My adventures in dualboxing

My main objective was to play my existing Level 70 warrior and shaman together, partly because I couldn't decide which to level first, and partly because it sounded like a fun idea.

The first thing I did was create a new warrior and druid team, and levelled them up to around 15 to get some practice and work out how to arrange macros and key forwarding. I settled on a whitelist for key forwarding using KeyClone, so the only keys that get forwarded are 1-4, R, T, H, C, and the arrow keys. I unbound the arrow keys from the melee character's movement controls so that I could use them to control the ranged character, minor adjustments like fixing facing problens, and stopping /follow. R is a HoT spell, T is Target macro, H is big heal spell, C is Chain Heal for my shaman and /cheer for the druid.

Once I had established that this works ok, I transferred my warrior to my new account. I did a bit of practice on Sunwell dailies, and also did a Ramparts run on my own for something a bit more challenging.

Since then I've been levelling up in Northrend and having a great time. I've added # as a macro to accept trades, accept invites, accept quests, and set loot to free-for-all. I should probably add /invite Hoofu on the first line on Oggie's version of the macro. The only glitch is that accepting the invite via a macro leaves the invitation popup window on Hoofu's screen.

We're both 78 now, Oggie got a bit of a head-start by doing both starting instances at 70 and so is about half a level ahead.

When I first got to Northrend, I decided I would try skipping the starting zone (Borean Tundra) but not knowing the geography I ended up in Sholazar Basin. I saw the Level 76 Grazers and proceeded with caution, but quickly saw a Saronite node and an Adder's Tongue herb that were near a friendly camp, so I decided to carry on and see how far I could get. I rode into some water and was immediately attacked by three L76-ish Crocs! I thought I was a gonner but I gave it my best shot, and found that I could actually hurt and out-heal their damage, and killed all 3! Oggie wasn't uber-geared, just 3 crafted epics, but Hoofu is covered in epics from Karazhan, badges, Gruul, mags, and a couple of SSC and MH items.

I spent a good while just mining and herbing the south and west edges of Sholazar Basin, and made about 10k gold on the auction house. Titanium didn't sell very well because no-one was using it yet!

The week-end after the expansion, I started levelling. Did all of Borean Tundra, then went and did all of Pining Fjord. This put me at a fairly high level for Dragonblight, but some of the quests were still yellow. I wanted to see all the storylines, so I took my time and tried to do everything even though I could probably have levelled a lot faster by moving up the zones more quickly.

A couple of nights ago I decided I needed to level up my hunter enchanter who is only 44 so I can diss my own greens, I think this requries Level 50 and Enchanting 325. I sent Oggie down to Stranglethorn Vale to help out with any tough encounters, and generally make things faster. He's outside the party on /follow, with a macro to pick up the hunter's target and Charge. Tab, Attack, then hit the Charge macro and Oggie flies past and slaughters the mob. Best projectile weapon ever! Sometimes he ends up on the wrong side of the mob facing the wrong direction, so I have to alt-tab and fix his positioning because the arrow keys aren't bound to his move controls!

Controlling the warrior remotely is not really an option, because switching targets becomes a nightmare, the only practcal way to do things is to control the warrior and operate the ranged character remotely. I can get away with the other way around in Stranglethorn because my hunter's pet can help out with the tanking if it goes wrong, and a Thunderclap from Oggie sorts it all out but I have to alt-tab for that at the moment. Maybe I should put it on a more accessible keypress so I can thunderclap remotely.