Dreaming of Dual Druids

[Harry Palms]

I'm considering dual-boxing two druids in the expansion and need someplace to gather my thoughts surrounding this, so I figured why not make a thread about it on d-b.com so other's can contribute.

I've boxed in the past, but mostly to have a passive pocket healer with me while I do MC and such. I used keyclone for this and generally passed a few keys that triggered heals and dispels, nothing fancy. Now I want to expand on this to be able to use my characters fully (or as much as possible).

My main druid has a feral main spec (bearcat hybrid) and a moonkin offspec. The alt druid is resto with a moonkin offspec. I figure I'd like to handle the following scenarios:

main feral / alt resto
main feral / alt moonkin
main moonkin / alt moonkin


A would work with very little effort. Setup separate dispel and heal macros for both characters, maybe a simple DPS macro for the alt (currently specced for mana-free Wrath). I've already got this setup with simple passing of keys via Keyclone.

B shouldn't be much more difficult than A. with the exception of a more complex DPS macro or possibly two macros. Possibly a different healing macro.

C is the challenge as I see it. Ideally I'd like to be able to play both moonkins as one, duplicating every move on the secondary. It won't be possible to get 100% from each druid, but if I'm able to get 90% each I'd be happy. Random procs will mess things up (insta-Starsurge, double energy procs) but moonkin procs are much more forgiving in 4.x than before. The dream would be to be able to play both as moonkins in heroics or even raids.

What needs to be done?

I'm considering investing in ISBoxer and maybe use mouse region click healing instead of the basic macros I'm using now. That would probably work well mechanically since I'm controlling my main character via a Logitech G19 gamepad.
Setup and use Jamba in anticipation of Cataclysm leveling. I've used Jamba before but always end up disabling it because I didn't box much and it seemed to sometimes conflict with other addons throwing errors, or trying to follow strobe while single playing.
Scenario C. How do I solve this without compromising single player play OR the other dual-boxing scenarios. I could broadcast the keys I use for dpsing as both feral and moonkin, but I don't want my resto alt to start throwing starfires everytime I mangle for example. Setup a separate configuration for dual moonkins somehow?

[Talos]

for both A and B scenario i highly recommend ISBoxer

1. for the aforementioned clickregions to make it able to easily clickheal your 2 characters while also being able to cast heals/dispells to other groupmembers/raiders/battlegrounders if you choose to do so.

2. the use of Keymaps in ISBoxer and the ability to toggle keymaps on/off
out of the box you get the general keymaps with a general toggle to disable them (ie. when typing password or chatting)
But you could make a new keymap, with an easy button to toggle them to turn on or off the dps key troughput.
ie. with the keymap disable pressing mangle/rake/rip key's (button 2-3-4 for instance) will not get passed to your resto/moonkin allowing you to heal freely withouth heals getting interupted for wrath/starfire
BUT with a quick button press you can toggle the keymap on and every dps keypress also results in your 2nd druid casting some wraths.

more info on the usage of keymaps on the ISBoxer site or the guick help guide :D

Good luck though ! and all i can say is that after 5boxing (DK+4Rets) i have found a new love in my new dualbox team of DK+Holy paladin :D

[Ualaa]

I'd look at Feral/Feral or Moonkin/Moonkin for the dual-DPS combo.
Playing two of the same will be easier than one of each, don't really like your "B" combo with one of each.

I've got a 5x Feral team, and they're quite fun.
Between them they cover everything I want from Feral.
One has the bear talents.
One has 3x Faerie Fire at once, and that is glyphed.
One has Pounce talented and Rake for PvE targets not fleeing, etc.
One has Infected Wounds for the snare and melee slow.

They all have Resto as their off-spec.
With the intention of running them as 5x Cat or 5x Resto in PvP (both, but Cat mostly).
And 1x Bear, 1x Resto and 3x Cat, for PvE.

[Harry Palms]

@Talos: That sounds like exactly what I need. I'll check out ISBoxer right away.

@Ualaa: The A and B combos are strictly for "soloing" unsoloable stuff. If it hits hard enough I'd use A, else B (since a moonkin has the option to switch out and heal if neccessary). I'm definately doing 2x of either feral or moonkin for pure dps purposes and questing/leveling.

5x druids are tempting since I got both the hardware and the accounts for it, but I don't really want to spend more time playing WoW than I already do, so 2x will have to do. :P

[Littleburst]

@Talos: That sounds like exactly what I need. I'll check out ISBoxer right away.

