Question to 10-boxers - what do you do all the time?

[Kulzor]

I mean, are you spending a few nights a week working your way through Kara, then another night or two on ZA? Are you going back down to 5-mans and doing heroics?

Or are the extra five mainly just to allow the occasional Kara and/or ZA runs?

Or PvP in AV? (BGs? That'd be rough I'd think...)

[Bigfish]

Well, I haven't actually started 10 boxing yet, but my intention is to run the 10 man dungeons of WotLK for badges and loot, while running around the world with 10 characters in 2 groups doing dailys simultaneously. While I will be running 5 mans, chances are it will be in the capacity of whatever group makeup I want to take (having 1 of every class is nice) and not really to overly farm loot.

[TheBigBB]

My setup is for two sets of 5 to be independent of each other, but to macro it out so that the "second" group will assist party1 when they're 10 boxing. I am going to play them back and forth in 5 mans and questing until my gear is good enough to raid, then hopefully get all my badges from raiding. I don't actually want to level all 10 at once, since I love to do quests, and it'd be a pain to quest two separate groups at the same time.

Keep in mind, though I just set this team up so I am not an experienced 10 boxer, I just have the plan, not the experience.

[Kulzor]

Barring soloing Kara and ZA, it seems like 10-boxing just doubles your downtime on things like dailies and quests. Almost like you hit the top of the hill at 5-mans, then anything past that starts wasting time rather than just gaining it by not pugging or waiting on guildies.

Was just wondering. I spend almost all my time (literally) doing heroics at this point. I sure wish wowarmory.com would update, so I could analyze my newest gear setup. :)

[Rin]

Barring soloing Kara and ZA, it seems like 10-boxing just doubles your downtime on things like dailies and quests. Almost like you hit the top of the hill at 5-mans, then anything past that starts wasting time rather than just gaining it by not pugging or waiting on guildies.


I'll chime in here too... I don't think 10-boxing really doubles your downtime. For a hypothetical example, let's say you love making gold by doing the daily quests. 10 characters doing the quests simultaneously = double the amount of gold that you would have received if you were doing it in a 5-man team. I know that this is a rather rudementary example, but it still alludes to the point that you are earning things quicker than a 5-boxer, for that matter. Also, right now you're absolutely correct - there are only 2 raid dungeons that have the capacity for 10-characters - Kara and ZA. Both of which can be done by a 10-boxer with a little patience, discipline and practice. Looking at the future of WoW, we realize that within the next few weeks WoTLK will arrive, and 10-man dungeons will be the norm. Having 10 characters will allow you to run those dungeons by yourself, if you choose to do so. Also, by having 10 overgeared level 80 characters, you should be able to do most TBC content by yourself or with a few other people. Given the changes to the game, the new large health pools of tanks at 80, the new spells and skills, I could see 10-characters doing everything up to Archimonde. This would hold especially true for 10-boxers who have balanced teams (not all caster specs, because as you are probably aware, many encounters have <insert damage type> immunity.

As a matter of personal opinion, I think 10-boxing is a blast. I plan on leveling my 10-boxing team up in 2 separate groups (the 4 shammis + paladin as group a), and my mix: priest, druid, pally, mage, mage, as group b when WoTLK comes out. I wouldn't try to level them both at the same time, as that just doesn't seem as efficient to me - but that's just my humble opinion. Plus, if you're into world PvP, there's not a lot of people who will be able to withstand 10k / second targetted dps, or about 8k instant AOE burst DPS, followed by a few AOE knockbacks from the shaman if too many people get close. There's also not a lot of people who would try to "jump" you in your situation with 10-characters. Some will, but most people will run in the opposite direction if they see you coming towards them.

In essence, with 10-chars you get: Increased profitability (this is not to say that you couldn't be a 5-boxer who has 2 teams of 5 that makes the same amount of profit as one ten boxer), great world pvp, and a good time ;) ... also you can create an instant RAID, on your own time - for Pre-BC, BC, and 10-man WOTLK content, plus 10-characters creates an unmatched challenge for the person playing them, especially when you're playing all different classes...

Cheers

[TheBigBB]

How do you do dailies and get double gold with a 10-box? I thought dailies wouldn't complete in a raid. You'd have to do the quests twice to get credit. Am I wrong?

[Rin]

Also, if you really wanted to get creative with 10 characters and profit, you could "run" people through 10-man dungeons for a fee (leaving one of your characters out)... I'm quite confident that you would have no problem finding an overwhelming amount of people willing to go with you for a guaranteed chance at an item - even if you charged an outrageous price like 8k for a run (people were paying up to 9k at certain points for 1 Zul'Aman Bear on my server) + with a guarantee like: you can have any of the items that drop, you're bound to have an unlimited number of clients.

