Broliant Writes…

Player versus Player is a very very very occasional series exploring aspects of the game’s PVP sensibilities from the perspective of someone that does hardly any PVP at all. Today Player vesus Player examines the attractions of twinking and wonders how the new ‘turn off XP gains switch’ purportedly coming with the forthcoming patch 3.2 might change things.

Although Broliant has engaged in numerous PVP encounters over the years, it’s never been more than a fun diversion for him in between raiding activities and when PVP has been pursued for its loot rewards, those rewards have always been coveted for the benefit they might grant to PVE endeavours. Raiding regularly takes plenty of time by itself and these days a typical raid lasts about three hours. Within that time you’ll need to use three flasks (1hr duration each), numerous potions (healing, haste etc) and bandages and you’ll incur expensive repair costs once you get some decent gear. Perhaps as much as 150g per night on a day of progression attempts and continual wiping. Plate-wearing tanks can probably double that figure.

Thus, a three-hour raiding excursion can swallow upwards of 350g a time on the worst nights and despite the assertion that money now grows on trees, it still has to be earned somehow. Combine the responsibilities of going raiding with the additional time-costs of helping to run a guild and very little time (actually none typically) is then left to explore the PVP side of the game.

As a result, the continual arms-war of current-day PVP arena contesting long ago lost its lustre for this rogue since to compete at a decent level really does require the kind of time investment that can earn rankings and reward points sufficient to purchase each new season’s gear. The alternative is to soldier on with outdated gear and that becomes tiring quite quickly once you begin encountering people with the next ‘tier’ up of gear in comparison to what you own.

Broliant had always been a fairly single-minded pursuit and represented the only max-level end-game character on the account when the end-game max-level was 60 and the raiding menu consisted of MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxxramas. By the time the end-game max-level had settled at 70 Broliant was joined by the warlock Koyaanis who expanded the horizons of a melee minded player into the realms of the finger-wiggling caster classes. Koyaanis later became a staple of early pushes into Mount Hyjal where the value of the warlock’s Seed of Corruption spell on the waves of pre-boss trash was immense.

Christmas 2007 saw the birth of a new project, a baby druid for whom the parental ambitions were that the druid would grow-up to become an additional support healer/tank for those rare but occasional guild nights where a key member was not available and a hole in the raid needed plugging. Given the very limited amounts of free time, this was to be a long-term project with a 9-12 month run-time for the completion of the 70 levels required to reach the TBC end-game.

After several months had passed Gosling, the said druid, was approaching the late-mid thirties. Although instance runs were naturally sparse due to time constraints, it had been notable through the Scarlet Monastery phase that on the server he was levelling on, healers were far more in demand than any other role. Not wanting to embarrass himself by being the worst healer in existence, he took himself off to the trainer, respecced fully into the restoration tree and then signed up for a few battlegrounds – AB and WSG being the only options at that stage – to gain a little emergency triage experience.

Unbelievably, healing in the 30-39 BGs was a blast, pure and simple. Levelling concerns were quickly forgotten in order to let this experience be savoured and as the enjoyment continued, web-searches were undertaken in earnest to find the best gear available within that BG category. It was already too late to run enough instances to get all the gear without tripping over the level 39 limit but since this was a slow process conducted over many weeks, it was a pleasureable process, scoping out what was possible before the druid inevitably had to confine himself to “known quarters” lest he ‘discover’ his way beyond the glass ceiling of level 39′s XP cap.

Unlike max-level PVP, there was a simpler purity about this ‘new’ experience. Resilience, the perfunctory stat that had been created in the usual heavy-handed manner to mitigate critical damage in end-game PVP encounters, did not really exist in a meaningful way at this level. Similarly, due to the self-imposed and therefore artificial level-cap, the game enjoyed a kind of stasis that was not possible at the level cap. Only a finite amount of gear and corresponding enchants and buffs were available meaning that it was possible to slowly build on a character here over an extensive time-frame.

Thus, Gosling could remain in mothballs for months at a time and yet each time he was unpacked once more, he was able to jump straight back into the fray without too much difference. Of course, the game always has slight changes going on – a talent tree overhaul here, an imposition on the ability to use certain enchants there… but overall, it was a far more stationary set of goalposts to aim for than would be the case if one were engaging in arena PVP at the level cap.

It was a genuine pleasure to discover this hidden gem of a game within a game. Just like PVE, the PVP side of WoW had always previously been viewed as a game in continual motion, where to stand still was to be left behind and thus, where inactivity for any period of time was detrimental to future plans and activities. The decision to halt the levelling of Gosling, at least for the time being, was soon made and it seemed an easy decision to make at that time.

