Theorycrafting: 10 boxing 10 man raids SOLO?

[daviddoran]

So, as I'm leveling my multiude of alts (im an altaholic) I got to thinking, "What would be a good group to 10 box in Kara?" So AFAIK the usual kara grp is 2 tanks, 2-3 healers, and 5-6 dps. So im thinking, ok, Pally tank, Warrior Tank, Holy priest, Pally Healer, 3x mages 3x shaman (all can off heal). That sound about right? Use Pally tank for trash, warrior for bosses, and pally off tanks on bosses. Are priests good healers in this regard? I know the AoE healing comes in handy, but with good tanking, and a few macros to heal the dpsers occasionally, most of the heals will be on the tank, so the pally healer would be the main one there, as he can just constantly be spamming FoL with the DPSers. Then I can put a holy light on a /stopcasting macro for bigger heals. I read about a resto druid solo healing, which if possible, would be easier to manage, and give me one more DPS. Are Mages/locks the best DPS to slave? Or am I better off with shaman, cause of the anti squishiness/totems? Maybe a squad of 4 shaman, 4 druid and a pally and warrior? then I have off healers if anyone bites it.

Any thoughts on this? I'm not really gonna buy 5 more accounts just yet, but once I get at least 10 70s, and at least a bit of gear on my tanks/healers, It might be worth 5 new accounts and 5x transfers to try it once, and if it doesn't work, 5 more transfers, or pay $150 a month. Worst case scenario, I'm out a few hundred $. I'd just like to be leveling the right classes, so its easier later. Right now, I will have 2 pallies and 3 locks, along with a mage priest druid pally and shaman.

[ElectronDF]

I haven't 10 manned, sorry. But if just thinking about it. Why not get another 5 boxer to give it a try with you. Yeah, the chances of finding a good 5 boxer with high enough levels or gear might be hard, but you never know. Ask in realm forums, ask in LFG chat and in trade for a multiboxer to try to work together. Maybe you find a good lvl 20-30 person and you can reroll together to get a 10 man army working together to level up on your own and then go destory places. Most places before BRD can be 10 manned. Take a 10 man lvl 25 into Gnome. See what happens with tanking, healing and aggro. Take a 10 man lvl 42 into Maraudon. Yeah, it will be hard, but is the point. See what happens when things are too hard, that might give you an understanding of what happens at higher levels when things are hard. It might give you a chance to perfect 10 man macros instead of just 5 man ones. I would love to 10 man something. It seems like it would be fun to figure out how to heal cross-groups. Yeah, you can't do quests, but you can kill bosses for loot. Just a thought.

[antishadow]

You'll want the priest not only for heals but shackles which will come in very handy.

[Stabface]

If your tank/healer is geared, shackle is almost entirely unneeded. The guild runs I go on, only use shackle for the trash pull to Opera that freeze the tank -- but you can instead use grounding totems.
It's possible to 1 tank + 1 heal most all of Kara, with maybe some offspec tank/heal on certain fights, but you'll need serious gear to pull it off.

If I had to choose 2 healers for Kara I'd pick Resto druid and Holy priest, HoT's and group heals are so much easier than playing health-bar-whack-a-mole.

[whosafk]

If i was going to do solo 10 man raids i would pick all druids, 4 feral druids, tank and dps, if one goes down u have spares, 2 or 3 resto and the rest boomkin. I dont multi box yet, just started to download the stuff this weekend but have been playing wow for a long time.

[chris916]

Well, I know that Kara was done with 10 Paladins, and I guess it could be pheasibly done with 10 Paladins with a rotation on prot/ret/holy.

[daviddoran]

Well, if it's possible to 10 man most regular instances, It seems like it might be fun to 10 man the Deadmines with some trial accounts. Shouldn't be too hard to get 10 chars lvl 10+ for a test. I think 8 DPS 1 heal 1 tank would be easiest to manage, but the tank/healer would need to be pretty well geared... I will try it tonight and post back on my results. :) I have 4 monitors, so I could quarter up 2 of em, and have a tank screen by itself and a healer screen by itself. I will most likely use the hotkeys for DPS, tank manually, with a couple duplicate keys for tanking if they overlap. Ill probably heal with healbot.

