What does the term Twinking mean in Wow? Where did the term come from? Who does it,
why do they do it, what is it, and how is it done?
Twinking or a Twink originated as early as Vanilla.
It is the act of having a character “pimped” out by a higher level one in order to min-max at a desired level.
Basically, having a low-level alt, and obtaining the absolute best possible gear they are able to equip, with enchants, gems, and any other items that maximize the amount of power they can have at the low level.
The main reason to do this, is to go do PvP and completely obliterate other low-level players.
People that dedicate a character to this, usually “freeze” the character so it doesn’t earn any more experience, thus being able to stay in that low-level bracket forever.
Of course there have been many changes through the years to accommodate this VERY niche playstyle, but for the most part… it’s there quite frankly just to annoy the hell out of the majority of the population.
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A bit redundant in some of your questions but essentially twinks are (low level) characters with best in slot gear and enhancements such as enchants.
People do it because they find it fun for one reason or another.
Twinks are low level toons that were geared to its best gear (bought from AH with ridiculous enchants) with a goal of dominating on low level Battlegrounds.
Twinks were popular back then. I dont know why it’s not popular anymore.
I use to make them too back then but with a goal of killing those rich twinks. I call my Twinks Twink-killers.
However, Asmongold refers them as cowards who doesnt want to face real players at max level as they prefer killing new players on low level battlegrounds.
I miss my 19 rogue with double mongoose enchants from BC era. Was ridiculously broken. Back when head and shoulder enchants could be bought on main, enchanted on an heirloom and mailed to your twink.
How far this game has fallen since then.
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It is not as popular anymore because Blizzard improved the game in a way that every character that is “frozen” in experience for this purpose is put in a separate queue for BG’s, so that they can battle it out amongst themselves.
This, obviously removed the main attraction to making a twink. Not that fun when all other characters can bash you with the same power.
You can still see some very abusive twinking every now and then, because people will unfreeze the character and risk “jumping brackets” just to grief 10-15 BG’s. Also depending on the bracket, some “greens” more a recent expansion, overlaps with the equivalent of epics in a previous ones, and opens a way to Twink a low level for somewhat cheap.
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Mostly people who enjoy kicking puppies.
Twinking requires no skill in a fight.
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Most twinking stopped simply because the community was not populated enough to sustain itself with the exception of perhaps the lowest level brackets.
Simply put; there were not enough twinks in most brackets to field a bg at any time of the day so unless a player coordinated with at least 19 other twinks you’d never see a queue pop.
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How is that term even allowed in this PC game.
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I remember it now. Nobody is queueing on it. As I said, I was a Twink-killer and I am looking for Twinks to kill. I also queue’d to such BG group but nobody queued for it. Becoz of this I made several Twinks parked on level 27, level 37, level 47, level 57. When my friends want to join Twink-killing with me, I covered all level brackets.
I remember my first time doing Twinks. I was abusing the mechanics. I remember on level 19 BG’s, Hunter then already had Aspect of the Cheetah while the rest of the Classes crawl…ROFL.
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Twinking was popping during SL with F2P 20s.
The main appeal for a lot of twink players was having a “finished” character and not having to worry about the endless gear treadmill. Unfortunately Blizz’s insistence on continual level and stat squishes ruined it since now even twinks have to re-grind stuff with every new bandaid Blizz lazily slaps on their game.
That said, there is still a decent twink population on classic.
This was my 20 warrior. Her ilvls are kinda wacked on some of her gear and a lot of the gems and enchants were heavily nerfed with DF. RIP
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Even that didn’t work, the reason having to do with how the queue system actually works. It fills all instances at the same time, one player in one, one player in the next, etc. It takes a large number of players queuing to keep those bgs popping. And although twinks did a disproportionate number of bgs individually, there weren’t that many of them.
PvE twinking is more popular than ever.