@Ualaa: The A and B combos are strictly for "soloing" unsoloable stuff. If it hits hard enough I'd use A, else B (since a moonkin has the option to switch out and heal if neccessary). I'm definately doing 2x of either feral or moonkin for pure dps purposes and questing/leveling.

5x druids are tempting since I got both the hardware and the accounts for it, but I don't really want to spend more time playing WoW than I already do, so 2x will have to do. :P

With 5 you're bound to spent less time. Because you can do whatever you want whenever you want. no 15 min queue's for a dungeon etc. :D Note that I have no gain in you 5 boxing, it really are my thoughts on it. The only thing that would cost more time is that you have spec and buy spells x 5 etc.

Druids ftw.

And, i highly recommend to start with boomkins, because range is soooo much easier then melee.

[Ualaa]

If he does go with IS Boxer, turn on Repeater for talents and learning spells.
Doesn't take any longer then one-boxing.

I have keyboard/mouse repeater on, when I make macros or configure my addons.
Or drag spells from the spell book onto an action bar.

No point in doing those things multiple times, when you can do them once.

[Littleburst]

If he does go with IS Boxer, turn on Repeater for talents and learning spells.
Doesn't take any longer then one-boxing.

I have keyboard/mouse repeater on, when I make macros or configure my addons.
Or drag spells from the spell book onto an action bar.

No point in doing those things multiple times, when you can do them once.

Point approved :D

So actually, there's no reason to not 5 box exept for money. :P

[lightstriker]

With dual spec down to 100g, you can have feral/moonkin main and moonkin/feral slave team.
Unless you are main healer for raid, you really dont have to spec and gear restore. As long as your moonkin slave gear have a big enough mana pool and spell power, you can heal most 5 man.

If and when LFG que is too long a wait for a healer and tank, you can do that yourself. The options of cat/cat, cat/moonkin, moonkin are fun.

5 druid stealth runs are the most fun.

[Harry Palms]

There is really no need to convince me of the awesomeness that would be 5 druids and I'll be considering it once I'm 85 and geared with my two current druids (and have experienced the instances to judge them multi-boxable or not). :D

I'm gonna take a look at ISBoxer right away since I don't really have anything to do before the expansion besides work on tradeskills. I just wish the trial was longer than 7 days.

I was thinking of a mouse region for click healing, repeating the keys used for dps and write a small addon that shows the eclipse energy bars of both characters so I can attempt to keep them in sync.

As to movement I'm not sure what to do. I would really like something more sophisticated than follow strobing if at all possible. Something like:


FORWARD - Main forward, slave follows main.
STRAFE - Strafe on both main and slave.
BACKWARD - Backward on both main and slave.
IWT - Interact on both main and slave. To be used together with strafe or backwards keys in combat to re-face mobs.

[Khatovar]

A lot of people simply pass the arrow keys for slave and main movement, restricting wasd and sometimes q and e to the master. You can map the left and right arrow keys to strafe, but personally I find it useful to be able to turn everyone at once {Eadric in TotC comes to mind}. I pass Q and E for strafing. I also have everyone use the same key for interact with target, but only allow my slaves click to move.

[Sbrowne55]

Try the same type druid first, it's easier. When you get more comfy with them, then add some diversity :)

[wyofiddler]

Don't forget that when you switch specs your action bar setups change for that spec as well.

On my shaman that swaps between Ele/Resto I have setup Ele dps buttons to mimic the other dps toons, and in resto spec all the buttons used for dps (1-4) are empty on the resto char. Heal macros are located on the right action bar 2, and acessed with keybindings used only by that one char.

With this setup I don't even have to change keymaps, all the key broadcasting stays the same from ISBoxer and differences for each char are handled by what ability is located on which button at each chars interface.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do. My first multiboxing experience was getting tired of dying on my solo warrior and loading up my priest on the laptop to keep him alive, so your description of playing two chars reminded me of all the fun I had with that setup :)

[Harry Palms]

I figure I owed you a report on how everything went.

I got ISBoxer and ran the wizard to setup a basic profile. I then setup broadcast of my DPS keys to my second druid, changed the sample Round-Robin to cast Typhoon and the sample Targetted AoE to Hurricane.

Installed and setup Jamba.

Proceeded to level 80-85 and be number 5 and 6 respectively to get to 85. :D

Now I'm rocking daily quests together while gearing my main on guild heroics and leveling archaeology. Life is good at 85!

Oh by the way, tried a Tol Barad but that didn't go too well since we were 7 vs 12. Might work better once it starts to fill up so I can hide better. :rolleyes: