How I (Eventually) Got Started Multiboxing
by
, 10-23-2015 at 03:00 AM (11017 Views)
I was actually a hold out on Multiboxing for a pretty long time. My first experiences with it go back to Everquest days. I played a cleric, so as our group's healer they would tend to get pretty annoyed when I'd be working or too busy to play. Of course, my husband (ISBoxer's Lax) just started dualboxing my cleric and his bard together in the end. He wrote programs to control my game from his computer, he'd even make my character say crazy things when I was trying to play it myself!
Later on in World of Warcraft, I would play a lone DPS while Lax multiboxed the remaining four in the group so that we could run dungeons on our own. I loved that we could take as long as we wanted to finish a dungeon, with no other group members waiting on us during our long afk times. With kids, that's a great ability to have if you ever want to play any MMOs! And hey, you don't have to share any of the loot either.
But in the end, I got pretty jealous and had to start trying it out for myself. Unlike my husband, I've never been a big fan of PvP, and I'm terrible at trying to multibox in any PvP situations, I'll admit! I pretty much just like to faceroll PvE stuff, so having four buddies trailing behind me to slaughter everything I pass is great fun. I started out boxing just two, but I think Lax poked fun at me too much or something, so I just jumped right into five afterwards. :P
Of course, while certain things definitely become easier to do, it's also a challenge to be able to control that many characters and actually have them all do what I intend. That in itself takes the game to another level of difficulty (as well as enjoyment!), especially if I've already gotten burnt out from whatever the end game content is at the time. I do often focus on easier content when multiboxing, though, since I don't tend to have my healing add-ons set up. Once you start getting into the Cataclysm dungeons at least, controlling five characters through the boss fights can be incredibly challenging!
I'm also a big collector of silly novelty items like pets, mounts, and toys. I use my team to collect those items faster. I'll run my five through separate instances of Black Temple simutaneously using mouse broadcasting, for example. I am almost guaranteed a pet will drop for at least one of my characters! WoW Holiday events are even better, especially since you can collect currency during most to buy heirloom items (or new pets and toys) at 5x the rate you would soloing. I'm an impatient person with little spare time for all the gaming I want to do, multiboxing helps me move through game content faster!
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