I'm addicted already

[eviltechie]

I tried dual-boxing WoW last night for the first time. I'm completely addicted. It's a whole new set of techniques and tricks to learn and a huge amount of fun.

I've only got my dual warlocks to level 8, but I'm already planning a 5 char team and enlisting my extra PCs and laptops to help. I'm currently thinking I'll start with a SPriest and 4 'Locks, or Pally and 4 Priests. I've got more experience with priests than any other class, so I wanted to use them somehow.

Has anyone had much success 5-boxing on a single ADSL line? My speed is about 6 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, and that's the fastest available where I live. A single instance of WoW gets around 97-150ms latency on my system normally. Viable? Or, should I wait for 5-boxing till I move to the area with faster connections?

Btw, thanks for this awesome resource on multi-boxing!

[Gurblash]

Has anyone had much success 5-boxing on a single ADSL line? My speed is about 6 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream,

Thats exactly my connection and I 5box no problems. Really have no idea what my ping is on each client I've got that UI feature hidden. But I don't lag if thats what your asking... and this is with my Wifes Laptop, my media server, my neighbors XBox 360 Live, and their 2 laptops all running at the same time. No hiccups, no disconnections, no spikes.

[Ðeceased]

WoW requires a 56k modem :) so as a minimum aim for anything above 500k. Ur 6mbps is more then enough :) you might even be able to download whilst you're playing providing you throttle the download somewhat to allow WoW to work without problems

[Littleburst]

I've only got my dual warlocks to level 8, but I'm already planning a 5 char team and enlisting my extra PCs and laptops to help. I'm currently thinking I'll start with a SPriest and 4 'Locks, or Pally and 4 Priests. I've got more experience with priests than any other class, so I wanted to use them somehow.
Some advice: you say you have most experience with priests. I don't know how far that experience goes, but if you played your priest for quite some time you might get bored of it a lot sooner then any other class. If he's not even 70, then there's no problem :)

[Ken]

I tried dual-boxing WoW last night for the first time. I'm completely addicted. It's a whole new set of techniques and tricks to learn and a huge amount of fun.

I've only got my dual warlocks to level 8, but I'm already planning a 5 char team and enlisting my extra PCs and laptops to help. I'm currently thinking I'll start with a SPriest and 4 'Locks, or Pally and 4 Priests. I've got more experience with priests than any other class, so I wanted to use them somehow.

Has anyone had much success 5-boxing on a single ADSL line? My speed is about 6 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, and that's the fastest available where I live. A single instance of WoW gets around 97-150ms latency on my system normally. Viable? Or, should I wait for 5-boxing till I move to the area with faster connections?

Btw, thanks for this awesome resource on multi-boxing!

1 instance of WoW only uses about 1.5 kByte/s upload speed and 1.5kByte/s download speed. Any line with 128kbps up and 128kbps down should be able to run 5 WoW instances, as long as the connection itself doesn't lag (which is more provider/location-bound than speed-bound).
But in any case: If you doubt that something might not work(e.g. PC specs, internet connection, etc.), get some trial accounts and find out! :)

[Coltimar]

My best friend's brother is stuck on dial up and does everything in game except arena. 6mbps should rock steady, as many have said. Also, depending on your computer, you may not need a ton more computer power. I ran 3 wow's on my 3.06GB single core dell with winxp home, 4gb ram and a 256mb video card.

I'm totally addicted as well. I am trying to find something to keep me busy while the realms are down :/ I may resort to housework!

[eviltechie]

Thanks for the info and advice!

I did get a chance to sign-up 3 trial accounts last night, so with the addition of mine and my wife's account (in my name) I had five. :D I set-up an undead group of four 'locks and a priest...Samæl (priest), Lilïth, Igrath, Näamah, and Mahalath ('locks). I suppose I shouldn't have put much thought into the names and class make-up...but I did. Samæl is described well here ('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael')...a fallen angel, the true angelic name of satan (pre-fall), both good and evil, the poison of god, etc...works well for a Spriest. The 'locks are his wives, each were Sam's wives and mothers to demons in Kabbalistic beliefs of the middle ages. Seemed like a good fit. Anyway...

My Experience

Overall pretty good. I still need to tweak my macros and all a bit, I ended up with hands crossed on the keyboard too often. And, I wasn't prepared for just how slow questing is. With two chars it was no big deal, but with five I spend a significant amount of time picking-up and turning in quests, training each, equiping gear on each, arranging new spells on each, etc. It was fun rolling into Brill at level 3, downing levels 7s. I encountered my first multibox hate at level 2...some lvl 55 in Deathknell, and got followed around by a lvl 7.

It was fun, but I'm not thinking I have the time to keep up with the maintenance on a team of five, and get them to 70/80. Since I spend a lot of time in WoW with the wifey. Hm, maybe I'll run 4 and make her the 5th. Haha! I'll probably stick to a dual box set of 'locks for now...until work lightens up or something.

[Ishar]

A day late and a dollar short; but with regards to the connection i sometimes have issues with my internet connection in Stormwind/Ironforge. So as a test, you could just wait till Friday at 5pm, make 3 trial accounts, log all 5 in and if you can run around (insert perpetually overcrowded city for your server/faction here) you'll be fine. You'll probably be fine though as everyone says. (I suppose this would also be a good way to test if your comp can handle the extra instances too. ). Its the huge huge crowds of people that do me in. People/my chars start ghosting everywhere and /follow is constantly breaking. hehe. But only at peak times. Never have issues except at the AH in those two places.

BTW, I love the names.

[Tonuss]

Has anyone had much success 5-boxing on a single ADSL line? My speed is about 6 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, and that's the fastest available where I live. A single instance of WoW gets around 97-150ms latency on my system normally. Viable? Or, should I wait for 5-boxing till I move to the area with faster connections?

Btw, thanks for this awesome resource on multi-boxing!I five-box just fine with a latency of 250-330ms most of the time. Sometimes I get lucky and it drops as low as 150-170, but otherwise I spend most of my time hovering on yellow.

However, I never PvP with my group, just PvE. And I get a notable ~1 second lag between my computers when I press a key (I run one account on one computer and four accounts on the other, linked via keyclone). For PvE this is not so bad, I assume that for PvP a one second targeting lag could be very annoying. I can't help with the connection speed issue, as I run a boosted cable line, but I don't see why your setup (6Mb/1Mb DSL) would have any problems at all. Your line is 4x T1 speeds on download and about 70% of T1 speeds on upload, and that's pretty darn good.

So enjoy! Multiboxing five casters can be extremely fun, especially when you are nuking down mobs before they get within 10 yards of your group. :)

[eviltechie]

I really had no internet connection issues at all with the five chars. All instances were in the green and hovered around 150-250ms latency. The only performance issues I had we're related to running five instances of WoW on one PC. I think I'm gonna try running the leader on my laptop and the slaves on my main PC. Should help...just didn't have time last night. That should help with the hands crossing deal too, and let me use the WASD keys to move. :)