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Nocturne
08-07-2007, 08:37 PM
So I've been five boxing now for a little over four months and it's been fairly enjoyable thus far. My intention for this post is to answer questions I have and not to pick on anyone's style or opinions. I simply wish to be better at what I do.

As a group I can run most instances to completion up to and including LBRS, unfortunately there comes a point where cloth just doesn't cut it anymore and all the DPS in the world won't make a difference if you can't take three hits. Currently I'm rounding out level 61 in Hellfire, I've not bothered with the Ramparts as I understand the bosses are heavy hitters. I may give it a go this weekend, but I do not expect much. All in all though I would have to say my PvE experience has been a good bit of fun.

My attempts at PvP on the other hand have been met with mixed results. I really can't justify taking all 5 into either AB or WSG as I feel I hinder the overall effort. AV I did alright in, (I won't bother again till the upper 60's) I felt I could more than hold my own and as a priest did my fair share to support other players besides my mages. Obviously my racial choice to play BEs puts me at a disadvantage in PvP and I'm fine with that, I had never intended them to be hardcore PvP toons.

I really don't feel there is anything "wrong" with my setup, but after seeing some vids and reading more into some of the technical write-ups here I've decided that I need to address some issues.

First and foremost my monitors are too far apart as Xzin pointed out back in May (and so pointed out to the wiki audience) so I've begun building a custom stand to fit on my desk.

What is the advantage to having all the PCs linked together? Currently my main PC is not connected in any way to my other 4 PCs. My mages run independent of my priest, and it's worked just fine so far. I bring this up because apparently its important for all the monitors to be the same size/resolution. Which leads me to...

People have mentioned using synchronous mousing and positioning of it/them. What situations is using the mouse on all the systems at once useful?

Hardware/Software - currently I'm only running an old version of multibox (thanks BTW) with a keyboard/mouse/n52 attached to the slave PCs. I only use the keyboard to type with and a majority of my interaction with the mages occurs on the gamepad. I have considered the Vectra/X-keys solution several times, but I really don't see the advantage. Which probably has a lot to do with how I currently play.

I see a lot of people use positioning now, or formations if you wish. I've never really bothered with the exception of Boss fights. Is there a real advantage to it other than looking pretty?

Thats all I can remember to ask at the moment. Thanks in advance for the advice/criticism.

:)

Stealthy
08-07-2007, 11:58 PM
Hiya Noc,

I'm assuming you're running one priest and 4 mages? I would have thought that would be a more PvP oriented group, since you have the insta-gib power of 4 x POM pyro's. :D For PvE I like 1 x priest and 4 x locks since the void walkers & felguards act as nice meat shields while you stand back and dot the mobs up.

There's a few advantages to having the PC's 'connected' (I asume you mean having your monitors in an array?)
1. Makes it easy to mouse to other screens if you need to do anything with just that char. For example 'collect x items' quests are a lot less tedious if you just need to mouse over to one char's screen and click on a corpse, as opposed to changing mice/keyboards to do this.
2. Synced mice means targeted / channeled AOE spells suddenly become viable. For mages it means blizzard and flamestrike (any others?), for locks it's rein of fire...but to do this effectively, you really need to have all screens the same size & resolution, so that the mouse tracks the same over each screen.

Note sure if anyone has got the formations part down pat yet, other than keybinding different movements on each PC to the one key (e.g. 'X' = left on PC1, diagonally back on PC2, bacwards on PC3, and so on). Xzin's last video had some pretty funky formation moves, but I suspect it was just clever use of this...

Cheers,
Stealthy

Xzin
08-08-2007, 01:19 AM
It was just clever use of that and follow :)