5 box or 10 box?

[Queshank]

My wife and I have run a 5 boxing team together for years. I'll tank and run 2 dps and she'll heal and run 1 offheal/dps. It's always worked pretty well. For awhile we each 5 boxed paladins for the heck of it. Karazhan with a 10 man swarmadin was pretty fun.

This sale on WoW is lasting a long time. And with RAF going to 85 now we are considering returning and starting a new team to level up. As a joke I said "Hey WoW is so cheap we should each 5 box so we can run 10 mans". Now my wife is considering it and it's less of a joke.

Is it worth it? Can progress be made with with 2 5 boxers running 10 mans? Or should we stick to our 3 and 2 standard?

Thanks for any tips.

[Lyonheart]

I envy you! I would say yes. 10 man raid content will be hard.. that depends on both your level of dedication, your skill at micro managing etc.. But two 5 boxers has so many other benefits. aside for 10 man content. Bottom line is, if you both are already boxing..more is always better, and 5 each is perfect right? Its why a single boxer almost always starts out "duel-boxing" and ends up at least boxing a full group later on, its the "power of more".

[RSM72]

I'd say go for it. If both of you got the dedication to 5-box you'd get only benefits from two 5-toon teams.

[Paradoxel]

Go for it, sounds like a fun project.

[Kicksome]

When you think about it as 2 people, each 5 boxing, I think you'd like it a lot. Then you could level the 2nd group together, should be fun.

I think doing a raid with all 10 would be extremely tough. I'm sure it can be done, but it would be a lot of work to get a fight down. You're better off bringing 2-3 of each to a LFR.

Also, the timeless isles is a lot of fun, you could have 2x 5 man groups and go kill all the elites and get gear when you're 90.

[Queshank]

Well we've decided to start with a 5 box team and if we're still gung ho when we get them to 70th we will just buy 5 more accounts before the sale ends and level a 2nd team to 70th then do raids from there. We're 43rd atm but haven't really gotten to put in some good leveling time due to having to actually interact with other humans over the blasted holidays! So hopefully we'll hit 70th before the sale ends.

[Damons]

I plan on buying another 5 accounts before the sale ends, mainly because I've been dicking around for the past month. And who knows, my wife asks me to play all the time too:)

[Queshank]

Okay we hit 52nd last night. Going into the weekend we're confident we'll be 70th by Saturday ... so we're both in agreement still. We're going to level a 2nd team and try doing 10 man content from 70th on. I'd almost forgotten how ridiculously fun it is to level teams with RAF.

I am running a Pally tank with 2 warlock dps, while she is using 2 disc priests for quick leveling. At 90th I can swap out the paladin tank for a Monk, Druid, Paladin, Warrior or DK tank. And she can swap out the healing priest in her setup with a Priest, Paladin, Monk, Druid, Shaman healer as each of those characters are on our "main" accounts. So at least one of each main healer/tank type is available to us no matter what we play for leveling the "team". We like leveling alts I guess :)

What should our second team be? Any suggestions?

We will run Karazhan at 70th and then each level a 5 man team to 80th so we get comfortable with our team setup before taking on 80th lvl 10 mans. Might as well get the achievements for our guild while we're at it :) If you were building a 10 man raid team and had 2 warlocks and a shadowpriest as set dps, with all else being adjustable what would you make the rest of the team be?

I'm having trouble focusing at work on a Friday and am instead trying to plan the logistics of a 2nd team with good synergy and playability :)

[Queshank]

Here's where I think we'll wind up.

Group 1 (played by my wife)

Tank: Paladin or Monk probably Pally for boxing simplicity
Healer: Holy Priest (will be primary raid healer)
DPS 1: Discipline Priest (will be part dps part heals as our 3rd healer unless we need 3 healers or more dps)
DPS 2&3: Frost Mages (I believe they will be easiest to macro)

Team 2 (played by me)

Tank: Blood DK offspec DPS DK when only 1 tank needed
Healer: Holy Paladin (for main tank heals)
DPS 1: Boomkin that can offspec resto
DPS 2&3: Warlocks haven't decided affliction or destruction yet

This gives us all buffs and debuffs when I am spec'd DPS on my tank, and all but the melee buffs/debuffs which are of lesser importance dps wise when I'm offtanking or maintanking as Blood. Her priest is normal ToT geared already, as is my Holy Paladin. So we should be able to drag our team through the lower tier MoP stuff with only 2 healers and the one autopilot hybrid dps/heals disc priest. I think my 5 man team will be the more difficult to control so I'm hoping I can get a handle on warlock/boomkin dps. If the DK proves too complex I can run a Prot Paladin that is 90th and in mixed normal ToT/lfr ToT prot gear and that would give us a leg up on lower tier MoP raids as well.

Here is our eventual raid composition with 2 tanks:

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/?c=1dpp4ehgcc000000000000000000000000000000

And here with 1 tank:

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/?c=3dpp4ehgcc000000000000000000000000000000

Any suggestions from those who have 10 boxed some raids would be much appreciated. I think we're going to challenge ourselves to progress as far as 2 people can while boxing. Worst case we'll force our 14 yr old son to maintank a few bosses so we can focus more on heals and movement :) But for the most part we'll try just the 2 of us.

