Paladin/Mage/Priest/Druid (4 man team) help

[Malgor]

I have 3 level 80s. Paladin (tank), Mage (arcane or frost), and a Hunter (survival or beast master).

I only have 4 accounts right now until I get my 73 druid / priest combo to level 80. Then I will switch to 5 accounts so I can try and 5 box.

I do fine on regular fights in the level 70 normal dungeons in WotLK (Nexus/UK), but when it comes to a fight where there is movement or lots of group healing involved -- I basically suck.

The Keristrasza fight is the best example of this. I am 4-boxing it with my 80 paladin/mage and my 73 shadow priest / and druid healer. All encounters are easy up to this fight and everyone ends up dying except my paladin who basically can solo it all anyway.

I tried using healbot and changing to the druids screen and that works okay for awhile but then my paladin loses agro over my mage and things go progressively worse.

I've made macros that do certain heals so I can stay on my main window, but they aren't efficient enough or too general so that they aren't doing the exact heal I need at the time. (Generally this is /target NAME /castsequence Rejuvenation, Regrowth so that when I double tap that button it casts rejuvenation, then regrowth on the target).

Then there is the jumping. I can jump the paladin easy of course. But, when I have to jump the other three with Ctrl-Space bar, I don't seem to get that right. I either jump during casts or am jumping not enough. I know the best case senario is cast/jump/cast/jump, but that's not what I'm doing.

I need to find a way to do efficient healing with my driud from my main tanks screen and figure out a way to one key jumping for all toons at the same time.

What suggestions does anyone have? Does anyone else run four different (and soon 5 different) classes efficiently? Or am I going to be stuck down the road and have to level four shaman for the cookie cutter group that seems to work best?

Thanks again for any advice in advance.

Malgor

Team: Rou, Tou, Pou, Gou, Xou

[Malgor]

Oops - forgot to say - I use ISBoxer as my boxing program. I used Keyclone in the past and recently switched to ISBoxer which I am liking because it is more powerful and more adjustable.

[Ualaa]

Everyone is ranged, except for the tank.
So you'll want to create some mapped keys for slave movement.

That's an example in my guide, which is linked in my signature.
Basically, take a look at the "others jump" mapped key, and adapt that for strafing, turning and forward/backwards movement.

You'll likely benefit from a spread out key as well.
But as long as you can move the team about, that will help a lot.

With a druid healer, I'd probably Rejuvenation/Lifebloom the tank.
Possibly Regrowth if necessary.
And then Wild Growth the casters from range.

There are macros to keep Rejuvenation up on all team members:

/castsequence [@party4] reset=5 ,,,,,,,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party3] reset=5 ,,,,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party2] reset=5 ,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party1] reset=5 ,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@player] reset=5 rejuvenation

[wyofiddler]

As usual, Ualaa has awesome advice :) I'll chip in with what I do, and how it helps me beat Keristraza and others.

My team: Pally tank, 3 Ele Shams, Warlock (thanks to Niley for originally suggesting this combo to me)

Note: my setup uses hotkeynet, but this is probably easy to setup in most of the other software programs as well.

One thing I did when I first started boxing was copy an idea I first saw from Syrodarko on these forums, for mapping the six keys in the Delete/End/Insert etc group to the six movement functions (forward, back, left/right turn/strafe) and send those ONLY to the slaves. These keys do nothing at all on the main char, and they are the second key binding for the slaves. When I have clicked over to the slaves window, then WASD work, but when the tank window is in front like it is 99% of the time, WASD is only sent to the main, and the six keys (delete, insert etc) are only sent to the slaves. This means I can move the slaves exactly the same ways as I'm used to, without moving the tank, and remotely, without clicking over to their window. I just spin my camera so I can see what they are doing, and run them left or right, forward or back out of the fire or blizzard spell or whatever.

For jumping, I have Space linked to jump on all five chars, and "spacebar" is sent to all five windows every time I hit it. On the Keristraza fight, this breaks the DoT on all chars at once and I don't mind that the tank is jumping along with the slaves.

I used to play a dedicated priest healer instead of four dps. I used the numberpad keys (every single key over there except NumLock) as her healing keybinds, with targeting functions for each char in the team, then the rest of the number keys were keybinds for all the diff healing spells, shield, etc that she could use. So it was just press button for which toon to cast on, then press the desired heal or w/e. Those key binds were empty on all the other chars, so when those buttons got pressed they only caused actions on the priest, not the whole team.

Just one way to make it work, as I mentioned I eventually gave up on a dedicated healer, but now that my team is about to ding 80 and run heroics, I will likely flip on shammy resto and go back to something like my old setup until they can blow through without a dedicated healer.

[Malgor]

Thanks for the replies. I haven't spent much time using ISBoxer yet, but will look into getting my keys bound so that jump is the same on all toons.

I will probably need to do what you did and bind 1-5 as selecting a team member and 6-9 the different heals on the num pad.

I can do UK no problem there isn't much involved with that. It's that pesky Keristrasza fight that messes me up.

[Malgor]

There are macros to keep Rejuvenation up on all team members:

/castsequence [@party4] reset=5 ,,,,,,,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party3] reset=5 ,,,,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party2] reset=5 ,,,,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@party1] reset=5 ,,,rejuvenation
/castsequence [@player] reset=5 rejuvenation

Can someone explain what this actually does? Why the extra commas (I figure they are for timing purposes), and what do they actually do?

[Ualaa]

On a comma, nothing occurs.

If one castsequence is on exactly the same spell as another, then both will advance together.
So you need to have the nulls (commas) occur first in earlier lines in the macro, and the actual /cast in later lines.

The macro assumes a spam speed; if you were to click it one click every 4 seconds, then there are too many commas.
In which case, you might want to increase the reset from 5 to say 10 or something, and follow each rejuvenation with a ,null ... like this: ,,rejuvenation,null

The macro is targeting each party member in succession and casting a rejuvenation on each toon.
The reset=5, means if you don't push the macro at all for five consecutive seconds, it should reset to the start.

[Malgor]

Thanks Ualaa - that makes it more clear.

[Malgor]

After many posts and with the help of the dual-boxing community - I 4 boxed The Nexus with my 80 Paladin, 80 Mage, 73 Druid and 73 Shadow Priest with no deaths.

The Keristrasza fight that I had so may problems with previously was remarkably easy and none of my toons ever got under 85% health. After finally correctly setting up my jump so that all toons jump at the same time with the space bar and setting up Healbot so that it works... just amazing on my main screen I couldn't be happier.

Thanks everyone.

[coglistings]

gratz