Yeah, the $150 crit to my wallet would suck, but not too bad considering all the other expenses to just 5 box.

[Tdog]

Well, if it's possible to 10 man most regular instances, It seems like it might be fun to 10 man the Deadmines with some trial accounts. Shouldn't be too hard to get 10 chars lvl 10+ for a test. I think 8 DPS 1 heal 1 tank would be easiest to manage, but the tank/healer would need to be pretty well geared... I will try it tonight and post back on my results. :) I have 4 monitors, so I could quarter up 2 of em, and have a tank screen by itself and a healer screen by itself. I will most likely use the hotkeys for DPS, tank manually, with a couple duplicate keys for tanking if they overlap. Ill probably heal with healbot.

Yeah, the $150 crit to my wallet would suck, but not too bad considering all the other expenses to just 5 box.LoL. 10 manning DM you wouldn't even need a formal tank/healer. Just 10 of any of the hybrid classes and you'd mop that zone up.

[Nixi]

These are the classes I take:

http://i281.photobucket.com/albums/kk201/emrys2/WoWScrnShot_062708_160440.jpg

4 Elemental Shamans
2 Fire Locks
1 Fire Mage
1 Holy Priest
2 Protection Paladins

Update [6/30/08]:

Ten boxing is freaking hard.

Hardware and software
I have laptop that can open one client, a computer at work that can open 4, and my personal desktop that can open 5. The computer at work should only be opening 3 clients, because when it has 4running it's prone to crashing keyclone and the framerate is crap. My desktop doesn't fair too much better opening 5 clients, the framerate goes down in Shat or AV, but it won't constantly crash keyclone. In order to 10 box I had to drag my home pc and laptop to the office over the weekend. A 22" monitor had 4 clients at 960x600 with the maximizer, one 19" monitor with my main tank, another 19" monitor with my 4 shamans, and I had my healer running on my laptop. I didn't like the positioning so I switched my mage and priest then largely ignored the laptop's (mage's) screen and it worked out better. (that toon is a scorch biatch anyway :P) I needed the main healing and main tank on one machine so I could control it with one mouse.

I use a G15 keyboard and a deathadder 5 button mouse on the main computer. 1 mouse 1 keyboard on the 2nd desktop and I just use the laptop keyboard and another standard mouse on the laptop.

I use Keyclone for linking the 3 pcs.
I'd like to learn how to install synergy when I take the time to download it.

Home Desktop Quadcore 2.4 (OC 3.0) 4 gig ram, 8800 GT, 7200 HD, opening 5 clients from 2 directories.
Work Desktop Dual core 2.x ghz 2 gig ram, 7600 GS, ? HD, opening 4 clients from 1 directory. (not sure about the specs on this machine)
Laptop Core 2 Duo 2.0 ghz, 8600M GT, 4 gig ram, ? HD, opening 1 client from 1 directory.



Macros
I was too anxious to really prepare everyone properly so I just dove in with my existing 5 boxing macros. This wasn't the best idea because i run the 10 guys in two seperate teams so the bindings were overlapping. For example, my shamans' PVE totem cast sequence was ontop of my mages Renew, my grounding totem macro was on top of my warlocks seed of corruption, etc. I ended up disabling one teams bindings instead of remapping everything. I just didn't have button space. I'm solving that problem with an x-keys pro but i'm still waiting on it to arrive.

I basically used some really simple macros.

Open fire button- Everyones main dps cast sequences, tank's tanking sequence, prayer of mending spam and flash of light spam.
AOE button - Arcane explosion, Fire nova totems, hellfire
AOE healing button - Chainheals and Prayer of healing
2 single target healing buttons - Greater heal with priest only and another that did quick heals with everyone.
CC button - just does shackle if the target is undead, banish if demon, sheep if human.
Potion button - everyone drinks mana pots or mad alch pots if alchemists.
I have a few other buttons scattered around for single abilities on each character. Paladin stuns, mage ice block, taunts, blessing of prot, etc. Nothing I use on normal pulls. THen there are a few shaman totem sequences that were taking up button space.

