Getting what you ask for

I continue to prefer doing bgs on my horde character instead of leveling during my Questing through Vanishing Azeroth experience.

I always get pumped from being able to contribute in a bg when I'm on the lower end of the bracket. But being on the high end means you get to participate more than just being a free hk. So when I hit the max for the bracket I'm in I decided to go visit the Slahtz "Experience Eliminator".

Easter Egg side note, the horde EE's name is Slahtz, while the Alliance EE's name is Behsten. Behsten Slahtz (Best in Slots). They both wear level 19 twink gear and are level 19 themselves. They whisper things about wanting twink gear (Lucky Fishing Hat) and losing twink enchants (Nethercleft Leg Armor). I assume after players noticed his hp didn't match a twinks his health was buffed to 1100 with the recent patch. No detail overlooked by Blizzard!

I quickly realized how it feels to be gold poor again as the fee to turn off XP gains was 10 gold. A mere pittance for my Alliance characters, but a large percentage of my lone Horde character's gold. But I chucked the gold pieces to Slahtz and rejoined the queues. I went about my normal activities while in queue, and didn't really pay attention at first that I wasn't getting queued up. Queues in lower brackets usually don't go past 10 minutes and are usually around 1 minute or so.

I knew there had been a patch so I searched to see if something was going on with it. Turns out hardly anyone is queuing up for the non-xp bgs!


Cynwise writes "The only twinks in the upper brackets are now ex-twinks. I sat for hours in queue with my experience frozen and never played a game once 3.2 hit. With XP gains on, I play in under a minute. The queue times speak louder than anything I could write. If you want to twink in the 50s or 60s, you won’t play."


So either twinks don't like playing with just other twinks (as they cried loudly about in the past). Or there really isn't as many twinks around as it seemed.

Now if a twink comes into a XP bg, they can still rip through non-twinks but they risk leveling out of their bracket. I can't imagine anyone is going to bother twinking much if they can't get a bg or if the bgs they get level them out of their twink gear.

The weird part is heirlooms give players the same advantage original twinks had. And not everyone has access to them, at least not until leveling one character to max. It's like Blizzard encourages twinks with one hand and discourages them with the other.

The whole thing has left me with mixed feelings. I have actually been enjoying pvping around the levels there isn't such a great gear or spell availability disparity. I'm the last person who would want to turn off XP but there I was actually wanting to freeze a moment in time.

The queues are so bad for non-XP bgs that it isn't an option for me. At this very moment I like pvping more than question so not being able to pvp doesn't work. I don't need to be able to level in BGs but it was nice to be able to do so. I heard at upper levels in AV you really could fly through some levels, but I heard they nerfed it.

I paid yet another 10 gold to turn XP back on and immediately got into a bg. Oh well.