5+ Raiders, where are you?

[Altsoba]

It's been long since 5+ Boxing raiders have posted their advancement here.

I've been in a long pause and hoping to start raiding again soon, doing something between 3-10 boxing depending on availability of others to come.

I went as far as Naxx, Voa (2 bosses) and Sarth.

Ulduar Anyone?
Trial of the Crusader Anyone?
Onyxia Anyone?
Where are you now?

Let's revive this section please :)

[daviddoran]

Yeah, lots of guildies have had RL stuff so raiding has been sparse at best. I used my non raiding time to lvl up my shaman, and farmed a TON of heroics so my tank is nearly maxed on badge gear, just doing heroic daily for triumph badges.

[Bigfish]

I don't have much incentive to raid. The learning curve is too steep, and I get better loots grinding heroics. I might clear Naxx once I finish maxing out my badge gear, but personally, I never plan on pushing raid content again. Unless encounters become a lot more boxing friendly.

[Bigfish]

Unless you're 10 boxing, the learning curve isn't steep at all.

1) form raid
2) zone in, kill trash
3) goto wowwiki.com, read boss strat
4) ??
5) loot!

EDIT: I think 10 boxing is just getting all the damn macros and keybindings set... which you knew would be a pain going in. :D


Not just key bindings and macros, but individual macros for damn near every boss, with movement and clicking on some, and at the end of the day, not really enough epics to cover the man power cost of just running heroics, which at this point offers me better and faster loot. Might be worth the trouble if they reduced lockouts to a day instead of a week. The conclusion I arrived to was that it was just more productive to go it with 5.

But then, that's my experience from the perspective of one of every class in a 10-man raid. 2 Paladins and 8 Shamans would probably cruise along a lot easier, but my ultimate goal was to realize the potential of every class at the cap. I just do it in 2 groups of 5 instead of one of 10. Plus side is I can still field all 10 if the need strikes me.

[Bigfish]

One of my healers is a resto Druid. The healing is so disgustingly good, high HPS, low MPS, and AoE Hot that keeps everyone topped off damn near 100% of the time.

[Coltimar]

I am doing 10. Team 1 is 80, team 2 is 71 so I just raid Kara/ZA atm. My goal is obviously 80 content. Getting the software has been my biggest problem.

[Iceorbz]

Ive been able to box through faction champions in 25, and my guild has allowed me to do up through Thorim and Hodir last night.
I doubt we will be short for mimiron and beyond so that wont happen for me I don't think.

[daviddoran]

if I were to 10 box, definately 2 pally tanks, 1 holy priest, 1 resto druid, 1 fire mage, 2 destro locks, and 2 ele shaman. Dual spec one pally tank holy, and the resto druid boomkin, for fights that only need one tank, maybe a few others for flexibility, i.e. make one sham dual spec resto/ele. I dont think i will though, for reasons posted earlier. You can easily laughably easily farm heroics, and get badge gear thats better than naxx 10 drops, by far. From what I've seen, most raid fights are much more movement and micro intensive than most heroic fights, lots of times where dps needs to either split to 2 targets, or burn down an add, then back to the boss, etc. Not worth it. Dual 5 boxing, however, IMO is the best of both worlds.

[Bloodcloud]

hmm I wanna see a video of someone boxing the 4 horsemans in Naxx :)

[SmartJelly]

hmm I wanna see a video of someone boxing the 4 horsemans in Naxx :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHREPuVHufg

[Coltimar]

I am almost 80 x10! I still have a bit of gear on Team 2 but I am GOING to do some 10 man raid stuff. I haven't set foot in Naxx (except for clearing one boss on each wing at 60) so I will have to figure some stuff out but I am looking for advice on where to start. I read the post with some advice in it but a lot of opinions varied and most were from non-10 boxers. Does anyone have 10 man experience and some advice on what you might do differently?

[Ualaa]

A lot of the guilds on my server (Cenarius US - Alliance) are having very serious issues getting enough people to raid 25 man content.

A lot of people are pretty bored with the game at the moment, or are busy with other things.

There's maybe 4 or 5 guilds who raid at prime time on a regular basis, with the few people who want to raid moving to them.

I'm pretty sure with Cataclysm, many or most will likely return to where they were, especially when interest is high again. We've got 5 or 6 raiders, who have their main raiding toon in a raiding guild, but who spend most of their time on alts who are still guilded with us. That basically says, they've only moved a toon, because they want to raid now and that's the only option.

There are so many attempts at PuG raids, pretty much primetime trade is inundated with people looking for more. I'm guessing its the same thing - people who want to raid, but who don't have enough in their guilds at the moment.

[Multibocks]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHREPuVHufg


Holy shit that guy is a badass! I wonder how he positioned those people before and during the fight. I couldnt tell if he had people tanking the other bosses, I assume you have to or its a wipe(never done 4 horsemen).

[TheBigBB]

I am back and I raided Kara to warm up and tried Naxx, but I didn't like how I did in Naxx because my team 2 is still in blues and most of my epics are pretty bad, so I am going to spend the next month or two farming emblems from the daily heroic quest on BOTH teams instead of doing one at a time. More emblems for the time spent. I don't think I need this to advance, but wiping a lot if a huge pain when you're 1 manning 10 characters. All that rebuffing and setting up positioning. Yuck.

[Ualaa]

As far as heroics go, gearing for the tank seemed to be very important.
The DPS or heals could lag behind a fair margin.
An undergeared tank made it much harder, but as the tank geared it became a ton easier.
Even though the dps/heals didn't really upgrade much until the tank had a half decent set.

I'd imagine for raids this too would be true.

If your team doesn't have the best gear yet, really work on the tanks.
ToC normal and heroic seem to be fabulous places for gear.
Even if you run them through single box as a PuG or with friends.
I'd imagine normal ToC would be very doable even in pretty crummy gear.

There are a ton of Naxx10 pugs on my server.
Single box running a toon through these, purely for gear, can result in mostly iLV200 pieces.
That's the same gear level as heroics, but in a fraction of the time.
Still you can heroic run 5 toons together to gear up.
Naxx10 with PuG's would likely be 5 runs for 5 toons.

[HPAVC]

On feathermoon - alliance there are what seems like six 5boxers and a significant number of dual boxers.

The 5boxers are all in raiding guilds, and boxing raid, it seems and play together frequently, feathermoon seems to having a high raiding without guilds thing going on. Its not uncommon to see multiple guilds in end game 25s and the guilds also doing end game 25s. More so than other servers I guess.

[Meshuggenah]

The new Onyxia raid and VoA are both extremely easy fights to multibox (with ranged DPS). As long as you have the gear to do 3k+ DPS and you have a key set up to strafe left/right to move out of fires, you should have no problem with either of these fights.

ToC is fairly complicated in some parts, but definately do-able.The last boss in the first encounter and the very last boss are the toughest encounters. Icehowl's charge leaves zero room for error. If you don't move fast enough, your whole team (or at least the 4 that are on /follow) will die. Anub's tunnell business is also pretty lethal if you can't quickly switch and run one character away from the rest of your group.

Funnily enough, ToC25 is actually easier to box than ToC10, for a couple of reasons. You're less likely to be charge/tunnel target out of 25 players, and the complicated DPS fights (dispelling/interrupting Lord Jarraxus, multiple forms of CC/dispelling/interrupting during champions) is too much for one person to handle. In 25, however, you can pretty much just DPS and let other people worry about the interrupting and CC. I've only managed to successfully box ToC25 twice, and the first time all my chars got stomped when he picked me to charge. Luckily all my Ankh's were up, and he didn't charge my group again. I've tried ToC10 once and it was a miserable failure. Without a much more mixed DPS (DK to control a melee, rogue to interrupt a healer, X class to focus on dispelling, hunter for frost traps, priest for mass dispel, etc) there's just too much to do during the faction champions encounter.

Anyway, I'd definately suggest that anyone who boxes ranged DPS start farming VoA/Ony (10 or 25, doesn't matter). They both have nice loot and are very easy encounters to multibox.

[Meshuggenah]

So, you've Main Tanked, Main Healed, and DPSed these fights then?

Everything I have done as ranged dps only is a joke. Stupid simple. When you start playing critical roles, things get crazy.

I either get guildies to tank/heal or PuG those roles, and I fill DPS spots. Occasionally if we're short on healers I might respec a shaman as resto, but that's about it.

TBH, I don't believe in filling complex roles like tanking/healing while multiboxing. It may work for basic stuff like heroics and extremely simple raids (ie, Ony/VoA), but I'm not sold that it's viable for anything more complicated. When you have raid mechanics that require literally 1-2 second reaction times or you not only die, but can cause your raid to wipe (Icehowl's charge is a good example, again), I think it's better to stick to one role and do it well rather than playing half a healer, half a tank, etc.

[Prega]

im a lone boxer on my server so zero chance to find long term jointventure partners for any activities :p


I either get guildies to tank/heal or PuG those roles, and I fill DPS spots. Occasionally if we're short on healers I might respec a shaman as resto, but that's about it.i would like really have same avaibility/positive stance vs multiboxers you have found in your server: here, life is hard, average people watch me somenthing between goldfarmer and botter.
ignorance rules.
atm considering myself really lucky to have found some nice guys that occasionally offer me some single mode(tank or dps(melee or ranged shaman)) ulduar runs (10 normal). sometimes filling some dps vacations too, boxing tank+melee dps (2x, 3x).
done 8/14 in this way, mainly for achievements.
for this reason watching *possible*(?) cross-server raid lfg with interest: if happens it goes alive, i would like find other european boxers interested in doing somenthing together.

[Meshuggenah]

i would like really have same avaibility/positive stance vs multiboxers you have found in your server: here, life is hard, average people watch me somenthing between goldfarmer and botter.

It was pretty much the same for me. I think I'm the only boxer on my server. If you stick with it long enough, people will start accepting you. Nobody would invite my shamans to anything when I first started here. After making a few groups myself, and tanking for people with my druid in ToC10/25, I got to know some of the better guilds and convinced them to let me bring 2 shamans, then 3, etc. I have a couple dozen people on my friends list now that will message me nearly every time I login asking if I'm locked to this or that. Everyone will be dubious at first, but once you prove yourself capable of not failing the raid, and of being a decent person, the smart ones will learn there are a lot of advantages to having a group geared DPS available with minimal effort, particularly on low population servers.

What I find funny is that, while I've never bothered replying to the silly comments people make, my group is well enough known now, that whenever there is a negative comment (usually by some fresh trasnfer or new 80), everyone else in the raid/BG will tell them to shut up. Be polite and friendly and don't react to the tards and you'll get there. Unfortunately there are some boxers around that are pretty arrogant about it, respond poorly to people making comments and generally make a bad name for us all. It just takes a while for people to get over it. Less time for the smarter ones, which are the ones you want to play with.

One thing I will say is.. be sure your characters are well enough geared and your setup is perfected before you try doing stuff with other people. It's not entirely fair, but first impressions count. If you turn up to a VoA25 and fail, the other 20 people in that raid will remember you and probably won't want to raid with you again. Everyone is new and has to learn the raid once, but people are much less forgiving when it comes to multiboxers. The same is true of the opposite, though. If you turn up and top the DPS chart on all 4 chars, people will be amazed and you will get all sorts of positive comments. I'd recommend taking one character to every raid you plan on boxing so you know the encounter well (plus, then you can link the achievement if people ask).

[David]

I went into Ulduar10 and killed a few bosses running my tank as MT and using my resto shaman to heal the full raid.
Keeping up with the healing compaired to the other 2 healers. You can box critical roles imo. It`s ahrder but also makes a lot more fun!

[Alemi]

So, you've Main Tanked, Main Healed, and DPSed these fights then?

Everything I have done as ranged dps only is a joke. Stupid simple. When you start playing critical roles, things get crazy.

Oh... I can taste the condescention!

Ranged dps have their role and challenges when multiboxing. Naxx was pretty ridiculous easy, I agree with you. But Malygos as ranged was pretty difficult back in the day. Everything past Kologarn (with the exception of Thorim & Crazy Cat Lady) in Ulduar would hardly be considered "stupid simple" for ranged. I would go as far to say some are downright ebil. And a majority of those fights are dps centered. So - you can bring the most awesome healers/tanks but if your dps can't cut it, you're going to wipe.

To say dps isn't a critical role is silly. Each fight is different and some roles have more important parts of each fight, imho.

[Multibocks]

As dps most of the time all you gotta do is strafe outta fire, etc. Not brain surgery, so ya its stupid simple. Try tanking +dpsing or tanking + healing or healing + dpsing, then I will be impressed. Btw you spelled "condescension" wrong, a fact I take pleasure in telling you. OOOOooh the irony! (I'm kidding here.)

[Multibocks]

Remember when I tried huntersx4 + holy priest healing raid? LOL, ya that was ugly. :(

[daviddoran]

I'm still not used to mouseover healing. I've used Healbot in the past, which helps as i dont have to target anything, and i can press my normal dps buttons. I guess i could map my dps buttons to multiple keys and have them trigger mouseover healing, like one button is little one button is big heal....

[daviddoran]

a couple patches back I was tweaking my priest, and was configuring healbot to work better for AoE heals with healbot. Healbot must have been designed with holy pallys in mind, left click flash of light right click holy light... great for pally whackamole style healing, but other healers require more finesse.... Party healing is laughably easy on a priest, but raid healing adds complication. I've been meaning to program my 2 party based aoe heals with a modifier key, one for group 1 and one for group 2 (for 10 mans, 25 mans, hopefully theres more healers...)

Although, that Naxx 10 run yesterday was insane, I brought my 5 shaman, Fur brought his team, so together we had 8 shaman.... we cleared spider and plague wings with one tank and 1 dedicated healer, with 8 chain heals making up the rest when needed. It was kinda funny actually. We did Loatheb without a healer, just chain heals during the healing windows. Easy Peasy. Then we did OS10, easy as pie yet again, only issue there was the drake that goes immune, had to use an earth ele to tank the add in the portal, he nearly died after 3 hits, so I had to spam some heals on the ele (was prepared to use more but tried 1 just to see.)

Chain heal really takes the guesswork out of raid healing, for certain situations. Just bunch up and spam the hell out of it.

Now I gotta figure out which of my shaman to dual spec resto, should I do the "main" like I do with my pally? or should it be an "alt" boxed toon, and heal with macros?

[daviddoran]

yeah, that's what I was thinking. Only problem is that my main is the acct my tank is on, so id have to do 2 as resto, if I wanted to run heroics with a dedicated healer (which I don't really, 4 dps is easier now that my tank has 35k hp self buffed.

[Meshuggenah]

You Sir, are not multiboxing in a raid environment.

Definitions don't change based on your personal preference. Try boxing 5 DPS through Uld or ToC and I think you'll find it's plenty challenging.

[Zaelar]

Definitions don't change based on your personal preference. Try boxing 5 DPS through Uld or ToC and I think you'll find it's plenty challenging.

As long as you have a way to avoid icehowl's charge and click on the portals on twins to change fast enough the only threat I can think of is the warrior bladestorming your group. For uld I could see some of the later bosses giving headaches.

[Alemi]

As dps most of the time all you gotta do is strafe outta fire, etc. Not brain surgery, so ya its stupid simple. Try tanking +dpsing or tanking + healing or healing + dpsing, then I will be impressed. Btw you spelled "condescension" wrong, a fact I take pleasure in telling you. OOOOooh the irony! (I'm kidding here.)

