Kel
05-06-2008, 07:56 AM
I've decided to add to this when my group gets up to something that I want to share, I'll update the title to reflect the newest 'adventure', but I hope no-one will mind me adding to the thread rather than making a new one each time.
This post will probably be rather lengthy and is partly a 'this is what I did over the weekend' as well as a reminder to myself for 'what to do next weekend'. You have been warned. :)
So I had a couple of days holiday over this weekend and decided to see if 5 accounts would run on my machine. I picked a new server as there is a guild there that runs pre-BC content, requiring members to have pre-BC accounts (which I don't have at the moment). The plan in my mind is to level up a group of 5 to 60 and then run instances with myself to gear them up while one or more of the pre-BC accounts joins the old style raiding guild for some casual old-school fun, the two BC characters can head on to Outland and so become better baby-sitters for the level 60 toons. This of course will never materialise, if I eventually did get around to levelling them to 60 I'm sure by that time the pre-BC guild will have long since finished all their content and moved on to other ventures, but it doesn't hurt to dream.
Set-up
One PC, one monitor (19" TFT), Keyclone.
Here's some specs for my computer:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3800+, MMX, 3D NOW, ~2.4GHz
Memory: 1022MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.000.0904)
Graphics Type: 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 PRO
Total Memory: 256MB
I was expecting my machine to keel over and die, when I tried to load it up, but on the whole it seems to have coped well. I set the screen up to have a big main one and 4 small down the right hand side (I think I copied that from someone elses set-up). I can't run through cities on more than 1-2 toons at a time (oddly enough) and I had a few occasions where Keyclone crashed, luckily those were all whilst in safe locations.
My Group
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_114159.jpg
I seem to have taken a screenshot of my carefully arranged group from one of the alt windows. Which is the reason for it being so small.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_114307.jpg
Here's a slightly better picture of my group, but unfortunately you can't see all the members very well.
With a view to doing instances and then moving on with 1-3 of the characters to raiding I went with the following group:
Draenei Paladin (tank), Draenei Shaman (healer), Gnome Warlock, Gnome Mage and Night Elf Priest (dps to 60 and then probably healer).
I was thinking of making a dwarf priest for nostalgic reasons, but looks won out in the end. Unfortunately I ended up with two advances made to my priest, so possibly I should have gone for a nice ugly dwarf instead.
Addons
Twoboxtoolkit - nice handy little addon, though I do keep whispering to myself when people whisper my alts
Back Seat Quester - I got this after the first 6 levels, I'm doing all quests at the moment (partly out of habit, partly because I want horses for my characters if I ever get them to 40, which means SW rep). Really nice addon which lets me monitor progress on all my alts (even easier after binding a key to get it up).
Trinity Bars - ARRGGHHH! Worked really nice at first, easily set up different bars and bindings and no worries about macro numbers. Unfortunately right near the end of the weekend I was getting a few more skills and so decided that some modifiers would be useful and I don't know if it's just me but I cannot get modifiers to work. If I put them in a macro then they will work on a keypress, but not if I press the button (so not very useful for my alts). I realise I could set-up modifier bars for this, but that would involve mirroring actionbars for all of my characters which is plain too much work when a simple [mod:shift] on one character should be able to do the trick.
I will be trying out different bar mods.
X-Perl - Not the clearest party frames, but they show me party targets and casting bars, which is the functionality I'm after, I may have to see if I can get them looking less cluttered though.
Smartbuff - with all of my characters being able to cast some form of buff this was pretty much a necessity. Couldn't work out how to keybind it though (so I was switching my focus to different windows and mouse scrolling), but I think I need to do this under the Blizzard keybinding options.
SpamMeNot - Because having gold spam forwarded to myself is not fun (and I don't like the thought of Blizzard monitoring this and seeing my alts spaming gold adds at my main). SpamMeNot blocks the wispers and auto-complains about any above a certain threshold.