You could expand on this a lot too, by offering people runs of any world dungeon - or by teaming up with other boxers to learn encounters, and maybe (hypothetically speaking), one day you could take down a 25-man with mostly boxers. As a 5-boxer, all you'd need to do is get 1 25-man on farm with 4-5 other people playing the raid limit (25 characters) and then start to offer runs to the general public for gold. There's really no end to what you can do as a boxer, and what you can do for yourself as a 10-boxer.

[Rin]

How do you do dailies and get double gold with a 10-box? I thought dailies wouldn't complete in a raid. You'd have to do the quests twice to get credit. Am I wrong?

Absolutely correct. I'm sorry, I should have made mention that you would have to complete the quests twice.

[Bigfish]

How do you do dailies and get double gold with a 10-box? I thought dailies wouldn't complete in a raid. You'd have to do the quests twice to get credit. Am I wrong?

Using Quel'Danas as an example of a Daily Hub, I typically complete 7 dailys with my 5-man there. Operate under the assumption that I'm doing 2 groups, not raided together and just focusing on claiming with the right group. First, I convert the sentries. Since you can simultaneously convert 5, I now have to kill instead of one, the longest part of which is just finding one. Once that's done, Kill the 6 BE pallies, locks, and 3 hunters. I usually end up killing more than are necesary anyway, and they respawn fast, so it doesn't add a significant amount of time to run a second group through simultaneously. Get one Lay Line. Go kill Demons and get the second lay line. Again, the things spawn so fast, little time is added by killing 6 more demons. Freeing the Greengil slaves will take a bit longer since the sorceresses are a bit hard to find. Get the 3rd lay line. The Boat bombing run is a joke for the bombs, and it really depends on how lucky you get with the respawns on the boat you land on. You could get 12 BEs real quick, it could take a while. Demon Bombing run will still have to be done seperately, but once team one hits the bombing area, you launch team 2, and by the time team 1 is flying out, team 2 should be arriving, so you've only really needed 1.33 (repeating of course) amount the time to complete that quest.

Boom. For maybe a quarter more of the time it takes to finish 7 dailies on 5 characters, you just doubled your take home gold.

[TheBigBB]

How do you do dailies and get double gold with a 10-box? I thought dailies wouldn't complete in a raid. You'd have to do the quests twice to get credit. Am I wrong?

Using Quel'Danas as an example of a Daily Hub, I typically complete 7 dailys with my 5-man there. Operate under the assumption that I'm doing 2 groups, not raided together and just focusing on claiming with the right group. First, I convert the sentries. Since you can simultaneously convert 5, I now have to kill instead of one, the longest part of which is just finding one. Once that's done, Kill the 6 BE pallies, locks, and 3 hunters. I usually end up killing more than are necesary anyway, and they respawn fast, so it doesn't add a significant amount of time to run a second group through simultaneously. Get one Lay Line. Go kill Demons and get the second lay line. Again, the things spawn so fast, little time is added by killing 6 more demons. Freeing the Greengil slaves will take a bit longer since the sorceresses are a bit hard to find. Get the 3rd lay line. The Boat bombing run is a joke for the bombs, and it really depends on how lucky you get with the respawns on the boat you land on. You could get 12 BEs real quick, it could take a while. Demon Bombing run will still have to be done seperately, but once team one hits the bombing area, you launch team 2, and by the time team 1 is flying out, team 2 should be arriving, so you've only really needed 1.33 (repeating of course) amount the time to complete that quest.

Boom. For maybe a quarter more of the time it takes to finish 7 dailies on 5 characters, you just doubled your take home gold.VERY good ideas! Yeah you could cut your daily time on the second group down significantly if you did things this way.

[Souca]

For me the biggest thing is the ability to mix and match characters without having to worry which ones are sharing an account. I haven't done much more than candy buckets on more than 5 characters yet so I can't comment on questing with them all, but I do think the travel time is where the savings would be with 10 doing dailies. If you manage the tagging correctly, you should also have twice the firepower and you could see some minor speed improvements in killing the peskier mobs.

As for equipment, I don't think you need as much gear as you would think. I took a poke at 9 boxing last night on my setup and was surprised a how well it ran. My system is by no means over the top (yet). I ran all 9 on one machine using KeyClone. 4GB of Ram, 8800GTS and 9500GT, and a 2.86GHz Quad Intel. I saw most of my slowdown in disk loads, esp in Shattrath.

I will be setting up the second machine this weekend if all goes as planned and see no problem with running 10 off the two machines. I currently run 5 off of the single machine with no worries.

- Souca -