Log in to a character one day and their gear is broken, because the minimum ilvl has been raised and they can no longer equip it. This went for all low level BoE’s, even those that weren’t especially popular for twinking. They even made a big deal of a vague hotfix to gear that “had no minimum ilvl”. Next day my level 1 was wearing broken gear. The min level 1 gear now had a min level of 2. That was really more important to fix than all the truly broken things in the game. Letting low levels equip white crafted gear that had no stats on it and was only useful for crafting skill-ups apparently had been breaking the game since 2004.
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back in my day, twinking had communities for each brackets. when they segregated xp off, pretty much every game every day was against the same handful of people in that bracket and it created a sort of amazing community with rivalries and alliances and drama and we had our own forum threads to hang out and have rap battles in
honestly forgot end game was even a thing while i was a twink
patch changes had little to no bearing on us unless it was drastic ability/talent/glyph changes, once you were bis you never had to get new gear because there was no gear treadmill like at endgame
the best part was gems/enchants. before they stat squished everyone, twinks used to be able to get ridiculous secondary stats by using gear and gems from later expansions than their current levels. i had an 85 ret paladin with like 140% mastery or something ridiculous. all of my hpal had baseline 50% crit and i had a soft haste cap set. if you stacked resilience you could get up to ~92% resilience. it was amazing and so much more fun than being arbitrary capped at 17% at endgame because stats are so low
now twinking is pretty cringe though
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What does the term Twinking mean in Wow?
It means staying at a lower level and obtaining very good gear, so much that you are often stronger than a whole group.
Where did the term come from?
I don’t know, the term has been used since Vanilla WoW. Originally it was just for low level Battlegrounds but since scaling has been added, low level dungeon runners have become twinks too.
Who does it,why do they do it
Anyone can do it, and it’s done for the same reason anyone does anything in WoW - It’s FUN
and how is it done?
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Figure out what level you want to twink at, get to that level and turn of experience. Look on wowhead for Experience Eliminator, just talk to them and pay 10g and you will no longer level up.
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Farm gear! Sometimes you need friends to carry you through instances or raids to get the best gear.
This is my first twink and I got all my gear just running the same dungeons over and over and over and over. I can easily solo any dungeon up to level 60 (SL and below).
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Honestly I always considered twinking to be anytime a player min maxed their character at any level or facet of the game (PvE or PvP).
The term tends to be used to describe low level characters but I never saw much difference between min maxing a character’s gear and enchants at level 49 or at whatever the current level cap was.
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So, you know how battlegrounds have different brackets based by level?
The lowest you can queue is level 10, the first bracket being 10-19, then levels 20-29, 30-39, etc., all the way through to 69, then 70 (current max level for the expansion) always gets its own bracket.
Folks are often doing it with lvl 20’s now, because 20 is the free-to-play limit. If your subscription expires, you’ll still be able to play that overpowered character.
Twinking is when you take a character from any bracket, and keep them at a low level on purpose. You then gear them out with the best possible gear avaliable, often low level gear, along with higher level enchants. This often takes a lot of money and time to do.
Low level twink gear can go for thousands of gold on the AH, easily.
Although, it’s probably easier to make them now since Dragonflight launched with the zone quest rewards scaling with level. Some of the best twink gear is from certain quests.
The simple reason why, is to dominate other players who wouldn’t be nearly as geared, because they are levelling. Often times the power to 1-shot others and feel like gods.
It’s not too different from the various times in the game’s life from when people had crazy powerful legendries and tier set bonuses, overpowered and unbalanced trinkets and weapons, and so on. There will always be crazy balance issues with the itemization and scaling, somewhere.
There used to be twink guilds where people would park characters and do old dungeons raids together at level. People would keep a healer or tank twink to help their friends level in dungeons.
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I really think it’s a new thing to refer to a max level character in bis gear as a “twink”. Twinks were always players who stopped leveling at some point below max level and geared up there.
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I agree.
I just don’t really see any difference and never did. Max level or not the intent and end result is the same; be as powerful as possible.
You can also have speed set twinks. They are great for efficiently farming low drop rate items from old content.
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