Actually getting around to playing
By level 8 I'd clocked up around 16 hours on my main (the paladin), some of that was afks, but I think a lot was setting up addons/macros and general thinking time, I'm hoping things will go a little quicker after tweaking a few addon issues, as I really would like to try out an instance run before my trials (the 3 non-draenei) run out next weekend.
First thing to do was get my two draenei and priest to the gnome starting area. I died a few times on the way (and worked out that [exists] is a very handy clause in a follow macro if you don't have all toons on at the same time) and got my first bot whisper at the tender level of 2 (I'd just dinged).
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_082419.jpg
My second whisper (discounting gold adds) was some helpful advice from a fellow player:
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050308_110550.jpg
For some reason my follow macro would not work with [help] included, but taking that out seemed to fix it, hopefully I won't end up one day following a random horde around. I am on a pvp server, but luckily I didn't meet any on my way through wetlands (though I couldn't sleep due to being ill so it was about 5:30am).
So I get all my toons together and start the pewpew. My non-gnomes are ahead in xp due to discovering places on the run through, my gnome mage ended up last in xp due to a disproportionate amount of deaths (I'm glad my priest has now learned resurrection, running one toon back is not fun).
Collection quests are ok at lower levels and I'm not finding it too problematic to click on the little windows (though it can be tricky to target the corpses sometimes). One thing that does bug me is that trial accounts can't trade. I see the logic for it with all the gold buying issues (uet another reason for me to dislike people that buy gold), but it's a bit of a pain for my characters as I would prefer to be able to loot everything on my main and then share it out as needed. Also I had to make sure my alts got enough random loot to be able to afford training. Also means that my mage can't trade water to my other characters *sigh*.
I didn't get as much play-time as I'd have liked (RL, guild and bf getting in the way :P ), but I got my little party to level 10, hopefully I can get them to deadmines level before the trials run out, but I'm rather concerned by the shocking state of their gear (I have 3 green's between them).
I'll try and get some pictures up tomorrow and will add an update next week to summarise my trial period.
Lastly, here's a picture of a weird bug I had in SW, not relevant to MB, but I still want to know who stole the water.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050408_145527.jpg
This post will probably be rather lengthy and is partly a 'this is what I did over the weekend' as well as a reminder to myself for 'what to do next weekend'. You have been warned. :)
So I had a couple of days holiday over this weekend and decided to see if 5 accounts would run on my machine. I picked a new server as there is a guild there that runs pre-BC content, requiring members to have pre-BC accounts (which I don't have at the moment). The plan in my mind is to level up a group of 5 to 60 and then run instances with myself to gear them up while one or more of the pre-BC accounts joins the old style raiding guild for some casual old-school fun, the two BC characters can head on to Outland and so become better baby-sitters for the level 60 toons. This of course will never materialise, if I eventually did get around to levelling them to 60 I'm sure by that time the pre-BC guild will have long since finished all their content and moved on to other ventures, but it doesn't hurt to dream.
Set-up
One PC, one monitor (19" TFT), Keyclone.
Here's some specs for my computer:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3800+, MMX, 3D NOW, ~2.4GHz
Memory: 1022MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.000.0904)
Graphics Type: 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 PRO
Total Memory: 256MB
I was expecting my machine to keel over and die, when I tried to load it up, but on the whole it seems to have coped well. I set the screen up to have a big main one and 4 small down the right hand side (I think I copied that from someone elses set-up). I can't run through cities on more than 1-2 toons at a time (oddly enough) and I had a few occasions where Keyclone crashed, luckily those were all whilst in safe locations.
My Group
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_114159.jpg
I seem to have taken a screenshot of my carefully arranged group from one of the alt windows. Which is the reason for it being so small.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_114307.jpg
Here's a slightly better picture of my group, but unfortunately you can't see all the members very well.
With a view to doing instances and then moving on with 1-3 of the characters to raiding I went with the following group:
Draenei Paladin (tank), Draenei Shaman (healer), Gnome Warlock, Gnome Mage and Night Elf Priest (dps to 60 and then probably healer).
