FInished RAF and lost that lovin' feeling? (long)

[Jheusse]

I got into running a multibox setup not long before LK dropped, my 90 days ran out in early december I believe. I did RAF because my family really limits how much I can play, so the idea of being able to run instances myself I really liked.

4 accounts separate from my main account, I now have 4 shammies, 4 druids, a lock, hunter, and priest all at 60 on them. Main account has my 75 feral, 61 pally, 64 mage, it's the only one with LK so far. I have enough muscle between several configurations of comp to run full group.

Right now I'm trying to get my main to 80, but the idea of being able to jump on and run instances hasn't really panned out due to the massive amount of configuration to move beyond simple RAF quest spamming.

I've spent a lot of time over the last weeks trying to figure out a layout and control scheme. With the variety of toons I have the number of groups I could construct would be endless, but I'd have to spend many many hours setting things up for that exact comp before getting to actually run things. I'm stumped on getting something that's simple enough that I can effectively drop in toons and go, flexible enough to accomodate multiple comps (pally/4shammy, 5 druids, DK with 4 dps, swap in lock hunter or priest, etc) and multiple machines, relatively transparent when I solo play. I don't pvp, so a very simple focus=master with jamba, keyclone and one or two assist macros has been enough to date, but going to outlands means instancing more or less for real.

But I'm really contemplating dropping down to at most 2 accounts, with or without transferring various toons off the other accounts. And not sure it's worth it to get LK on the other 4.

I guess the main gripe/complaint/plea is that when you only have an hour or two to play at a time most nights, it's real hard to get anything configuredfor a real strong multibox, so the multibox moving forward may be a waste of money. Any gurus that are willing to help me via PM trying to shake out some control system stuff?

I thought multiboxing would allow my limited time to be more impactful and let me do more by myself, but the admin time to try and iron it out is too huge a lump at this point I'm afraid.

[Redbeard]

Multiboxing (can) require a huge amount of metagaming... it doesnt sound like an aspect you enjoy, but believe or not thats what some people find the MOST fun about boxing haha.

This is another reason why most people suggest stacking shamans. The more classes you mix, the more complexity you're introducing into the situation.

Bottom line: multiboxing CAN let you experience more of the game without worrying about grouping, which will save you time, but you gotta invest some time in the beginning by learning / experimenting before you get there.

I am by no means an expert but I will share some of the things I've done and im sure others will as well.

1) Mods. Before I started boxing I ran 100% vanilla UI and was fine with it but some add ons can really make your life easier. You might already be using them and if so I apologize, I didnt see you mention it. The two that come to mind for me are Jamba and SmartBuff, which makes buff management and team management that much easier (we like easy woot).

2) Healing: Ive setup F1-F5 to correspond to each of my characters in my group (I unbound the default f1-f5 and rebind them to refer to specific characters, not to their party position). I dont have a dedicated healer so I use what I call healing pass through, where If I hit f1 for example, my "first" healer will heal my F1 character. If my first healer is dead, my "second" healer will attempt to heal my F1 healer and so on. I use variations of F1-F5 for other beneficial things like decurse / depoisoning. F6 is my rezz key.

3) Movement: I rebound movement to esdf just to get myself over into the middle of the keyboard a bit more. shift + d moves all characters back, I use this for breaking follow. shift + e turns follow on for all characters (using the Jamba command).

4) Multifunction key: F7 I use to have all characters Mount. Shift + F7 is my "big button", which accepts trades on all characters, retrieves your corpse, releases after death, etc. Alt + shift + f7 has all my party members eat and drink. Ctrl + alt + shift + f7 has all my party members hearth.

5) Combat: For combat abilities I use keys 1 - 7 on my keyboard for all characters as follows. Remember that there will not always be a 100% correlation between abilities if youre playing multiclass and if you are playing a stacked class group it might not be desirable to fire all of these abilities off at the same time (you can use round robin or something like that depending on your boxing solution to get around that).

1 - snare
2 - stun
3 - taunt / detaunt (depending on class / spec) shift + 3 = AOE taunt
4 - alternate attack ( i put moves i dont cast often here, for example lacerate on my bear)
5 - AOE attack (bear swipes, paladin does consecration, death knight does blood boil, etc etc)
6 - Single target strong attack (mangle, crusader strike, storm strike, etc)
7 - debuff

6) Non shared abilities: Ive setup 3 buttons for each of my characters that are for hitting off things specific to those classes. So for example, my druid uses g h and j and when i hit those keys it only does stuff on my druid and not my other characters. I have 3 keys for each of my characters. So for example, I can hit a key and my druid will do frenzied regeneration. I hit another key and my shaman summons spirit wolves. I ultimately decided to set up these keys because i wanted a finer control over non-spam abilities for each of my characters.

I think thats about it. Youll probably find as many setups as there are multiboxers, you just have to pick and choose bits of what you like to make it work for YOU. As I said above, you can save time wtih multiboxing but you need to put the time in to set it up first.