Talents and gear
Main Paladin - He uses a typical raid tank spec. He's in kara tanking gear and badge loot. He's definitely ready to tank ZAM, Heroics and Kara mobs aren't much of a problem for him.
2nd Paladin - She was holy until Mores. I just ported her out, respeced, then summoned her back. She's critable, crushable, and under 10k hp without buffs.
Fire Mage - Over 1000 fire dmg. Mainly a scorch mage. I was using the 5 scorch, 7 fireball, 1 scorch, repeat sequence until i switched to using the focus targeting method instead of /assist. Sometimes when i switch targets it'll just continue to where she left off in the sequence and not build the scorches up again. My warlocks weren't going outta mana nearly as fast as my mage fireballing stuff so i just switched her to straight up scorch DPS. It's low mana so she's more in synch with her mana usage compared with the locks.
Two Fire Locks - 0/21/40 Shadow and Flame spec. They are the bulk of my DPS. One lock is epic'd out and has over 1000 fire dmg while the other lock just hit 70. She's in full tailored gear so she's still doing respectable dps. They just open with a Curse, immolate, then move to 3 incinerates followed by a lifetap before putting back up immolate; repeat.
Four Shamans - 41/0/20 Totem of wrath. Nothing special here. Three of them just hit 70 so on average they are 400 spell dmg. DPS is a 3x lightning bolt 1x chain lightning castsequence. For caster heavy mobs i use /castrandom lightning bolt,purge,grounding totem.
COH priest - I thought about switching to the Spirit buff build but i wanted COH to heal my two groups since I she's the main healer. With the shamans able to chain heal I'll probably end up making her a divine spirit priest for my next attempt. At 2000+ healing she's more or less done with ZAM and is bored as hell healing Kara groups when I play her solo.

The Encounters
Trash to Midnight - The chargers are a pita with the fear. With 2 shamans in each group dropping staggered tremor totems it wasn't much of a problem but i still had to take time to reface the dps that weren't facing correctly. My desktop at work is really stressed running 4 clients so keyclone constantly crashed and i'd lose the DPS of my 4 shamans. I wiped twice on this trash because of this problem.

I've cleared to Midnight before with my 5 man crew and the 5 pack right before her was the hardest part. 10 boxing it was a breeze though, My paladin could withstand the brunt of the 5 mobs with FOL spam and Ghealing spam.

Mightnight and Attunmen - Keyclone crashed on my first attempt and I ended up wiping. I restarted the computer and I had to clear to her again but my 2nd attempt I pulled off without a hitch. I just arranged my 9 toons in a position and drug midnight there. When attunman appeared i stopped dps and just picked them both up. When he mounted same thing, just stopped dps and picked them back up. My priest doesn't really have a problem healing him, especially with my little FOL spammer there. With my 9 toons just behind midnights hiney she didn't charge them. Open fire!

Trash to Moroes - Easy mode with 4x fire nova totems 2x hellfire and arcane explosion. I just chainheal and prayer of healing after dropping the fire novas. It all dies pretty fast. I wiped on a bad pull after accidently aggroing one of the packs with a mob that fears. The two guys that make your tank blurry can hit really hard but i just GH spammed on top of FOL spam.

Moroes - I had the shadow priest add, the paladin add, and two melee adds. The shadow priest i wanted to kill first and the paladin i wanted to shackle at the opening of the fight, then let my MT tank everyone. My first couple attempts I was hoping I could leave my 2nd paladin in a holy build and just drop consecrations with righteous fury active to pull moroes attention after the gouge. Heheh, it worked, but she died in half a second. Then I was like, Okay no gouges, i'll just tank him like the trash in Mana tombs, with my back to them. It's too much dmg letting a boss mob and 3 trash mobs pound on my tnak that's not blocking, dodging or parrying.

I respeced my little paladin to protection and had her throw avenger's shield at moroes, then my MT throw avengers shield at the shackle target. (so when the shackle breaks my priest doesn't get owned) On the pull i'm like, "omg this is going great!" My MT was taking the hits from all the trash and moroes really easily and my little paladin was just building threat. My DPS is weak so it took quite a long time to kill the shadow priest. She mana burned the crap outta my priest, and then when I went to look at what was happening with my priest my MT got gouged and my 2nd paladin just died.. too fast. I tried it several times, my method is pretty sound, but my 2nd tank just doesn' thave the gear. She's critable, crushable and doesn't even break 10k hp without buffs. So i skipped moroes.

