Progress Report - WoW Pa/Pr/Wl/M/H

[tommyg]

Just thought I'd post you all a progress report. After posting a few questions on the Beginner's board, I dropped the cash on three sparkly new WoW battlechests and made a pretty freakin sweet team: belf pally, ud priest, tauren huntard, troll mage, and orc warlock. I figured, as long as I'm going for five different classes, might as well go all out and get all five races in there. :thumbsup: Their names are Tibbins, Libbins, Mibbins, Zibbins, and Nibbins, respectively, and they make Argent Dawn their home.

They hit 17 today after a few runs of Ragefire Chasm, and I gotta say this is lots more fun than I've had in quite a while. I first took them to Ragefire Chasm at around 10 or 11 to see what would happen. I took down some mobs, but didn't feel comfortable with it, so I came back at 14 and trashed the place. Well, I wiped once, and a couple toons died here and there while I was getting my bearings, but I feel lots more confident in my skills and setup, now. I don't even really have to bother with sheeping or offtanking stuff.

I'm pretty proud of some of the macros I've made so far. I haven't used macros much at all until now, but I think I picked them up pretty quick. I've got my warlock doing the whole "CoA, Immo, Corr, SB spam", mage doing "fireball, fireball, fireblast, etc.", hunter with "hunter's mark, serpent sting, arcane shot, arcane shot, etc.", and all of it is tied in to the button that my pally uses to judge targets, so I just sit there and spam the judgment button and the mob fills up with debuffs and eventually dies while my pally is holding aggro. Pretty much the only other thing I have to do during the fight is refresh my seals and have the priest heal me. Of course, the warlock cast sequence is probably overkill, and I certainly don't use DOTs during normal questing, so I've got two sets of "spam" macros. I even let the priest toss in some smites during normal questing. :)

I haven't had any negative social experiences, yet. My first team (with trial accounts, not full ones) was five tauren shamans on some no-name server, and it was kinda fun, but seems like every quest in the tauren starting area is collection. :thumbdown: Only reaction I had was a couple people stopping, waving, and moving on, or one person who said "whoa, that's freaky!" when I made all my toons jump at the same time. The experience has been pretty similar on Argent Dawn, which has been my home for around six or seven months, now. One person started laughing at our names and asked if we were friends or family or something. I said, "one guy", and they said, "Awesome!"

I <3 Argent Dawn.

Gonna go run Wailing Caverns tomorrow. I'll let you know how it turns out. So far, looks like I'm gonna be a 5-boxer 4 lyfe :D


P.S. I feel like I'm leveling really slowly. Do you have any tips for quick leveling? I've heard quests are best, but that's what I've been doing, and it's painful, even without the collections.

[Slats]

Very awesome choice of classes man :D Loved all your emotes too.



Anyhow, levelling is very slow 1-20. In fact I found 20-30 pretty damn painful too. It then picked up dramatically and from 40 onwards it just rockets along. I think I did 54-57 in about 4 or 5 hours and a huge amount of that was travel time and a chunk of PvP because some Alliance decided that the damn bear Ursura was there's and I decided that no it was MY fucking bear so I camped it and everyone else for awhile.



Oh dear I'm getting sidetracked. Anyhow if I can give you any advice it is to do all the easy quests and skip every single collection quest. When you feel like you've run out of things to do to move to a new zone comfortable, go and hit up 1 or 2 instances to make up for all those missed collection quests. If your going to focus on anyone's gear in paticular focus on your Paladins. If he is the one wearing all the shiny blues you'll have no dramas tanking things.



There are a couple of mods that will speed things up for you. Get all your party to have the mod 'QuestAnnounce' and enable the party chat feature. When one of your clones picks up some item they need they will announce they have completed or 'done' a segment of a quest. Another mod is called QuestHelper and if all your party has it, it essentially organizes all your waypoints so they are lovely and close to each other. I also use Lightheaded so I can read WoWHead notes on any quest without alt-tabbing and I use Cartographer to actually get the funky waypoint arrow above my head.



Make sure you have a spread out macro, a follow-the-leader macro, a mount macro, a hearthstone macro, an AcceptQuest/Trade/Group/Rez/Release all in one macro. Unbind 'Enter' on all your clones. Unbind 'Tab' on all your clones. Unbind WASD if on all your clones but keep Up/Down/Left/Right so you can move them if you want.



Keep us updated, I am pretty sure there is a chap running a Clone Army called Twenty Totems on your server also - he runs 5 Shamans. Perhaps you might know him or could do some stuff together at various levels.



Anyhow, enough rambling from me, nice post good luck and keep us updated. A pic of your setup and a screenie of your gang together is always nice too. :)



-Slats

[tommyg]

Thanks for the reply. I meant to mention my setup here so people with a similar system could know how it runs. I wasn't able to get a pic of my setup, but I'm using a three-year-old laptop for my main and a pretty average desktop for my clones. My laptop is a 17" widescreen, so I've got plenty of real estate on there. The machine's not too impressive, so frame rates are kinda low, but it does everything I need. My desktop has an E6550 Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gig of ram, and a 7600 GT. Not terribly impressive, but it gets the job done. Actually, I was horrified at the performance in major cities when I first started, but the whole "/console maxfps 50", along with "/console maxfpsbk 20" trick fixed most of that, along with using minimum video settings. I'm pretty happy with how it performs, but I ordered another 2 gigs of ram to smoothen out the rough edges. I hope it works. :S

I've got the laptop positioned to the left of the desktop monitor. The desktop monitor is 20" widescreen. It kinda strains your eyes after a while to look at one of the four windows on that screen, but you don't really have to do it that much. I use the stand-alone version of Maximizer, not the one included with Keyclone, to show all four clones on my desktop monitor. I already had Maximizer working perfectly before I got Keyclone, and 5 minutes of toying around with the Keyclone version didn't yield success, so I just forgot about it. ^^ I just use Keyclone for the, well... key cloning. :P I also use Synergy, so I can slide my mouse back and forth between monitors to do whatever I need. I use the "Scroll Lock" trick to move my clones when I need to, and it works ok. I never really have to touch my desktop keyboard or mouse at all.

I'm not sure if this is something you all deal with, but when I first got Synergy, I disliked the fact that you had to click on a window to focus it, then you could press keys and it would work, but you had to click the window first. TweakUI has a handy setting for dealing with this problem. It's under "Mouse->X-Mouse->Activation follows mouse (X-Mouse)". If you've got that selected, you only have to hover your mouse inside a window to be able to send input to it. TweakUI is a free Microsoft product and can be easily downloaded from their website. Google probably also works. :P

Anyway, moving on to progress. My group was 17 last night, and I wanted to try out Wailing Caverns when I fired them up this morning. I hate Wailing Caverns. X( Half of the mobs are casters. Others call for help. Some of them even fear. There are a million patrols. It's a recipe for disaster. Well, the disaster didn't quite happen. I did wipe a time or two, but eventually finished the whole thing. I tell ya, it took forever! That place is huge. I never want to see it again. It did get me a couple levels, though, and I moved on to Shadowfang Keep at 20.

Shadowfang Keep rocks! It's not too long. Most of the mobs are melee. It drops good stuff (except my robes, three clothies + three Arugal kills and no chestpiece :cursing: ). I had a couple wipes here as well, but they were mostly flukes. One of them involved the wolfmaster chain-spawning wolf adds until we got overwhelmed. That never happened again. Nothing changed, he just stopped doing it the next couple times. Then, there was Arugal. The first time I fought Arugal with this group, I had my head in my hands, wondering if it would ever be possible to bring down a beast like this. I ran back inside, set my guys up on a different spot, and pwned him. Seriously, I wiped the floor with him. Apparently, this is a fight that's very sensitive to positioning. ?( I cleared it two more times and Arugal put up absolutely no fight at all.

I ended the night at 22. Hm... I spent all day playing, and only got five levels. Five levels is really good if you're past the mid-way point. Before 30, though, five levels is nothing if you've got a nice free day to spend playing. Then I realized, I actually made TWENTY-FIVE LEVELS!!! Wow!!! Now, THAT is a good, hard day's work! Well, work is probably the wrong word. That implies I don't enjoy it. I surely do! Twenty-five levels is like icing on the cake. I'm really stoked. I probably won't get to play near that much over the next week, but I'm off to a hell of a start. ^^

I do know about Mr. Twenty Totems on Argent Dawn, but I haven't had any personal contact with him. He's up in the low 60's, now. I was pretty impressed by his progress and his blog. I'd always wanted to 5-box my own instance team, but thought it was really complicated. His site was what showed me the nuts and bolts about it. It didn't actually seem that hard after reading his blog for a bit, so I figured I'd take a shot. Seems like it's going well so far. :thumbsup:

[tommyg]

Oops, forgot my group shot. Here's my toons giving fair warning to whomever inhabits instances and carries around phat lewtz: YOUR DAY IS COMING! http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~tgrindi/warning.JPG

[thinus]

Then, there was Arugal. The first time I fought Arugal with this group, I had my head in my hands, wondering if it would ever be possible to bring down a beast like this. I ran back inside, set my guys up on a different spot, and pwned him. Seriously, I wiped the floor with him. Apparently, this is a fight that's very sensitive to positioning. ?( I cleared it two more times and Arugal put up absolutely no fight at all.

Hahaha, I remember my first Arugal attempt. I have the same class combination as you. I had every one on follow and just boldly charged up to Arugal and engaged. He mind controled the pally and blinked away and everyone had LoS problems etc. Lmao.

Next attempt I just parked everyone at the door making sure they were in range to nuke Arugal. Summoned a VW and sent the VW and hunter pet in first. Then the pally ran in and started DPSing and the ranged went to town. Easy mode.

[tommyg]

Bingo! That's exactly the strat that worked for me. :D

I've found that my pig makes a hell of a lot better tank (at these levels) than my paladin. The only time my pally can hold aggro is when the pig's charge is on cooldown and my pally got a couple preliminary hits on the mob. It seems like the piggy can take a hit better than the pally as well. My pally just surpassed him in health a couple levels ago. I don't have any issues with either one having dps (and/or healing) pulling aggro off the tank, even when my priest is smiting her ass off, while landing the big heals. At least, not while the mob is being tanked. :S I also sometimes have issues with pally taunt not working. I don't get any resist message or anything, the mob just ignores me and continues smashing whatever face it was already pwning. I hope that goes away with practice. Maybe I'm just doing something wrong.

Anyway, off to Blackfathom Deeps. I'll let you know how it goes later.

[Slats]

I actually had a different strat with Arugal. I had all my guys far far back in the hallway before Arugal. I pulled with the Pally and ducked behind the wall so he had to come to me. I then built some aggro while mana-burning the ever living shit out of him with 4 priests.



Then I proceded to destroy him and everytime he regenned a chunk of mana I burnt it away.



But yeah I thought he was gonna be impossible with him too and just got a bit creative.

[tommyg]

Blackfathom Deeps at 22 is complete EZ-mode. I had absolutely no problems. Not a single wipe. Got some decent gear, too. Pally got a new chestpiece, warlock got some new pants, etc. That was certainly the easiest instance run I've done so far while 5-boxing. The only time I had to scramble a little was on the water elementals at the end where you have to activate the little flames around the statue. They do AOE damage to the entire group, so I had to actually slide my mouse over to my priest's screen and use Healbot a little. Other than that, the whole thing was incredibly simple tank-n-spank.

At one point, during the run, I stopped and thought to myself: "Wow, this is a lot of fun! It's tuned really well to my level. Blizz knew what they were doing with this instance." Of course, I was destroying the place, but I could imagine (and remember) coming here as a low-20's single toon in a group and feeling neither overpowered nor underpowered. Doing that with five toons at the same time is a nice feeling. :D Tanking has gotten much easier with all the gear my pally's picked up, along with some of the real tanking abilities and talents, like consecrate and retribution aura. My other toons are kind of suffering from outgrown gear, but I'm reluctant to resort to boosting with my 70 druid to collect upgrades. I'd rather level them the old-fashioned way. Seems nice and cohesive.

I'm 24, now, and feeling a bit anxious about running Gnomeregan tomorrow. That instance is the devil for normal groups. I wonder if I'll do much better. We shall see. :evil:

[kayb]

I approve of this setup, being an advocate for 5 different classes myself. The shammy would give alittle more oomph than the hunter, but a hunter is not a bad choice for 5th member. Misdirect alone kicks ass, not to mention it's physical damage ability that's sorely lacking from my own setup. You will, however, learn to dread bosses with aoe fear ability =)

I also like 5 different races. Funky stuff.

[tommyg]

I had actually given careful thought to running with a shammy instead of the hunter, but there were a few big reasons why I decided not to. First, my main reason for leveling these is to save time. I want to have one of every class at 70, and it saves a bunch of time if I can level them all in parallel. Running instances at 70 is just icing. :D I've already got a druid at 70, a shammy at 60, and a warrior at 62, so those three are redundant. I don't have a rogue, but I know they'd be uber-painful to 5-box with. That leaves pally, priest, mage, warlock, and hunter. Hey, works out pretty well! Plus, I'll have the benefit of two offtanks, a physical damage dealer, and more CC (might be hard to multi-box hunter traps).

On the other hand, my hunter has definitely been the most painful of the five to party with. Her medium quiver can only hold enough arrows for one instance run. She's always dropping auto-follow because she sometimes enters melee combat (not a problem in instances, just when questing). Her pet has a way of NOT assisting me when attacking, even when my macros clearly call for such behavior. This doesn't happen often, but enough that it's annoying and sometimes makes me sweat a little.

I'm not unhappy with my hunter, but I certainly think I'd be more happy with a shaman in that spot if I didn't have a high-level one already.