[Queshank]

Bah cancelled message.

[Queshank]

First team got to 70th on Saturday. Parked em there to try to hit KZ at the appropriate level when we get the 2nd team up. 2nd team 20th level. We did a 10 man paladin KZ run and got stymied by the chessboard years ago (pre cataclysm) and decided 10 man raiding wasn't gonna be viable enough to justify the expense. This time if we need to we'll draft our kids to play a couple just so we can get past chessboard and see if we can down Prince with xp locked at 70th. Then we're gonna decide whether we wanna hit other raids at level 80 and 85 or just level to 90th and try MOP raids exclusively. My son has fraps so I'll see if I can make serviceable recordings when we start 10 mans.

[Queshank]

And Damons... if you can get your wife to play it's gonna unlock a world of fun for you :) My wife and I have been playing since vanilla, and got a 2nd computer to play together since the Burning Crusade era. We got into multiboxing when we had 2 extra accounts for the kids to play (and they never wanted to...) and things took off from there. Even at $75 bucks for 5 accounts active, it's still cheaper than a single night out on the town. So we saved a lot of money by keeping us both entertained. Date night became drink a bottle of wine and duo a couple of heroics :)

[MadMilitia]

A lot of WoW PvE is a dance fest now. I have a few things I do to typically deal with this headache.

PvP - I drive as healer. CTM IWT melee, Follow melee IWT Hunters. This doesn't work very well in PvE due to the dance mechanics necessary.

PvE - You have some important options here. One is the tank driver. This is the normal way of doing it. But I try to avoid running a clicker heal rotation here opting to chain both my tank rotation and light heal rotation into the same key. Of course, all my dps do the same. This can still be tough if you run melee DPS with the tank because of the way dance mechanics work and how unreliable IWT can be.

For kiting I have been experimenting with hunter distracting shot. This has worked exceptionally well on scenarios like Ragefire where the last boss drops AE damage everywhere. The melee DPS IWT on him and stick to him while the hunter does all the agro and kiting work. The healer sticks to the hunter and heals using healing tide, riptide and other instant casts with grace and swiftness when need be.

So you really have some options to consider. I would not try to kite much on a tank for mechanics that stack armor pen like the guy in Ragefire caverns.

Some others have these abilities that call on you to hit a special button on every toon at the right time. I just macro those all to a specific keypress instead of trying to click the button in the middle of the screen. In my experience, clicking buttons on screen in combat is a sure way they don't work.

All that said, 2 * 5 man groups would be ideal. You could run a ranged group in one and the melee group in the other. The difficult part is if one of you has to do the tank, the melee and the ranged dancing. That is incredibly hard to maintain as a single boxer.

So if you tank, you should handle the melee DPS. Pretty easy. If she heals, she should maintain the ranged DPS. Again, this makes it easier on both of you.

[Queshank]

Hmm. Redoing some characters and respecing some others might make the tank/dps/dps/dps/dps and healer/offheal/healerdps/dps/dps possible and you're right that might simplify boss fights. Melee dps seem too heavily penalized in later expansions to be slaveworthy, so we stick to ranged dps as much as possible. But I can swap to a ele shaman (already at 90) instead of the holy paladin and my wife can switch to holy paladin instead of tanking paladin... for a priest and paladin healing duo. Definitely a good way of looking at it if we fail on our 2 full teams system. We're hoping our years of boxing experience will make dancing more doable :) But I have a feeling you're right and splitting up roles between us like that for 10 mans might be more successful. Hadn't considered that so thanks for the insight.

[Damons]

Queshank, she just plays casually for now. Her solo toon is not even 20. Maybe someday she'll get into it more, hopefully.

[Queshank]

Both teams 70th. Dps macros good enough. Cliques all bound for our healers. Gotta tweak the dk tanks macros a bit and karazhan dies tomorrow! I know kz ain't much these days but it's gonna be a fun trial grounds for our 10 man team.

[Queshank]

Ran kz this morning. Was a little disappointed at how simple it was considering we only had enough heirloom gear to give each character 2 pieces and the rest were low lvl greens. Guess it's been awhile and the nerfings took their toll. First wipe wasn't until shade and then only because we forgot what flame wreath does. Skipped nether-spite and prince took two tries because we kinda forgot what he did and freaked when everyone lost health. The team works darn good together. Druid macros are the only juggling I need to do on my team. All still 70th and now it's lvl to 80 and try a few wrath raids time.

[Queshank]

Downed the Spider wing of naxxrammas at 80th. Was fun but we decided not to waste any more time with lower level raids and instead maximize our RAF time by leveling a few more teams to mix and match various dps flavors. Seemed counterproductive to spend a day of playtime on old raid content and instead got a new team of 10 to 32nd level in the same amount of time. Damn leveling with RAF in instances is fun.