Trash to Maiden - Same stuff as moroes trash up to guest rooms. The dog packs were easy, the demon pat was easy, i skipped the 4 pack to the right in the hallway by jumping behind the statues and running past.

Maiden - After a couple wipes that happened from aggroing her while positioning my guys, i was extra careful to get them spread out around the room for a real attempt. I put the paladin and priest on opposite ends of the room and spread the rest of the dps out. First couple attemps I had the shamans in the same group and my primary group wasn't protected by grounding totems. Once I put 2 shamans in one group and 2 in another with the /castrandom lightning bolt, grounding totem macro i could remove her holy fire from the battle.

On my best attempt I got her down to around 50% before my shamans and 2nd paladin ran outta mana. Without my 2nd paladin healing during repentance, and my 4 shamans not dpsing, i just couldn't finish her out. 5 of my guys just turned 70 last week, they don't have any gear even though I've been farming heroics for over 30 badges on each toon.

I'm confident that once my 2nd paladin gets tanking gear and my 4 shamans get some spell dmg I'll be able to make it to the opera event.

Off to farm heroics!


note:
4x totem of wrath + 1 flash of light spamming paladin is freaking awsome.

[daviddoran]

so do you actually 10 box kara? If so, Kudos to you! How do you have it all set up?

[Bunny]

I have been toying around with that idea too and especially since bliz announced that there will be 10man versions of every 25man raid in wotlk where will be a lot of content for 10 boxers.
I am currently playing a 5 sham group at lvl 65 and my main priority is to get them to 70 and try arenas, heroics and bgs. When they are more or less decently equiped I may start another group of 5 toons: 1 prot pala, 2 mages (fire), 1 druid. 1 holy priest is already waiting at lvl 70. I will include the druid for two reasons: 2nd tank when needed, motw buff and possibility to use him as healer or nuker depending on how it works out.
Even if I stick to my plan I expect to be able to try 10mans not before Xmas due to my limited playing time (and my limited motivation to level 1-60 again...). I am pretty sure that there will be quite a few bosses which involve so much movement that it is simply not possible to 10 box them, but we'll see what lich king brings :)
Bunny

[daviddoran]

I've decided that IF I attempt my own 10 man group, that I won't do it on 10 accounts until I have 10 70s, and do some xfers. I figure the xfer cost and new acct cost is a one time cost, and I don't necessarily want to start a 1-70x5 run all over again. Plus I plan on having multiple lvl 70 alts on my 5 accounts, so if I already have the chars, why level more? Worst case, I xfer them all back, and I'm just out $325. I've made mistakes that cost me more than that, so it's no biggie. If it works out, and I like it, the $150 a month crit will be painful, but I can just deactivate 5 accts when it gets old.

[Bunny]

Bringing up this old subject again:
I plan on 10 boxing wotlk and maybe some kara before simply to set up macros, test hardware etc.
I have a group of 5 shamans at 70 and with the help of raf i currently level a group of 2 pally, 1mage, 1 lock, 1 druid (all at 60 atm). I already have another priest at 70. Originally i wanted to have 1 of the pallys to tank but I consider changing that plan: The new idea is to level a warrior for main tanking (using RAF levels); the group whould then consist of:

1 war MT
2 pally (heal spamming on mt; having castsequence macros on my dps button so no further attention is necessary)
1 resto shaman (active healer: my n52 enabling me to heal/chain heal everybody as needed but usually healing the MT as needed)
2 ele shams
1 mage
1 lock
1 shadow priest
1 druid (usually skilled for nuking but having a tank set in case a sencond tank is necessary)

Reasons:
* I feel comfortable with a war tank (see vodeos of my old blog) and the pala tank i currently use just "feels" weird.
* I only need 1 char (the druid) to deal with 2 specs, the rest of the chars just needs one
* having two paladins healing the MT with /castsequence ,,heal macros (adding commas as necessary for the different fights) leaves me with a nice base healing for the MT. This whould be harder to to with chars using "bigger" heals that are not so spammable
* I have just ebout every manareg in the group i can think of (shadow priest, resto sham, palas)

What do you think of this plan? Any suggestions are welcome :)

Bunny

[Kicksome]

Hmm - I have 10 level 70's
1x prot pally
2x mages
5x shamans (1 resto)
2x priests (shadow and holy)

[Bunny]

Do you 10box them?
If so, what are your experiences?

