PvE twinking now

[Malintent]

I'm curious on the state of PvE twinking and what the levels are for it. I've not played in 3 months and honestly I'm bored to death of doing nothing on my days off work and I got really annoyed with Blizzard screwing over the PvE aspect of level 10-15s in prepatch while basically trying to tell twinks that they don't matter.
I've been looking around and I see people saying that 10, 11 and 15 are still viable but isn't it far less viable then what it used to be? I don't really enjoy WoW end-game and haven't for years, twinking for PvP and PvE are really the only things that kept me playing the game after WoD. So if you know a thing or two because you've seen (or done) a thing or two feel free to let me know.

 

[Emelia]

I pretty much just pve twink to help others gear or level up.
Since pre patch I've focused so far on Guardian druid, Arcane mage, Frost Death Knight, Protection Paladin and Mistweaver Monk.
I plan on working on a 12 Windwalker and a 14 maybe 15 warrior.

IMHO any viable spec at 10 should always out dps any spec at 20 unless the 20 has unobtainable gear. That means pre patch items GF items or exploited items. The closer you get to 15 the more = it becomes in scaling. 10-14 is just insanely op in pve. But some classes might be better at 15 than 14 due to talents.

Put on your **Tin foil hat**: Level 50 is still Level 120 and level 60 is Level 130. Argument: Some items in game at times show 120 level req in the tooltips. When mining, herbing or skinning you can sometimes see the former skill requirements for the node/mob (Skill of 800). Wowhead's level scaling bar goes up to level 1300 and is default set to 220. Talents are still 15 even though levels have been "cut in half". I have no real code based evidence but when I look at the plate of spaghetti that is SL I see a mask over what I think to be the old levels still in the game. As someone who loves exploiting I am really interested to know exactly how they "scaled" everything for SL - You may take your hat off now.


Gearing
The entire way of twinking has been made quite different than content in the past. Instead of the typical raid or dungeon bis items we instead have a plethora of requirements in order to become BIS. You have to dungeon, quest, craft, and farm your bis items this time around. Due to bracketing of gear it is advantageous to make twinks to farm boe bis items for lower level twinks. In essence twinks for twinking for your twinks. This gives us a level of replayability we previously did not have in twinking.

Before you quest in legion you need to unlock your order hall upgrade chance for quest items. just do quests until it becomes unlocked.

10 monk in unable to return to the order hall once it leaves unless it is RaF summon back. Access to order hall becomes available at 10.

I have 4 level 10s
Paladin
10 Prot paladin: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/sargeras/leveltin (Pure haste gem build) I found while the hits a Paladin can do are strong they lack flow and thus I went prue haste. I'm sure a str/haste gem set might be more optimal. However I just find the overall CD oriented gameplay of Prot to need more haste to excel. I haven't touch ret pve or holy pve. Grading: A for bosses, B+ for trash, B to A- for Speed, A+ for Survivability. Tends to get 80%+ total dmg in dungeons. Even with a https://www.wowhead.com/item=136975/hunger-of-the-pack?bonus=1826:1472 Prot cant manage a massive kite to well. (Some hooligan normie will pull something as you kite)
Monk
10 Mistweaver Monk: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/sargeras/spintoheal (Int Crit gem build) I went MW over the other 2 specs at 10 because of https://www.wowhead.com/spell=107428/rising-sun-kick and https://www.wowhead.com/spell=117952/crackling-jade-lightning. I found that https://www.wowhead.com/spell=117952/crackling-jade-lightning really likes to proc https://www.wowhead.com/spell=104430/elemental-force and thus I spam that stuff on mob packs like im the tank. It tends to get packs 2/3 of the way by the time they get to me. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=107428/rising-sun-kick and or https://www.wowhead.com/spell=101546/spinning-crane-kick and the group is pretty much dead. Since it's a monk it has https://www.wowhead.com/spell=115080/touch-of-death and https://www.wowhead.com/spell=119381/leg-sweep. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=117907/mastery-gust-of-mists mastery is OP. Since the base mastery is so good you wont really need to stack anymore making mastery your worse stat. Monk is tad soft in terms of armor but somewhat mobile. I have yet to test it but I think Windwalker might be op at 12 due to https://www.wowhead.com/spell=113656/fists-of-fury. Tends to do around 80%+ of total dmg in dungeons. Grading: B+ for bosses, B+ for trash, B for speed, A+ Survivability