Over time Gosling earned himself a number of items that are available via the honor points system and was grandfathered a few additional niceties from the auction house by Broliant, whose spending power was naturally greater as an end-game character. For those that don’t know, the practice of using a higher level character, or characters, to source more powerful equipment and consumables for a lower level character is known as ‘twinking’ and thus Gosling was now a confirmed twink. Twinking as a practice is in equal parts enjoyed by many and vehemently disliked by others.

The enjoyment is easy to understand since almost every single WoW player seeks to find better equipment and the like for their characters on an on-going basis. Better equipment normally equates to a more powerful character and thus improves the chances of success in any encounter. However, that increased power can be such that it unbalances encounters to the extent that players that are not ‘twinked’ have lower chances of success should they encounter a fully twinked character.

Battlegrounds divide entrants into level ranges along the lines of 10-19, 20-29, 30-39 and so on and since 19 and 29 are the lowest and easiest to reach levels, the most common twinks are either level 19 or level 29. Furthermore, they are invariably ‘DPS’ twinks since a majority of people prefer playing a DPS role to any other in such PVP encounters.

Broliant didn’t enter the BGs until he was well into his late 40s where twinks are generally very rare therefore the experience of being thoroughly beaten by a full-power twink was unknown to him. Equally, Koyaanis only began PVPing at level 70 and Gosling at around level 36/37 or so.

At the 39 BG level, you see far fewer twinks than one imagines you’d see at the two lower brackets, presumably due to the extra effort required to reach the level. What twinks one does see do seem invariably to be DPS twinks as normal though. Let’s pitch the balance at say 99 in every 100 twinks at the 39 level are DPS, taking a rough guess based on past observations.

Gosling has encountered his fair share of these DPS twinks and boy do they hurt if you get caught within the range of their attacks. It’s not hard to understand why non-twink players would find the contest to be imbalanced. However, it’s rare to find more than one or two in any single BG game and thus the many cries of “foul!” screamed from some quarters at the world of twinking surely follows the expectations of a player who is disappointed to learn that all is not fair in life. There have certainly been occasions when I’ve not been thoroughly in the mood to be easily killed by the same player over and over again but such times have normally resulted in my most creative and exceptional playing – adapting simply to survive at times, to overcome at others.

As a dedicated and fully specced healer, Gosling has all the DPS punch of the proverbial asthmatic ant with a couple of heavy bags of shopping, walking up a steep hill. Never one to go toe-to-toe with any other character, his power lies in his ability to remain alive and to keep others alive at the same time. His HKs are earned by healing his team-mates and very occasionally by moonfire-spamming the last 2% of life from that rogue who’s desperately running for cover.

It’s a good game to sharpen the senses of one that spends most of their time in PVE DPS roles and certainly improves the whack-a-mole reflexes immensely. Heal, heal, root, heal, run, shift, shift, run, heal, heal, root, sleep, etc etc. It’s just fun.

So, Gosling remains to this day a level 39 twink healer destined to spend his days fighting the good fight against the Horde in Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch. Certainly he is a more potent healer than a non-twinked level 39 character would be but on reflection, the game-changing ability this twinking provides is nowhere near as pronouced as it would be were Gosling a dps twink.

As stated earlier, Gosling had been intended for our guild’s raid team as a backup healer/tank. Some of the guilt of parking Gosling at 39 was subsequently overcome by the birth of a second druid, Balgardner, who did indeed manage to make the full climb all the way up to the level 80 end-game of the modern era and become a relatively well regarded stand-in healer for the team. Balgardner thus continues to make it possible for Gosling to live the guilt-free life of a permanent twink. In the words of one of his fellow officers, “Huzzah!”

Patch 3.2 is encouraging to Twinks?

So, that’s the history to date of Broliant’s “other life” as a twink and in this other life, he was recently very interested by the annoucement made by Blizzard regarding the forthcoming patch 3.2. In this patch, Blizzard are introducing a feature which is currently described as the “turn off XP gains” feature and essentially describes the premise that any character will be able to access a setting whereby they can stop their character from gaining XP when they otherwise complete actions that would normally result in XP being gained.

This of course will make the life of a twink far easier to control if the feature operates as its early descriptions suggest it will. Furthermore, battlegrounds will for the first time also offer XP gains to the people taking part by the completion of the battleground’s aims. This has not been clearly defined but one might assume that winning the various games would be the primary XP scoring criteria here. Blizzard have gone on record to say that HKs will not score XP since that would simply encourage players to farm HKs instead of completing the game which is not something they wish to promote.

So far, so good. All sounds rosy and wonderful does it not. XP from BGs could well lead to more people entering the BGs as a means of levelling their characters which would make the BGs more populous and therefore reduce queue-times and improve match-ups. Sounds awesome. And then the wheels fall off the cart…

Blizzard have indicated that players queueing for BGs will only be matched against players whose “XP gains” setting matches their own. Thus, if you have disabled the XP gains feature to create a twink, then you’ll only be matched into games with other “XP gains off” twinks. Likewise, if you are levelling along with the “XP gains on” setting, you’ll only be matched against other people with the XP gains flag set to on.