I was thinking of making a dwarf priest for nostalgic reasons, but looks won out in the end. Unfortunately I ended up with two advances made to my priest, so possibly I should have gone for a nice ugly dwarf instead.
Addons
Twoboxtoolkit - nice handy little addon, though I do keep whispering to myself when people whisper my alts
Back Seat Quester - I got this after the first 6 levels, I'm doing all quests at the moment (partly out of habit, partly because I want horses for my characters if I ever get them to 40, which means SW rep). Really nice addon which lets me monitor progress on all my alts (even easier after binding a key to get it up).
Trinity Bars - ARRGGHHH! Worked really nice at first, easily set up different bars and bindings and no worries about macro numbers. Unfortunately right near the end of the weekend I was getting a few more skills and so decided that some modifiers would be useful and I don't know if it's just me but I cannot get modifiers to work. If I put them in a macro then they will work on a keypress, but not if I press the button (so not very useful for my alts). I realise I could set-up modifier bars for this, but that would involve mirroring actionbars for all of my characters which is plain too much work when a simple [mod:shift] on one character should be able to do the trick.
I will be trying out different bar mods.
X-Perl - Not the clearest party frames, but they show me party targets and casting bars, which is the functionality I'm after, I may have to see if I can get them looking less cluttered though.
Smartbuff - with all of my characters being able to cast some form of buff this was pretty much a necessity. Couldn't work out how to keybind it though (so I was switching my focus to different windows and mouse scrolling), but I think I need to do this under the Blizzard keybinding options.
SpamMeNot - Because having gold spam forwarded to myself is not fun (and I don't like the thought of Blizzard monitoring this and seeing my alts spaming gold adds at my main). SpamMeNot blocks the wispers and auto-complains about any above a certain threshold.
Actually getting around to playing
By level 8 I'd clocked up around 16 hours on my main (the paladin), some of that was afks, but I think a lot was setting up addons/macros and general thinking time, I'm hoping things will go a little quicker after tweaking a few addon issues, as I really would like to try out an instance run before my trials (the 3 non-draenei) run out next weekend.
First thing to do was get my two draenei and priest to the gnome starting area. I died a few times on the way (and worked out that [exists] is a very handy clause in a follow macro if you don't have all toons on at the same time) and got my first bot whisper at the tender level of 2 (I'd just dinged).
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050208_082419.jpg
My second whisper (discounting gold adds) was some helpful advice from a fellow player:
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050308_110550.jpg
For some reason my follow macro would not work with [help] included, but taking that out seemed to fix it, hopefully I won't end up one day following a random horde around. I am on a pvp server, but luckily I didn't meet any on my way through wetlands (though I couldn't sleep due to being ill so it was about 5:30am).
So I get all my toons together and start the pewpew. My non-gnomes are ahead in xp due to discovering places on the run through, my gnome mage ended up last in xp due to a disproportionate amount of deaths (I'm glad my priest has now learned resurrection, running one toon back is not fun).
Collection quests are ok at lower levels and I'm not finding it too problematic to click on the little windows (though it can be tricky to target the corpses sometimes). One thing that does bug me is that trial accounts can't trade. I see the logic for it with all the gold buying issues (uet another reason for me to dislike people that buy gold), but it's a bit of a pain for my characters as I would prefer to be able to loot everything on my main and then share it out as needed. Also I had to make sure my alts got enough random loot to be able to afford training. Also means that my mage can't trade water to my other characters *sigh*.
I didn't get as much play-time as I'd have liked (RL, guild and bf getting in the way :P ), but I got my little party to level 10, hopefully I can get them to deadmines level before the trials run out, but I'm rather concerned by the shocking state of their gear (I have 3 green's between them).
I'll try and get some pictures up tomorrow and will add an update next week to summarise my trial period.
Lastly, here's a picture of a weird bug I had in SW, not relevant to MB, but I still want to know who stole the water.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w167/Keluria/WoWScrnShot_050408_145527.jpg