Twinks made me better at endgame.

Starting the game in 2007, I was a total noob. It took me three weeks to make it to level twelve on my first toon, I had no idea that warlocks were supposed to use moves other than Shadowbolt, armor was the stat which I gave highest priority, and when called a ninja in dungeons I jumped for joy thinking that they were complimenting my super leet WoW ability. By the time I got to level 37 I had given up and rerolled a rogue because those were what always killed me in battlegrounds and it was clearly the class's superiority and not my inability to play that caused my countless deaths.

After reaching level thirteen and attempting to solo SFK, because obviously as a rogue I would now be able to achieve such feats, I noticed a level 19 rogue exit the instance. He had about five or six times my health, glowing red weapons, and he looked like a ninja - I had to become him. So I pestered him for about two hours as I asked every noobish question in existence (including "dude where'd you get your hat??") and finally convinced him to invite me to the twink guild he was in, <OWNAGE>.

After joining OWNAGE, I directed all my energy into first acquiring all of the gear I was told to and then farming gold for my enchants. To fund my character, I picked up mining on my level 37 warlock and spent days running up and down the Deadscar farming copper ore and then selling them on the auction house. This took especially long because at the time I only had three six slot bags in addition to my backpack and they filled up rather quickly.

A month later, my rogue was finally complete. I couldn't afford fifteen agility to weapons or leg armor, but I still found myself content with the outcome of my hard work. The next few months consisted of me trying my hardest to top KB's in our pugs to prove that I was the best rogue in the guild and ready to partake in premades. All the while I justified my faults by claiming that while clicking my Sinister Strike, it came off my action bar and caused my death.

Before the end of BC ventured into two other battlegroups: Whirlwind and Vengeance. In Whirlwind, I caught my first hat on a new rogue. I also "perfected" the method of farming ore for gold. The new technique involved leveling a shaman to twenty for Ghostwolf which made running up and down the Deadscar much easier. After spending a lot of time on my ore farmer, I began to fall in love with the shaman class and decided to roll one of my own. Deciding that I had spent enough time on Whirlwind, I moved onto Vengeance - the BG that I like to refer to as my home.

To make a long story short, I engaged in the same techniques while making my shaman. Get gear, farm ore, get enchants. After playing a few games on my shaman, my "world of twinking" changed entirely when I discovered the battleground forums. Excited to post on the forums I quickly made an @post directed toward the first rogue that came to mind from my last WSG. In my mind, I was in the middle of an epic 1v1 outside of the graveyard with him and his teammates came to aid him right as I was about to land a kill. The post was a kind-hearted GG and, to my surprise, the responses were far from that. In the first three posts I was called a "scrub, skeyer, terribad, and a waste of a BG spot."

I made a toon on one of the player's realms and waited for them to log on. I asked him what s-keying was and, again to my surprise, got some really helpful and constructive replies. He directed me to the keybind interface, had me promptly unbind my s key, taught me some focus macros and lastly pointed me towards Twink Info, the website owned by one of "the great vengeance twinks." In the next few weeks I began keybinding, starting out using the num pad and then slowly advancing to WAD for movement and the use of the keys around it. I would have never learned of any of those things if I weren't flamed. Although a lot of people may disagree, if you're told that you're bad one of two things will happen. You'll either seek advice and get better or continue living in your fantasy world where you're num won tink univers. There's always more to learn, and although I've gotten heavily side tracked reminiscing, that's what this post is about.

Once I began keybinding, I realized how bad I really was. I was clumsy with my binds but even then noticed how much better I was playing than when I clicked. As I got better, I learned to fake cast, made mouseover macros, downloaded addons, started playing arenas, got vent, and played my first premades. As I "made a name for myself", I got offers for funding, thus playing more arenas, joining more vents, and playing more premades. When I moved to Ruin, I got called bad more, sought out more help, played more arenas, joined more vents and played more premades. Now, when I log on F2P, I join more vents and play more arenas. On 19s, I play more premades. It's an endless cycle but I really do believe I get better every time I play.

When I was doing 3s with a few old friends from Vengeance last week and playing my resto sham, I was frustrated at triple dps 3s teams at high mmr (both of them are 2.2k + players so they dragged mine up heavily). After complaning for a minute or two, one of them said to me "Dude, its just like 19s. Stop running around like an idiot. Just stand there and fake cast." In so many ways, 85s are just 19s. You have the same core abilities and the same basic concepts apply. If you're getting mana burned, los. If you overextend, you'll get bursted. Accidentally dropping in Blade's Edge can cost you a game. If a rogue is running away, dot him. You can't get ambushed when you have your back against a wall or off the edge. Believe it or not, it's a lot easier to get away when your enemy is slowed by an Earthbind. Although these all seem like pretty basic things, I really think that I wouldn't have learned half of them if it weren't for 19s. Both the nice and the not so nice people that I've encountered have helped me become the player that I am.

Every time you lose an arena, even if you're not fully conscious of it, you pick up things that your opponent did that contributed to the win. In my opinion, every time you miss a key, pop trinket at the wrong time, or eat a kick, you're given an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and improve. Even when you get trolled/flamed/blamed for those things, you're still given the opportunity to improve. This post didn't really turn out to what I wanted it to be but I think I'm going to keep it up anyway. If nothing else, its a fun story for a bored reader about my twinking roots.

P.S. Played on Sen'jin in Bloodlust and Darrowmere in Whirlwind for anyone interested.
P.P.S. Don't troll my grammar mistakes. It's late, I'm tired, this turned into a rant and there are probably tons of them.