Twinkability

My first character to hit level 60 in World of Warcraft was a warrior. Next level 60s were two priests, one Horde, one Alliance. I leveled the Horde priest to 70 first when TBC came out, then the Horde warrior. The low-level mage I am currently playing was created when TBC came out, and I was speed-skilling jewelcrafting with my priest. I sent all the jewelry I made to the mage, and disenchanted it to level up enchanting. I also learned tailoring with him, because that is a good combo with enchanting, as tailoring doesn't need a gathering skill, and you can disenchant tailored green items for dusts.

So now I have a level 17 mage who is maxed out at 150/150 tailoring and 160/160 enchanting. And I still got tons of higher level jewelry to disenchant once I hit level 20 and my enchanting cap goes up. Plus of course I have access to large amounts of gold, one daily quest with a level 70 gives you all the money you need for a long time for a level 17. I'm twinked to the max, wearing only magic armor, weapons, and jewelry. I even put enchantments on everything I could. I know all that is a terrible waste, since you outgrow your equipment so fast, but it isn't as if I had anything better to do with the mats.

The one thing that irks me is how little all this twinking is actually helping my mage. I found just one item yet which increases fire spell damage. All the other stuff I can tailor, enchant, jewelcraft, or buy from the auction house increases my intellect, stamina, and spirit. But none of that really improves my mage, as the damage I deal is totally independant of my stats. Intellect means I can cast longer before I run out of mana, but then I have to sit and drink longer to get it back. Stamina gives me more health, but mages shouldn't get hit anyway. Spirit theoretically increases my mana regeneration, but while the effect on a priest is already small, the effect of spirit on a mage is too tiny to even notice. In short, the mage has a very bad twinkability, he profits very little from being a twink. I already had similar problems with my priest, where again being twinked doesn't help you much in solo situations, unless you go for a spirit talent build and gear.

Now compare that to the warrior. Stats like strength and stamina are highly important to a warrior, and so is armor. A twinked low-level warrior deals more damage and survives a lot longer than a non-twinked one. Warriors have high twinkability. So in hindsight I might have been better off if I had played a priest or mage as my first character, and then used their cash to twink a warrior, who would have had an easier live. Hunters, rogues, feral druids, shamans and paladins also have a relatively high twinkability. Warlocks have a low twinkability. It's three years to late to think about it for most of us, but maybe something to keep in mind for future games. If a game has damage dealers whose damage only depends on their level and not on their stats, they make great first characters. The other classes who are helped a lot by their stats make better twinks.

I hear that in this week's patch 2.3 Blizzard is changing low-level magic items for casters to have more bonuses to spell damage, and thus make gear more relevant for casters for leveling up. Good timing, as this will improve the twinkability of my mage. Only problem is that most of these items will be bind-on-pickup loot from dungeons. And finding a group for a low- or mid-level dungeon on a 3-year old server is next to impossible. I checked my server at prime time and found 900 Horde players online, but 600 of these were playing their level 70. The 300 remaining characters were pretty much evenly distributed over the other 69 levels, thus only about 4 characters per level available for grouping. I so wished Blizzard would introduce cross-server instances (with trading disabled inside the instance).