterall twinking still happens at level 80, unless you think it’s a fair fight you’re getting between a 213 geared guy and someone with 251 gear.