Looking for advice how to preserve my paladins 1 box playabillity while getting a good 5 box setup

[Perrigrin]

Long title ;)

I'm not happy with my current 4+1 (sham+pal) setup technically, it was built for a 5 shaman setup and then just throwing my raiding paladin in there -- It's no issue at the moment as it's easy-mode boosting/leveling - But for 65+ I would be interested in getting it to work better (such as not accidentally DI one of the slaves when dropping totems :P).

So, I found this post: bar setup question - 1 pally 4 shams ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=92855#post92855') - Which I like for boxing, my problem however is if I set that up I would be a bit lost when it came to raiding. I'm also surprised to see only 4 buttons used for totems, I would have expected more totem versions needed - such as disease/poision/ae/tremor/mass grounding etc beeing needed.

Must be quite a few of you out there that has this challenge - So any advice you can give or insight to how you set it up?

[Perrigrin]

Is some clever use of trinity bars the answer? (don't use any bar-addon atm).

[dRiN]

Clever use of whatever actionbars is the trick. Only trinity bars seem to be the holy grail :D

I run a pala + 4 shammy setup.

Start simple and work with that. For example don't double bind totems to your DI macro.

I have a castsequence for pve giving me some default totems to start a fight. Also I have the fire totems bound on a seperate buttons so I can drop those during the fight, same goes for tremor and grounding totem.

For the pala I only have my tank macro and taunt button bound. The seals and judges I do with a mouseclick, and I'm not a clicker, but since pala was new for me and I boosted it hard I wanted to start simple.

I have the tank macro bound twice, so I can start building threat spamming a button so the shammies dont start to dps. And I have the same macro bound to a button that combines shammie dps + the tank macro.

To show how simple I have started, I only have 2 healing macro's, one for group healing and one for tank healing. I have only one dps macro for the shammy only doing lightning bolts. No shocks yet. And I have 3 buttons bound to the totems I mentioned before. And 1 button to the castsequence.

I do have some more bound, but I generaly dont use them and could do with clicking those.

I know it is hard to grasp just from text, and I believe someone is working on a video + audio explanation for this. The same person that made the post for the octopus starting guide that was well received.

[daviddoran]

Trinity can let you program a myriad of bars, with multiple states per bar, like an in combat bar and an out of combat bar for instance (to keep your buffs n stuff)

What I do, is simply put most of my tanking spells on a separate bar and just click cast em, while I use the keybinds for the slaves. I have a few overlapping spells in my main actionbar (consecrate tied to holy nova/arcane explosion/hellfire for my AoE farming, but for the most part, my paladin's main action bar is blank. One thing you could do is just set up trinity for multiboxing, and just deactivate it for raiding solo. Or just use action bar 1 for solo and action bar 2 for boxing.

[Nixi]

This is the eternal question that seems to plague a multidisciplinary multiboxer.

You've got hundreds of abilities, and about 20 buttons worth of realestate. As everyone else said keep things simple and just start your interface from scratch to be built around multiboxing. Then when you just can't avoid it and are forced to play one character, you can do what i've resorted to doing, just have a new installation directory for playing solo.

[Perrigrin]

This is the eternal question that seems to plague a multidisciplinary multiboxer.

You've got hundreds of abilities, and about 20 buttons worth of realestate. As everyone else said keep things simple and just start your interface from scratch to be built around multiboxing. Then when you just can't avoid it and are forced to play one character, you can do what i've resorted to doing, just have a new installation directory for playing solo.Isnt some of the buttons etc stored server side, I do have a separate instance for solo play - but if i move stuff around it will get moved in there to... thanks for the input so far, ill probably be doing the rebuild exercise, just wanted some input first.

[phetish]

This is the eternal question that seems to plague a multidisciplinary multiboxer.

You've got hundreds of abilities, and about 20 buttons worth of realestate. As everyone else said keep things simple and just start your interface from scratch to be built around multiboxing. Then when you just can't avoid it and are forced to play one character, you can do what i've resorted to doing, just have a new installation directory for playing solo.Isnt some of the buttons etc stored server side, I do have a separate instance for solo play - but if i move stuff around it will get moved in there to... thanks for the input so far, ill probably be doing the rebuild exercise, just wanted some input first.Yes - all of your bars are stored at the server - key bindings are stored per instance of wow. Keep in mind i'm just starting out, but I have my main raiding setup on one wow install, and my boosting setup on a separate wow install. I dedicated bars 5 and 6 to boosting and bars 1-4 for my raiding.

If i were smart - and i will be someday - I'd move all my slave macros to bars 5 and 6 so I can just hot key to the proper bar on all of my instances of wow and still keep my slaves working while my booster switches between bars 5 and 6 for it's abilities.

[Drakkun]

I use two wow folders to separate multi-boxing from solo play. There are mods I use for solo that I don't use for multi-boxing and vice versa. I've found that trinity bars 2 is the best for this setup since the mod stores its bars and button layouts seperate from the defaults. The thing I'm not looking forward to is that in WoTLK your keybinds and macros are going to be stored on the servers which will probably screw up my setup.

[Stompp]

I use two wow folders to separate multi-boxing from solo play. There are mods I use for solo that I don't use for multi-boxing and vice versa. I've found that trinity bars 2 is the best for this setup since the mod stores its bars and button layouts seperate from the defaults. The thing I'm not looking forward to is that in WoTLK your keybinds and macros are going to be stored on the servers which will probably screw up my setup.

This is exactly what I did, I have a seperate install for solo... I use COMPLETELY different setups and it's the cleanest way to do it so far.

[blast3r]

I don't know if this is the proper way to do it but it works great for me.

I bounce back and forth between several different teams of toons.

What I do is originally copy and paste my WTF folder right into the same folder twice. Now I have "Copy of WTF" and "Copy of WTF 2" I keep the second one as a backup. I then rename the WTF folder to WTF.sham (if it is for when I want to use all my shamans). Then I rename the "Copy of WTF" folder to WTF and log in to WoW with my new toons. I setup all my macros and buttons and make sure everything is working okay then log off. So if I had just created 5 druids I will call the new folder WTF.druid.

So, when I want to play my shamans I will go to the WoW folder and rename WTF.sham to WTF. This works very well and will keep all your settings.

In your case if you just want to change the Main toon between your pally and your shaman you could just go into the WTF/Account/Servername and probably do just the account in the same fashion.

[Drakkun]

I don't know if this is the proper way to do it but it works great for me.

I bounce back and forth between several different teams of toons.

What I do is originally copy and paste my WTF folder right into the same folder twice. Now I have "Copy of WTF" and "Copy of WTF 2" I keep the second one as a backup. I then rename the WTF folder to WTF.sham (if it is for when I want to use all my shamans). Then I rename the "Copy of WTF" folder to WTF and log in to WoW with my new toons. I setup all my macros and buttons and make sure everything is working okay then log off. So if I had just created 5 druids I will call the new folder WTF.druid.

So, when I want to play my shamans I will go to the WoW folder and rename WTF.sham to WTF. This works very well and will keep all your settings.

In your case if you just want to change the Main toon between your pally and your shaman you could just go into the WTF/Account/Servername and probably do just the account in the same fashion.You could write a couple of batch scripts to do this and put them on your desktop. Then you would have 2 icons, 1 that renamed the folders and launched for solo and 1 that renamed the folders and launched for boxing.