[puppychow]

While it is possible to do anything, really think carefully about how complex some of these fights are, and whether to expect more of the same or less in WOTLK?

If you have 10 different classes, you will rarely use all of them to their maximum ability. Warlocks and mages and priests and druids have dozens of spells that all can do important things at clutch times (ice block, shackle, cyclone, kite with frostbolt, kite with fear/CoR, shapeshift kite, etc, etc). But a 5 or 10 boxxer will generally reduce all these classes to 3-6 spells, so 90% of what that class can do is wasted.

And the fight complexity progression at Blizzard is clear - you start off with Molten Core, which a 10 boxxer could solo now. Karazhan kicks off TBC, many of the fights would be doable by a 10 boxxer but require lots of concentration. Zul'Aman however would break down fast, maybe the bear boss would be soloable but beyond that it gets rapidly complex, really hard to imagine anyone soloing zul'jin or even the eagle boss. Naxxramas is the starting 10/25 man raid in WOTLK, and the fights were incredibly complex in preTBC WoW - I doubt they will reduce the technical aspects of the fight too much. Healers dashing in/out of LOS on razuvious, DPS in a different spot doing the same, etc.

And a trick people use nowadays, dropping 4-9 grounding totems, will not work in WOTLK anymore as grounding totems stop stacking.

One person (in china?) has solo'd all the Karazhan bosses except Netherspite (dunno about Nightbane?), which is impressive. Of course a very geared group should have few problems, especially with a ton of shamans you can drop a ton of grounding totems and every fight more or less turns into tank'n'spank. A extremely geared prot pally can solo tank everything (except Netherspite) in Karazhan, with no cc at all. I do not think however there is time enough anymore for a new person to try and gear up a group before WOTLK is out, it will take a few weeks to hit 70, then a few weeks/months to get the badges to get the gear needed. But when TBC first came out there was no badge gear, and when WOTLK comes out we don't know if you can "overgear" the first few raid instances like you currently can for Karazhan - after all, many people now zone in to a iLevel 115 instance with iLevel 141+ (badge) gear, basically like a level 60 clearing Scarlet Monastary.

[Raskaz]

Some really good points there from Puppychow.

I am thinking of starting Kara as well and I would only need to set up a few more accounts and then move some alts over even I do think Nixi set the bar far too high ;)
However the only reason it would be remotely doable on my part, is soley to the fact that most of my chars outgear the instance.

With Wotlk things will change and I am sure we see more instances like MGT which I find a bit awkard to multibox and 10-man instances will be even more complex in nature.

Multi-boxing can be tremendous fun but it can really frustrating as well. Any fights which involve a lot of movement usually reduces the fun factor for me by a large margin.

We al l have to see how these raid instances in Woltk turn out but I doubt as well that multi-boxing them will be only be doable to a very small degree, esecially at the start due to being undergeared.

[Sarduci]

And a trick people use nowadays, dropping 4-9 grounding totems, will not work in WOTLK anymore as grounding totems stop stacking.
Where is this change noted? How are they stopping you from simply doing what we are already doing?

[Memn]

1 war MT
2 pally (heal spamming on mt; having castsequence macros on my dps button so no further attention is necessary)
1 resto shaman (active healer: my n52 enabling me to heal/chain heal everybody as needed but usually healing the MT as needed)
2 ele shams
1 mage
1 lock
1 shadow priest
1 druid (usually skilled for nuking but having a tank set in case a sencond tank is necessary)

2 Holy Pallys seem... unnecessary... I like your dps group, but think you should spec one of the pallies for prot and have your shaman and your druid focus on ranged dps and off healling. I know you favor warrior over paladin, but paladin is a great, low micromanagment OT.

I can't even imagine what 10 man I'd come up with.

Probably:
2 Prot Pal
1 Holy Pal
1 Holy Priest
1 Mage
5 Shaman

not because its a great group, but because it would be easy to control. Swapping out a shaman for a lock would prolly be good too.