The Twink Graveyard

Leaving Teldrassil after a long day of herbing.

Cynwyn, the mage pictured above, was my very first twink.  I had an absolute blast leveling her up through Elwynn and Westfall, and given how much fun I’d had with that, I decided to try my hand at twinking on a mage.  I froze her XP and worked on gearing her up.

We had some fun, she and I.  Not a lot of fun – mages are actually pretty frustrating to play at level 19 – but some fun.  Not as much fun as I had while leveling her up.  Leveling was cool.  Slowing FCs and trying to polymorph everything in sight while not getting killed?  Less fun.

And dungeon runs with her were painful.  I’ve mage tanked SFK (though not with the style and finesse of Psynister) because the quality of tanks is so variable in low level LFD.

I lost a lot of fights in Warsong Gulch with her – I think I went 6/20?  She was really well geared, though not quite as well geared as Cynderblock (who could run dungeons to her heart’s content.)

So, not very much fun, after all.

What do you do when a twink stops being fun?  You’ve put a lot of time and effort into making them great.  This isn’t just about twinks, by the way, but for any character — twinks just have more effort and gold poured into them at a specific level than others.  (All those bandages ain’t cheap!)

I suppose if I’d been having more fun with Cynwyn, leveling her would have been an option.  I took my banker — who was a level 19 rogue twink — and leveled her when I decided I wanted her to have better professions.  I’m having fun leveling a rogue.

But I wasn’t having fun, so I deleted Cynwyn.

Deleting characters is really liberating.  Every character has something unfinished about them.  At the endgame it’s a perpetual grind, but at least you know what you’re getting into when you hit the level cap.  Leveling characters have a lot of things to finish up — quests, getting decent gear (not even BiS, just decent), and the process of leveling itself.  All of these can be enjoyable if you have fun playing the toon.

But if you don’t have fun anymore?  Rid yourself of the obligation.

I hadn’t finished gearing up Cynwyn, nor Cynwagon, my hunter twink.  They both got deleted.  Cynwine, the warlock?  Gone.  My level 64 druid, Cynli?  Also gone.  I have one left, Cynderblock, the warrior, and she does both PvE and PvP.

It’s good to roll lots of alts.  It’s good to experience other classes, to see how they work, to see if they are a good fit.

But it’s also good to have focus.  To work on one thing at a time.  Trying to manage 4-5 twinks was too distracting, too much competition for attention.  I can look at Cynderblock and go: okay, you need a hat (done), a ring upgrade, faction change for another ring upgrade and a shield, and then the AGM trinket.  That’s all that’s left.

I have no regrets about deleting Cynwyn, or any of the others.  I thought I would at first, but the regrets never came.  Instead, I have a nice, clean login screen with space and only a few projects to work on.  Work on my main, my twink, or my bankers?  That’s all I have left.   And that makes me happy.

So, thank you, Cynwyn, for getting me into twinking.  I’m grateful, and hope you enjoy your well-earned rest.