At face value, this simply appears to be a mechanism to prevent players from being ganked repeatedly by over-enthusiastic twinks – and although here at BW we’re not entirely in agreement with that idea, we appreciate its community spirit, misplaced though we feel it is.

What does concern us is the on-going viability of BGs at our preferred level of twinking after such a policy is enacted. As noted previously, it’s rare to see more than one or two twinks in such a BG and therefore one should guess that unless there is a fallback position, level 39 twinks may never be sufficiently numerous to enable a game to take place.

Perhaps at this point, it is worth considering whether twinking is something Blizzard should continue to allow at all or not. The objections are almost always levelled against the DPS twinks whom the non-twink players regard as being too powerful for them to overcome. “Ban them” or “stop twinks” you’ll often hear such opponents to twinking cry.

Looked at rationally though, battlegrounds already permit players of greatly different levels to enter the same game (10-19, 20-29, 30-39 etc) and the ultimate effect of twinking is to improve a character beyond their perceived ‘normal’ ability for their level. In essence, a level 39 twink is probably as potent as a non-twinked character of a few levels higher. Thus, the sum effect of twinking is to extend the ‘virtual’ range of a battleground – think of it as 10-22, 20-32, 30-42 for example.

This might mean then that for the non-twinked players that are just “passing through” they won’t be able to claim the status of being ‘top dog’ in the battlegrounds simply by the quality of the gear they have but if they can play well, make intelligent decisions and have good general knowledge of the game then they can still be a vital and wholly valuable member of their team.

It will be interesting to see how these plans that Blizzard have announced work out finally for those of us that do enjoy participating in PVP via ‘twink’ characters. If the queues are short and the games plentiful, then the outcome will probably be good for all. It will naturally be a shame to be held separately from the non-twinked players and note that I write that as a healer and not a dps. By segregating the battlegrounds into two separate categories, Blizzard might well be ‘protecting’ a group of players that want nothing to do with twinks but they’re also denying players the opportunity to mix freely.

It would be far better to create two queues that players could sign-up to independently and freely. One would be the normal queue and the other would be for ‘XP off’ (aka: twinks) only. Twinks would most likely enter both queues and take whatever came first. Although it seems plausible that twinks would simply choose the easier option and more easily farm HKs, this argument would only be valid for a limited time. There is a finite amount of loot that players can get via Honor points and once this is collected, Honor points and battleground tokens simply accumulate to a maximum level. Honor points would likely not have any real use to a proper ‘twink’ player at that stage.

However, it’s highly unlikely at this stage that Blizzard will do something like this. As they have already demonstrated numerous times, their aim is to homongenise the game such that near equality exists across all classes. The idea of there being a “rock/paper/scissors” relationship between classes seems now to be abhored because it would break arena balancing. Given the choice though, I would prefer a World of Warcraft where there were genuine differences between classes. Let Broliant as a rogue find mages an appealing target but warriors a genuine nightmare. Let warlocks run riot against other casters but sweat feverishly at the thought of a good melee getting in their face. Right now, the insipid differences between classes are hardly worth considering.

Furthermore think back to even earlier times when, as an Alliance rogue, the only time one would encounter a Shaman would be in the battlegrounds and boy could they be trouble to fight. It was probably a reasonable decison for the PVE game going forwards to give Shamans to the Alliance and Paladins to the Horde but that old factional difference sure was a delicious ingredient in PVP and it’s yet to be replaced by anything as memorable.

Perhaps the best observation that can be made about PVP is this one: The more constraints Blizzard place upon PVP, the less compelling it becomes. Tarren-Mill/Southshore battles remain the highlight of many people’s PVP experiences simply because in a single zone, level 30s could rub shoulders with players 30 levels above them and still feel that they were part of the experience. You might not have the ability to solo-kill at that stage but you’d join the pack and as your levels increased and your skill improved, you’d branch off by yourself more and more. You could come and go from the battles as you pleased since this was no falsely walled garden affair and although it was of course having a detrimental effect on the ability of players to complete quests in that zone, the sense of effecting real change in the otherwise static world of the game by siezing an enemy town and locking them out of it for a period of time was genuinely satisfying. Likewise, the effort of retaking your own town ellicited ad-hoc groups and rapidly agreed strategies to be formed. Communication and collaboration were at least as developed there as they are in the modern BGs where PVP is relatively ‘produced’.

PVP is changing soon and in fairly significant ways. It’s going to be hard to predict how these changes will play out over time and hopefully it’s going to be a lot of fun in the discovering.

-B-