What allows you to run 5 fast flyers?

[Malekyth]

I know some people successfully box epic flyers. What are the system specs that allow your alts to keep up with your lead on fast flyers? I just bought my fifth epic riding skill and tried it out in Howling Fjord ... and was just shocked. I not only lose alts over medium distances, but I often lose them immediately upon starting as they don't register the follow command before the lead toon is well out of range. This last point means that, to keep everyone together over long distances, I can't even stop frequently to let everyone catch up. So far it's a very expensive disaster.

Temporary, hopefully not permanent fix is, put the lead toon back on her non-epic flyer. But ... damn, dude, she's got the Headless Horseman's Mount. It would truly suck, having to bank it.

Is the secret to successfully running a full group of fast flyers all computer hardware? Network? Are there some settings that I probably am not already running, that would help?

Edit: Added system specs: Quad core 2.66GHz, 2 gigs RAM.

[Zal]

I'm a quadboxer running quad-core, 6 gigs ram. follow never breaks due to lag.

[Malekyth]

At least something is obvious and easily repairable. :) How much is a "lot" more RAM? 4 gigs total? 8?

[Nitro]

At least something is obvious and easily repairable. :) How much is a "lot" more RAM? 4 gigs total? 8?

Rams cheap, get 8gb and a 64bit OS

[olipcs]

i would second that, i also run a quadcore with 2.66ghz and 8gb ram. Epic Flying is no problem at all, and i only rarely loose one, if my latency is very high...

[evilbob]

First - You need a LOT more ram.

Second - There are probably a ton of system tweaks your missing.
I just thought it was going to be the ram for him, but what system tweaks are you referring to? I don't think i've ever looked into those at any point while playing WoW

[Spudgun]

I notice you have a paladin in your group, it could be the mount speed aura thats too much for your machine to handle. I had the same problem with my pally/shaman toons whenever the aura was on the pally would keep skipping ahead so i run without it.

[Malekyth]

Naw, I checked Crusader Aura, and it's off. Good idea though.

All right, thanks for the info, y'all. I'll do some upgrading. I could be up to 8 gigs within a week I guess. Does 64-bit necessarily mean that I'll need to switch to Vista? I know there's a 64-bit XP Pro, but then I read somewhere that XP is not supported anymore. Vista has been out for awhile and I stopped paying attention ages ago, but last I heard, one should gnaw his own leg off before upgrading to Vista. Avoidable or is Vista all right now?

[grap]

yes, xp x64 or vista x64 or w7 x64
if you want to have and run more than 4Go RAM, x64 is your only choice

[Steph]

I am running Vista 64bit with 8GB RAM and have no problems with five epic flyers.
Cheapo Q6700 quadcore, 1x 4850 graphics.

I'd recommend to stay away from 64bit XP, the versions that exist were never meant for gaming.
You do need 64 bit to use more than 3.xGB ram though and five times Northrend uses between 6 and 7 GB RAM on my system.

[Multibocks]

with epic flying mounts crusader aura is worthless, with zero lag and a top of the line computer I can still lose a follower. They need to make the range on that damn spell zone wide.

[daviddoran]

I would also say disable questhelper. I was losing follow on regular epic land mounts... I also noticed that weather conditions from zone to zone altered my performance. As soon as I disabled questhelper everything went back to normal. With the whole issue with addons that charged no longer being able to, I am unsure as to where I'm gonna go. I might try carbonite, or just lightheaded, or just wing it the old fashioned way...

[Spudgun]

Something else while i remember, do you use Keyclone? I've noticed that sometimes if you have the FPS in background set too low they will break connection with the main alot. I have it set to 10fps for background and maxfps 45 now but i did have it down to 5fps for the background and it broke connection alot when on follow. But again this comes down to a pc speed problem if your machine cant handle that.

[Malekyth]

I run HKN, but I do have my max background fps set to 5. It makes sense, that this might affect it. I spent part of today starting to backup my machine prior to wiping it and installing Vista 64bit ... will definitely try upping the background fps to 10 if OS+memory doesn't totally fix it.

Thanks for the replies, y'all, good stuff.

[davedontmind]

with epic flying mounts crusader aura is worthless, with zero lag and a top of the line computer I can still lose a follower. They need to make the range on that damn spell zone wide.If you want to use crusader aura while flying on epic mounts, just make sure your lead toon is not your pally. It generally seems to work ok then.

[Taliesin]

If you want to use crusader aura while flying on epic mounts, just make sure your lead toon is not your pally. It generally seems to work ok then.

Yeah, this is the only thing that works well with crusader aura. Without crusader, the follow does not break so long as the lead on the slave's client is within follow range. Crusader range, however, appears to be determined server-side regardless of how close they appear on the slave's client. Hence the strange behavior of crusader breaking first, causing the slave to lose range.

If they made auras calculate based on distance determined on the slave's machine, I would expect this type of issue to go away (not counting flying through phase boundaries).

My pali is my lead and I don't feel like setting up a new lead system just for flying, so I just don't use crusader. It would be nice, but not that big a deal for me in the larger scheme of things.

[zanthor]

Edit: Added system specs: Quad core 2.66GHz, 2 gigs RAM.