Hope that was helpful.

[Stormweasel]

It's hard enough getting your configuration ready for ONE team and ONE setup after the ease of levelling through RAF. IMO you are setting yourself an unreasonably high bar and dooming yourself to failure by trying to implement multiple DPS rotations with multiple synergies between different tanks and healers. I'm sure some people can do it, but I couldn't and it doesn't sound like you're ready for that either.

My two pennies worth - pick one team: the pally, the priest and the shamans and level them all the way to 80, come back and get the rest. Forget trying to be able to slot in whatever you want whenever you want. You can do that when you have experience.

God knows it took me long enough to get my single team ready for instancing. Given that you haven't levelled these toons bit by bit, new ability by new ability through earlier instances means you now have to learn the classes. Attempting to learn an additional half a dozen classes and, well, you end up understandably feeling like this.

Just pick the team you have the most knowledge with and/or are the most multiboxer friendly and learn with them. Read the forums, print out abilities and do some scribbling during lunchtime. That will maximise the time you can spend in-game.

The curve is steep at first but levels out surprisingly quickly - to the point where you'll soon be writing macros outside of the game, confident that they will work in game. Good luck and don't be disheartened - but don't make things hard for yourself.

[Jheusse]

I don't enjoy the metagaming all that much (aside from occasions in threads here over lunch at work and the like), I'm more likely to end up spending so many hours I never actually get out and kill things.

I actually have a huge backlog of addons on my main, the 4 additional accounts were usually pretty stripped down, jamba, cartographer, quartz, omen, a few others, and the first account of the RAF team had tomtom,lightheaded, and ELBA's tourguide files.

I know I'm setting myself up by trying to figure out all the configurations ahead of time, but they are so interlinked it's difficult to break them down.



Keeping addons up to date: symlinking would help (though I'm not too comfortable on it, haven't done it) but I have separate wow folders across 2 HDs on my main box, and am likely to go to 2 comps running when I want to go to 5 box, right now my main runs 4, and I have a dual core laptop and an older single core desktop to get to 5. My main I run through a separate wow folder entirely with many more addons, like XPerl. I don't see how symlinking will help much, so keeping copies up to date is painful.

I leveled the 4 elemental shammies and the 4 balance druids, the other 3 60s were pure RAF gifted while the last hour of the 90 days ticked away, so I know balance druids, feral druids, and the shammies' skills somewhat. Simplest is probably pally with 4 shammies, I know druid better than pally and he's much better geared, but pallies are much simpler to tank with, and pallies and shammies don't have to shift.

Quickbar layout is tough to settle on an approach, especially since I have an n52te I need to train myself on for my feral. Getting a bar mod that can shape the bars to look like it, easily configure, and be easily copied to another wow folder/toon is a challenge. Macaroon I got kinda lost in (and I'm not entirely dim, honest).

I see people with beautiful UIs, but know that's painstaking to construct and you end up rebuilding it constantly as addons update. I know myself well enough to know I'd end up with something ugly and half broken due to inertia and frustration

Even simple questions like "Which works better for setting up teams, linking shift1-9 to bar 2, ctrl 1-9 to bar 3 (or similar), or constructing a macro with 1-3 modifiers in it to be inserted on bar 1?"

Which makes more sense to configure a toon (like my feral) for use solo or in a group, try to configure all of the macros to fail through, or just put all of my solo quickbars on for example bar 4, and manually scroll through to that bar when I log to run solo? Or keep solo on bar 1 and put the bars I use for multiboxing on 2 through 4?

I don't pvp so I don't need targetless, I'm looking at either tank and 4 dps (all of whom can heal) or tank and 3 dps and a healer, so I don't think leaderless really applies so much does it? Focusless is nice, but I also like having focus for the leader/master action for jamba.

Even been balancing pros and cons of how to divide up my keyboard, whether to do 1-5 are the tank's buttons, 5 through = are the dps and healing buttons, or use some of the variants like 1 through = is one bar and F1 through F12 is another. I reflexively try not to use F keys much because at different times I use them for mob marking or closetgnome sets or window swapping.



So many variations of setups that I like, like zorba's, zanthor's, Kaylin's.

[Chranny]

Ya, I'd either take the 1x Pal, 1 Priest, 3 Sham route or the classic 1x Pal, 4 Sham group. =)
If you don't wanna use the F1-F12 keys, you could use the NUMPAD-01234567890+-*/

[msher]

Check out Dominos or Bartender4. Dominos is what used to be Bongos; and I think you'll like it for an action bar addon. It's not macro-dependent like Macaroon, but is straightforward and offers paging. Play with 3-4 bars and you can set it up to look like your n52 (I use one as well, just not for MB yet). Plus, the bars "dock" with each other/ meaning they all line up when you get them near each other, and you can move them as a group if need be.