level-requirements
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Twinking post patch 3.1
The twinks were a little doom-and-gloom before the patch, but it seems like the end of the world has come and gone, and they're still interested in twinking. As Drayner over at Twinkinfo predicted, all of the changes on the PTR went live: enchants have level requirements, as did profession buffs, and those aren't scaling either. At this point, it sounds like the only way to twink out your character (which means make it super powerful at a certain low level) is to fit them out in the best gear you can find for the level.If you can keep them at that level, that is -- apparently there's a bug in the game with queuing up for BGs where you are sometimes accidentally transported to a graveyard when you queue. And for some twinks sitting just on the brink of leveling, that extra few points of exploration XP could ruin everything. Be careful with that, though we're sure a hotfix is incoming soon.But nevertheless, people apparently still twinking -- while there are good numbers of people ready to leave twinking (or even the game), the majority of answers on their poll over there say that people are still going to try ruling the lower level battlegrounds. Which is about what we expected before the patch: these people live to bend the rules as far as they'll go, and a few more probably won't stop them.
Level requirements changed on some enchants, items
Ishh over at Twinkinfo has some pretty big news for lower-level players: the enchants, librams, and even jewelcrafting trinkets that used to work for almost everybody ingame have gained a few level requirements on the PTR. Twinks especially love these items, as they can be used to give big buffs to even low-level players, but Blizzard isn't down with that any more, apparently. Even applied enchants and Leatherworking leg armor will apparently stop working if this change goes out to the live realms -- they have pictures, as you can see, of enchanted stats turning red due to level requirements.Most of the time, when Blizzard makes changes like this, they aren't actually targeted at twinks -- they're just designed to keep the game from becoming extremely easy at a given level (I'm still bummed that my Leatherworking drums have no effect after level 70). But obviously twinks are affected by these changes, and as you can see from the comments on that post, they're not very happy with having even more limits placed on how they can buff up.But then again, as I said a little while ago, twinks have always dealt just fine with limits. Twinkinfo has a poll up on what twinks will do if these changes go live, and the majority of votes say that they'll just keep twinking. They've gone around level restrictions before -- a few more won't be the end of the world.
Blizzard's stubborn requirements on the summoning stones
If you've ever tried to do an instance below or above your level, you know the problem here: the summoning stones outside instances are pretty picky in terms of who they'll summon. This came up for me when a group of us 70s tried to run the Horseman over Hallow's End-- the summoning stone outside Scarlet Monastery wouldn't let us summon each other, claiming we were too high for the instance.But here's the kicker: Bornakk not only says that there are no plans to change things, but that the reason for not changing them is because Blizzard doesn't want to support higher levels running lower instances, and vice versa. They figure that if you're going to cheat the system like that, you can come up with your own transportation.But here's the deal: I pay my $15 a month. I should be able to play the game however I'd like. If I want to, as a higher-level character, run my friends through on their lowbie alts (or even solo), as long as it's not actually cheating, I should have the opportunity to do that. Not to mention that, as I said, there are legit reasons to summon people to the stones at those levels anyway-- during holidays, and just as general transportation around the world."Because we don't like you doing it" is not a valid reason to have these limits on the summoning stones. If Blizzard really didn't want us running the instances in this way, they'd shut the instances off completely to people outside the level range. Either make it clear you don't want higher levels in there, or get out of our way and let us play the game however we want.
