New Dualboxer: Testimonial
Hi, I've been dualboxing for about a week now and wanted to share my initial reaction with this experience.
Originally I started with RAF and my wife, just playing together when we had some free time (work and kids sees fit to relieve us of most of that). But with odd work hours, I tend to be up late at night after the family gets to sleep and so I decided to look in to "multiboxing".
Wow, there's a much bigger community and support structure here than I first imagined. Lots of documentation and this site has just been great with providing a place for other players to bounce ideas off of. Until now I've just lurked in the forums, but I feel compelled to share... if not for the more experienced players to remember back when they first started, then at least for new players / lurkers to get a shout out.
Hardware Setup: Intel Core i7 920 processor (an absolute beast), 6gb (3x2gb) triple channel ddr3, Radeon HD 4870, EVGA X58 motherboard, dual widescreen monitors... there is more than enough hardware here to run two instances of WoW.
Software Setup: Windows XP 64, Keyclone, no maximizer. I have each instance of WoW in "windowed" mode and I just place one in each monitor, then hit the maximize button. This allows the mouse to travel freely between the two windows, and a single click sets focus. Standard framerate is approx 90fps on focus window, which drops to 30-40dps once it loses focus. I suspect this may be a client issue with WoW. I've also enabled "only pass hotstrings", which saves a lot of time on initial configuration. Also, both clients run from the same directory. Same client settings except for what Keyclone changes on client startup.
Character / Hotstrings Setup: My dualboxing team are a blood elf paladin and blood elf priest. My main intention was to be able to put together pug groups quickly without having to look for the two most vital roles to fill. Secondary intention was to have clear-cut equipment needs, so as to maximize random drop usage. Currently they are level 32 with the paladin slightly ahead due to his class quests (about half a level). I'm using questhelper, debuff, onebag3, auctioneer and some other standard addons. The paladin is setup as primary player, with the priest as a kind of slave. Most of my hotstrings revolve around ordering the priest around. Essentially, I am playing the paladin manually with common functions shared between 1-9 hotkeys. They look something like this:
1: Start Melee Attack (paladin), Shadow Word: Pain Macro (priest)
2: Seal of Light (paladin), Wand Attack Macro (priest)
3: Judgement of Wisdom (paladin), Holy Fire Macro (priest)
4: Hammer of Justice (paladin), None (priest)
5: None (paladin), Renew (priest)
note: renew works a little different here, I've setup renew as a macro on my paladin bar that basically just does "/p Renew!" but Keyclone has a hotstring that relays "renew.paladin" if alt+5 is used, or "renew.priest" if 5 is used. This has the effect of treating it as though the paladin himself has the renew ability. To heal himself with it, he just hits alt+5, and 5 to heal the priest. I may change this macro in the future to actually cast renew on the paladin's target if he doesn't press alt+5.
6: Consecration (paladin), None (priest)
Unbound Z (paladin) -> Wand attack (priest), this is useful for having the priest do "something" while not blowing all your mana on a fight.
Unbounx X (paladin) -> Flash Heal (priest), this one works just like renew, as explained above.
Random Thoughts: This setup seems to be working very well so far. At around level 25, I gathered a group together of 3 dps and ran RFK with no wipes and very few deaths. I gave everyone fair warning that I was playing the tank AND the healer beforehand. They seemed just as surprised as I was when we all came out of it relatively unscathed. I had a great time and am looking forward to some Scarlet Monestary later on. Also, I've been doing this on the new Borean Tundra server, and have no "main" character to support me with gold. This is extremely frustrating, because I am constantly broke trying to choose between which skills to upgrade at level time. Now that I'm 30, the choice between saving for a mount and letting my skills slide very far behind or going without a mount and keeping somewhat up with my skills... is a tough decision. The paladin gets his own mount, so really I just need to save for one. That's still quite a bit of saving, at the rate I'm leveling. Tough tough choice.
Anyways, sorry if this is considered long winded. I hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane if you've been at this awhile, and if you're new, I hope you've learned something to do / not do. Thank you for your time.