2.66ghz is on the slow side but livable, 2gb ram is amazingly low... bump that up to 8gb and you should be OK.

[Aethon]

Naw, I checked Crusader Aura, and it's off. Good idea though.

All right, thanks for the info, y'all. I'll do some upgrading. I could be up to 8 gigs within a week I guess. Does 64-bit necessarily mean that I'll need to switch to Vista? I know there's a 64-bit XP Pro, but then I read somewhere that XP is not supported anymore. Vista has been out for awhile and I stopped paying attention ages ago, but last I heard, one should gnaw his own leg off before upgrading to Vista. Avoidable or is Vista all right now?

You don't need Vista to run a 64bit OS. If you're able to get a copy of server 2008, this might be for you www.win2008workstation.com .

I attend a ton of MS tech events, sometimes they give out delicious MS candy, Server 08 was one of those. Or, you could even try the evaluation, it should last 280 days (might need to do a sysprep in there to re-arm it). Works great if you have an external/network drive; load the server up, install all your patches, games, drivers, etc. Make it into a workstation. Sysprep it and capture an image before it boots up again(will be a large image, depending on how much/many games you have on there). Then when the trial expires, just load the image up again, and at worse, you'll have to apply any of the most recent patches.

[BobGnarly]

Have you enabled "the registry hack ('http://gamers-underground.com/forum/role-playing/27887-latency-fix-wow-registry-hack.html') "? That alone significantly reduced my latency (~200 down to ~90) which is critical for fast mount following.

[Kissell13]

I notice you have a paladin in your group, it could be the mount speed aura thats too much for your machine to handle. I had the same problem with my pally/shaman toons whenever the aura was on the pally would keep skipping ahead so i run without it.

ditto...same with the speed increase aura on my DK. Im running 4gb ram now but upgrading to 8 soon.

[EvilTofu]

Stay away from 64bit XP. . . it is absolute trash. That version of XP was an afterthought by MS and it is a nightmare trying to find drivers for it. I run 3 clients on a core2duo 2.66 with 4GB RAM and 64bit Vista with no trouble at all. I tried it with just 2GB of RAM and it was not really playable, even with the graphics turned all the way down.

[Malekyth]

Stay away from 64bit XP. . . it is absolute trash. That version of XP was an afterthought by MS and it is a nightmare trying to find drivers for it. I run 3 clients on a core2duo 2.66 with 4GB RAM and 64bit Vista with no trouble at all. I tried it with just 2GB of RAM and it was not really playable, even with the graphics turned all the way down.Reading further, that's my impression too, kind of a duct tape job to tide us over 'til they did a real 64 bit OS. Well, no problem, I'm Vista-bound, for better or arrgh.

But hey, good news, I did the registry hack that's been floating around, and saw some definite improvement. It's not night and day, but it's noticeable. Awesome. It's hard to recommend that people of unknown savviness go near regedit, but in this case, I think it's simple enough to be recommendable.

[Memn]

with epic flying mounts crusader aura is worthless, with zero lag and a top of the line computer I can still lose a follower. They need to make the range on that damn spell zone wide.

I have no problems with it if my paladin is one of the followers.

** EDIT: Daviddorian beat me to it long ago!

[kadaan]

I don't think RAM is the issue, I'm running 32bit XP, quad-core, single 8800GT 512m, with only 2g of ram. 4 instances of wow with maxfps/bk set to 30/15 and I've never had issues following with epic flyers (other than phasing, which doesn't count.)

[heyaz]

I started putting my paladin in the back long ago, crusader aura in front = broken follow within 15 seconds. I still have the main outrun the slaves occassionally but knowing that they all have crusader behind me, they always catch up.

[Nisch]

I'd recommend to stay away from 64bit XP, the versions that exist were never meant for gaming.


That's a very false statement. I have run XP 64-bit and it works VERY well. There is nothing about it that dictates that it's not "meant" for gaming.

[Nisch]

Stay away from 64bit XP. . . it is absolute trash. That version of XP was an afterthought by MS and it is a nightmare trying to find drivers for it.

That's also untrue as there are most drivers available now that the industry move has been to 64 bit systems. Before that, drivers were hard to find, but now, I have been able to find drivers for all my systems running XP 64 bit at home and my systems at work running 64 bit.

[echo]

Hmm.... I have a team of 5 pallies with epic fliers, and with crusader aura perma-enabled, I usually never have problems. I have all my graphic options dialed down to the lowest except for particle effects at medium and viewing distance set at medium though, so not sure if that's a factor.

I'm running vista x 64 with 8 gigs of DDR2 ram. ATI 4870. C2Q 6600. all 5 wow are symlinked also.

The only thing that gives me trouble is the phased areas in icecrown. But when I know I'm about to go through one of those areas, I'll just line up all my followers with the leader by having them autofollow for 2 seconds then stop. I also have auto-run mapped to a key on all 5 instances, and I will hit that key. Since all 5 are lined up exactly after auto following for a few seconds, they will all head in exactly the same direction upon hitting the auto-run key. When I get close to where I want to go I will hit the auto-follow focus key again and then since they're all traveling in the same cluster at the same speed, I never lose them that way.

Sorry if my explanation is convoluted, not enough sleep. :p