Moving on, I ran Razorfen Kraul at 25 and Gnomeregan at 26, today. I didn't really have any issues with either. No wipes at all in RFK (not even close), and only one wipe at the last pull before the final boss in gnomer. My warlock's imp got impatient and firebolted the huge group at the end before I was ready. That's kind of bugging me. Is there some way to turn this thing off? Specifically, I'm talking about when you're spamming a button on a mob, then if that mob dies faster than you expected and you spam the button an extra time or two, it selects the nearest mob and executes the ability you were spamming on it, instead. Sure would save me a couple headaches.

I'm 27, now, and not quite sure what to do with myself. Unfortunately, my instance runs have been dropping almost exclusively melee gear. My pally's looking pretty good, but everyone else looks like utter crap. I could boost my non-tanks through a few instances with my druid to get them better gear. I'm afraid of them getting too far ahead, though. There certainly isn't much in the way of future instancing before level 30 or so. I'm certainly not going to grind Gnomeregan. :thumbdown: I don't know what Blizzard was thinking with their level ranges for instances. There's three instances for the teens, five for the (mostly lower or mid) twenties, two for the (mostly upper) thirties, three for the fourties, and a bazillion for the fifties, but actually just two for the lower fifties. That means you've got a huge number of choices in the lower twenties, but as you near the upper twenties and lower thirties, you only really have one or two small wings of an instance to choose from. It gets better as you get higher, but there's around a seven or eight level range with extremely slim pickings.

Anyway, fifteen levels on a weekday. Not bad progress at all. :D

Happy hunting!

[tommyg]

*raises thread from the dead*

One week after my last post and I'm 40! Mount time!!!

Two weeks of leveling and I have 5 40's. I'm having a blast! 200 levels in 14 days, and still going strong. My instance runs have gotten easier and easier. I'm kind of amazed how great of a tank my pig is. My pally is better at long-term, multiple target threat, but my pig has about 1k more health and has better burst aggro. My hunter has really come into her own in the last 13 levels. I bought her a really slow gun, and she preserves ammo a lot better. I can make several instance runs without running out of bullets, now. :D She picked up one of the black armored pigs in Razorfen Kraul, which is badass, but he doesn't get a Gore upgrade for a loooooooong time. Eh, that's not so bad. Normally I just leave Gore turned off, anyway.

Since my last message, I've run SM Graveyard and Library at 33, Razorfen Downs at 36, SM Armory at 37, and SM Cathedral at 39. I could have done most of those earlier, but that's just when I got around to doing them. I gotta say, I think Library gave me the most trouble. Getting to and killing Doan wasn't an issue at all. I set up my "spread out" key binding to make my alts strafe to the side around a corner when he did his exploding thing, and he died eventually. The hard part was getting out. The respawn rate in Library is ridiculous. I would normally get all the way to the huntsman's cloister on my way out, only to aggro a dog and trainer that spawned right on top of me. While killing them, another one spawns and attacks. Then another, and another. I swear, I had six dog and trainers on me once. I have no idea where they all come from. I don't even think there's that many in the whole SM Library, but there I was with six dogs and trainers. ?( Anyway, getting out of Library gave me nothing but problems, while the rest of the instances were ez-mode. I never had any problems getting out of Armory or Cathedral, and those bosses went down like butter, for the most part.

Razorfen Downs takes a while to get through, but it's quite fun. This instance is the first where pally tanking really shines. I can basically spam heals on him while he keeps aggro on those huge undead packs. I still haven't picked up the plate hat from Amnennar, so I may make a few more runs, there. It took me ten kills of Herod, 8 mail hats, and 1 2-handed axe to finally get my shoulder. Gear is looking decent across the board. It could be better, but I'd have to sacrifice leveling time to do so. :whistling:

Overall, this is probably the most fun I've ever had in the game. I highly recommend it to all who think they know what they're doing.

Oh, one more thing. I said I ordered some more RAM for my desktop (the machine with my four clones on it), and it really did the trick! I don't really get any more hang-ups while running around cities. I haven't tried Shattrath yet, but I had no issues with Orgrimmar during peak hours.

Now, time for a group photo! Enjoy.

http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~tgrindi/mounts.jpg

[Electrissy]

*raises thread from the dead*

One week after my last post and I'm 40! Mount time!!!
Mad respect to you leveling 5 different classes, my original 5 box team was pally, mage, druid, warlock, shaman and it takes a crap load of skill and concentration to play them well, especially in instances. As you can see....I switched to all shamans because I couldn't take the heat ;) Hope you stick w/ it and keep us updated.

*Edit

Also have you tested in outlands yet? The amount of system resources needed to function out there is pretty steep, hopefully that RAM will hold up!