I'm happy to provide you with some joy. :) Regardless, I tanked/healed/dpsed Naxx with another multiboxer before the original shaman fix (back when we were doing really craptacular damage comapred to other classes and couldn't outgear the encounters) back in January. My only point is, to say "moving out of the fire" is all dps has to do, is by far simplistic at best. It's like saying all a tank has to do is "keep threat high". All of Mimiron, Freya's add phase, General Vezax, all 3 Yogg phases, are highly dependent on smart dps and not as simple as "getting out of the fires." There's lots of other things going on, yes - but point being you can't just be dumb and mash buttons to get through these fights either.

[Multibocks]

Ive been in most raids (succesful) in WoW and I'm going to just agree to disagree here. DPSing as 4 shaman (or whatever class) is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than doing two task. (Do I need another much in there?) Yes it gets a bit harder when there are raids with more movement, but seriously I dont see how you can put in the same class Healer+Tank or Healer+DPS or Tank + DPS vs DPS only. That's just silly.

[Meshuggenah]

As long as you have a way to avoid icehowl's charge and click on the portals on twins to change fast enough the only threat I can think of is the warrior bladestorming your group. For uld I could see some of the later bosses giving headaches.

Simple answer is - if it were easy as you're suggesting, everyone would be doing it.

[Meshuggenah]

Ive been in most raids (succesful) in WoW and I'm going to just agree to disagree here. DPSing as 4 shaman (or whatever class) is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier than doing two task. (Do I need another much in there?) Yes it gets a bit harder when there are raids with more movement, but seriously I dont see how you can put in the same class Healer+Tank or Healer+DPS or Tank + DPS vs DPS only. That's just silly.

I don't think anyone has said or even suggested that playing DPS rather than filling multiple roles is "easier". Infact I specifically stated at least once that I prefer not to mix roles in equal level content, because it IS too complex to manage.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "in the same class as". If someone manages to successfully box any raid, good for them. I don't see why it's necessary to ridicule other peoples' achievements.

[Meshuggenah]

Its not so much ridiculing as it is "poster/reader awareness". Every post that says "I multiboxed "X" raid" needs to be clarified because there is a significant difference between running all ranged vs. playing critical roles.

You ever agree to this fact yourself as you've stated previously. People get the wrong idea here all the time. There are many posts saying "XXX heroic is easy!" where its really not depending on your group makeup.

If you're refering to my comments in another thread recently, that's a misquote. I said if you heavily outgear a heroic, it is easy regardless of your class makeup, assuming that you have a tank, a healer and 3 DPS.

And the point is I HAVE multiboxed X raids. Your comment wasn't designed to increase awareness, it was a blatant attempt to lessen other my achievements in an effort to make your own seem more valid. A person genuinely interested in quantifying achievements wouldn't so frequently claim to be the leader of a "Multiboxing raiding guild" but neglect to mention that you haven't raided anything you don't severely outgear, and isn't 12 months old and almost 4 tiers ago (and then get extremely abusive and defensive when people question the content you're playing).

I don't think I've ever seen you comment in a thread unless it was to make some kind of criticism or disparaging remark, or boost your own self-esteem.

If you like playing a healer and a tank, then do it. Grats. It's up to you. Get over the superiority complex.

[Meshuggenah]

Welcome to wrong, population you.

You did exactly that in the last second-to-last thread you abused me in. If I hadn't questioned you, you wouldn't have made the distinction.

A lot of multiboxers have trouble getting past heroic level content. I posted here to give some advice to people on getting into PUG's and which raids to try first, not to polish my own e-peen. Being criticized for it and told "I'm not multiboxing raid content" by someone who hasn't even attempted Onyxia is fucking obnoxious.

[puppychow]

reality is that there isn't really any reason to multibox raids anymore, maybe my server is a special snowflake but there are dozens of pugs that 1-shot clear every week toc10/25 without issues. Whenever I'm bored I login to wow and I can find a toc/ony/voa25 pug within a few minutes and be done and out. Blizzard has indicated they are very happy with this model of normal raids being fairly easy, and heroic mode being for raid guilds and will continue it in ICC. I haven't stepped foot in naxx or ulduar in 2+ months and don't miss them at all.

I still activate my 5-box for stuff like brewfest and hallowed eve (and ZG, sethekk halls, etc), but its mostly just so I can do 5 mans by myself and get any mounts/pets/etc that drop. In fact if anything I view raids as simply an easy way to gear up my chars solo, so I can clear 5 mans even faster when boxing. Nothing stomps oculus or hos faster than 5 guys in full 232/245 gear :)

[Meshuggenah]

reality is that there isn't really any reason to multibox raids anymore

I know what you mean, but I do it more for the challenge.

Or I did, at least. I was never very interested in PvE until recently, and to my surprise I found myself actually having fun managing boxing raids. The first few times, at least. Once you get to the point where you're just doing it to get that 5th head for your ring, or that 5th dagger, it loses some of the appeal. After next patch I'll definitely be more focused on farming a furious set and PvPing more. But I suppose it's the same issue there. Once you get where you wanted to be, there's not much left to do.


You really like being wrong don't you?

Go search around, I made some posts about this exact subject.

"Fucking obnoxious" was the more at the core of the point I was trying to make. Your achievements are not made more significant by putting everyone around you down.

[Bollwerk]

Can't we all just get along?

[Niley]

Can't we all just get along?

but then what would i read at work?

[TheBigBB]

reality is that there isn't really any reason to multibox raids anymore, maybe my server is a special snowflake but there are dozens of pugs that 1-shot clear every week toc10/25 without issues. Whenever I'm bored I login to wow and I can find a toc/ony/voa25 pug within a few minutes and be done and out. Blizzard has indicated they are very happy with this model of normal raids being fairly easy, and heroic mode being for raid guilds and will continue it in ICC. I haven't stepped foot in naxx or ulduar in 2+ months and don't miss them at all.

I still activate my 5-box for stuff like brewfest and hallowed eve (and ZG, sethekk halls, etc), but its mostly just so I can do 5 mans by myself and get any mounts/pets/etc that drop. In fact if anything I view raids as simply an easy way to gear up my chars solo, so I can clear 5 mans even faster when boxing. Nothing stomps oculus or hos faster than 5 guys in full 232/245 gear :)

I don't want to start a fight, but I have trouble understanding why you're paying for more than one account if this is how you see multiboxing. I'm sure any of use could do PUGs and clear out the raids solo if we wanted to or found groups that fit our schedules.

[Bollwerk]

Actually, I do things the same way. I'm in a (casual) raiding guild and I raid with 1 toon a couple nights a week, then multibox for 5-man content, dailies, quests, etc. Every once in a rare while, I've boxed a boss or 2 in a raid, if we were short people, but normally we have enough people on to fill the spots.

[Ogloo]

haha well i see multiboxing as a chance to challange myself, to be honest, anyone can go do naxx get gear, do uludar, join a pve guild and do all the raids, but when ur trying to do this on 4-5 characters, its a challange, TOC mount fight? challange for multiboxing ;0
I multibox pvp to own, and there is i guess no reason, and who doesnt want 4 guys lined up pewpewing in raids? its just do boring solo ;0

[TheBigBB]

Actually, I do things the same way. I'm in a (casual) raiding guild and I raid with 1 toon a couple nights a week, then multibox for 5-man content, dailies, quests, etc. Every once in a rare while, I've boxed a boss or 2 in a raid, if we were short people, but normally we have enough people on to fill the spots.

If you're having a good time with the boxing then I would never criticize you. I am taking puppychow to be putting down raid boxing because we could simply burn through raids with a PUG.