Death Knight
10 Frost Death Knight: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/sargeras/boelooter (currently built str/crit) Blood and Unholy are useless at 10 don't play them. Frost is simply put an aoe kiting playstyle. You can really gem however you want but your playstyle is really just going to end up being aoe instant dot kiting of mobs. Speed is your key for unlocking a very fun mobile build. With enough speed and damage your https://www.wowhead.com/spell=49184/howling-blast is enough to maintain agro and generally will 2/3 most mobs. Since it only cost 1 rune to cast you can simply spam as you pass each mob pack. It requires several Howling blast to build up enough runic power to cast https://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998/death-strike. In most cases https://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998/death-strike will be enough to keep you up as long as your playing smart and not like Leeroy Jenkins. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998/death-strike does more damage than https://www.wowhead.com/spell=47541/death-coil so it will be your go to spender as it also heals you. tends to do 90%+ in dungeons. B on Bosses, A- on trash, A for speed if you have https://www.wowhead.com/item=136975/hunger-of-the-pack?bonus=1826:1472

Mage
10 Arcane Mage: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/sargeras/ashieer I went raw dmg for build. (currently Built Int Vers) I found Fire and Frost to be stupid useless/slow for pve. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=30451/arcane-blast that's it. Just remember to drink. Use other spells when needed.
https://www.wowhead.com/spell=30451/arcane-blast can 1 shot mobs. Mage is Soft so be aware that any move you do pretty much makes you the tank at 10. Just stack up 4 https://www.wowhead.com/spell=36032/arcane-charge and the rest of the dungeon is kind of a cake walk. I tend to not spend my charges with https://www.wowhead.com/spell=44425/arcane-barrage as it would require me to farm up 4 more https://www.wowhead.com/spell=36032/arcane-charge Grading: A for Trash, A+ for Bosses, B+ for Speed, B- for survivability. Tends to do 85%+ of total damage done.


Druid
11 Bear: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/sargeras/thrasheer This is my flagship twink for SL. I find bear to be the Master of all trades. Bear has Single and aoe damage. Bear has speed and mobility. The ability to https://www.wowhead.com/spell=228545/shapeshift-form out of snares is wonderful. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=8921/moonfire as you approach mob packs and https://www.wowhead.com/spell=77758/thrash as you walk through them on your way to the next mob group. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=8921/moonfire and https://www.wowhead.com/spell=77758/thrash both leave dots allowing https://www.wowhead.com/spell=104430/elemental-force to finish off the mobs as you venture onword. Outside of not having a rez 11 Bear has everything you could want. Regrowth Will top anyone off and leave a hot on them. Taunting is useless as a moonfire will be just as effective to pull aggro off a normie or high level twink.
Bear form resets to 25 rage when you enter it allowing just 1 https://www.wowhead.com/spell=33917/mangle to put you to enough rage to use https://wowhead.com/spell=6807/maul. Kitty Combo points are saved for their duration allowing some interesting kitty openers with https://www.wowhead.com/spell=22568/ferocious-bite on bosses. just collect max combo points in between each boss. Highest crit I've seen from cat was 1068 on the https://www.wowhead.com/npc=17380/broggok of https://www.wowhead.com/the-blood-furnace
I firmly believe that Bear is the King of PvE in SL.
Grading: S+ for Trash, S for bosses, S+ for Speed, S- for survivability(have to leave bear form to self heal) Tends to get 98%+ total damage in dungeons.

Personal Challenge to anyone: Whisper me if you would like to challenge my Bear to a speed dungeon. Must be NA Alliance. I genuinely want to know if anyone has a more effective toon within scaling. You must clear the dungeon in such a way that would allow normal questers to get to the each boss/objective without fighting in combat. No skipping of trash packs that are in the way of quests or bosses. All items available for use. Challenge is meant to gauge the ease of clearing and speed of other twinks. I already know im the worlds best 11 bear and don't need the ego boost . This is a challenge to you for the sake of SCIENCE! First to dps more than me will win a wow token equivalent of gold on their server of choice (NA Alliance 10 bracket of dungeons only. Your choice of dungeon).

14 arcane mage: Post soon

16 Frost DK: Post soon

 

[Warglave]

I've been looking around and I see people saying that 10, 11 and 15 are still viable but isn't it far less viable then what it used to be?

The only downside to 10-15 is fewer dungeons, which really isnt too bad unless you plan to use them to gear 20.

People are soloing 20 too lately, quite a bit of interest there in the achievements in a few threads.

According to the ptr thread 10's may be getting a slight change in stat allocation next patch, i dunno good or bad for that.

I personally prefer 15, been using prot pally and druid quite a bit to gear up my 20 alts and just started thinking about island farming with the druid (did a little with 110 DH in BfA but blizz got pissy and started screwing that up, so lots to farm).

Without the ilvl 44 staff it'd be a little less fun for me, we'll see how that goes in the future. Have a 10 shammy and a few druids that have it, once it gets fixed I dont know that I'll care to play them anymore... it'd be a pretty big nerf to me.

 

[zazzyfraz]

There is some pve twinking at 50 in the form of group/solo endgame scenarios called vision of nzoth. I recently speed ran 25 “5-mask” vision runs in a week to add sockets to all of my mages items. Got the runs down to 19 minutes each.

50 also can level boost via dungeon aoe grinding and random df end-run xp. It’s not as good as it used to be in terms of time and xp but it’s a thing. With party sync you can boost/solo any random xpak dungeon queue in wow as 50 with end of run xp, because when a 50 syncs they stay 50 with full power, and the mobs scale to you. 10-50 via mob grinding freehold is reported to take 4 hours. On my druid I have pulled boss to boss in normal 10-50 bfas, similar to level 101 twink gameplay just much less output and more reliance on power systems (azerite armor+Azerite neck essences)

all of this is a nice bonus to 50 having a great competitive 1 level xpon bracket. Where you see twinks almost ever game. On na we are very open in our bracket, with a main bracket discord, and in game communities reaching 200 players on both sides soon, where anyone is welcome, and all topics related to 50 can be discussed regardless of your xp/knowledge.
Since you mentioned twinking for pvp you’d definitely like the power gains in 50. The only other pvp twinks are 20s, and I have not heard really anything about people having major success doing solo speed running pve as 20. 50 has both of that.

there is a ton of work though, if you don’t have a character with 3x/3x bis azerite armor traits, you’ll never be as powerful as in pve as someone who might have those already(from GFd pvp and m15 gear). A post BfA 50 is definitely worse off than a 50 who collected epic pvp trinkets or azerite armor from pvp/mythic+

 

[Malintent]

These are very interesting, thanks folks. Also, as for the 10s it's interesting to see they're basically still the same after SL dropped and there's not much change after they dropped their damage down immensely - though I heard they now give groups an XP debuff which prevents them from getting XP whenever there's someone with XP off in the group. This is very interesting and a fun take on things, I may come back to try it out but that would require me buying SL and everything.

I still have my level 10 Twinks, I believe they're all on A52 US Horde. Here's my Prot Paladin - https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/area-52/zandajar and he's got shit gear but before prepatch I was doing insane damage to the point where max level people with the best gear were pissed off saying they were going to report me for hacking (because apparently they think that anyone doing more damage than them is hacking according to a few groups I had where people even complained about people in worse gear doing more damage than them).

Oh and if 50s are viable I might try it out. I just want something that's fun and can make gold, either via farming or running dungeons or something. I'm just bored as shit when I'm not working and I'm tired of sitting here watching YouTube all day because I'm caught up on all the shows I started watching.

 

[Grahamdab]

Other people in your group only get the xp debuff if you group with them manually. If you join a dungeon through LFG then they receive no debuff. So that is what I mostly do, join random Legion/Cata dungeons as they have the most variety. I enjoy peoples reaction to my relatively absurd damage, and helping people clear the harder dungeons that folks usually struggle on is a nice touch.

I don't have the time or dedication for much end game stuff, so when I have an hour or two to play, speed running random 5 mans is an entertaining choice.

Islands are also nice once in a while, especially since the Gnomish gravity well works there, you can explore some of the areas that are otherwise inaccessible if you get high enough and use a glider. I usually rush to 3k before the enemy team even arrives, then I go exploring. The mogu lightning staffs are also great for exploration, especially inside the themed portals. Bonus points if you rush fast enough and get the pirate ships to spawn 100 feet in the air.

These days I tend to treat my twinks like action figures. I have a lot more fun collecting accessories and toys and gear sets for them than I do pvping with them. To even be able to pvp with them, I would need to move them to an inactive account and lose a bunch of QoL stuff, so I don't plan on doing that. I am more than content with the occasional world pvp situation when I feel like flagging myself.

I lost a bit of power going from 10/11 to 15, but the extra content and abilities were worth it. I doubt I will take Arewurd to 20 though.

 

[Asylum]

i thought that i dabbled a bit into PvE twinking at levels 22 & 24, but then was told it was invalid because i was just farming PvP gear for my 20s.

 

[Malintent]

That's very interesting. I'm currently at work right now, they're trying to get me work a 12 hour shift when I'm sleep deprived lol. I hope WoW is fully downloaded already, every time I tried downloading it my internet kept shutting off (hooray for getting a technician who doesn't understand how MoCA works and using splitters that don't work properly).

I'll check this out more later in the day, I just can't wait to get home and pass out.