New dual box'r. When 1 + 1 =/= 2

Hi. I am brand new at this, running 2 toons on the same box, and am having some trouble at the moment.

I have an 80 tankadin, which solo's a lot because of my schedule. It can do normal Utgarde and Nexus but I wanted to see more. So I thought I would add a lvl 70 resto druid (from my BC days) to the mix. I thought, that all my tank really needed to get past some of the other instances was a few heals now and then.

I really underestimated the mechanics of boss fights in LK; there is alot of emphasis on movement, and alot of ancilliary AOE damage to other party members. And my healer (in BC T4/T5) is not living through 90% of the boss fights. I mean, there are some simple tank/spank ones. But overall, if the healer isn't moving most of the time, and healing itself a great deal, it dies.

I only have HotKeyNet installed, and to be honest, it does exactly what I want it to. I have macros hotkeyed to everything I want, for heals to tank/healer on the resto druid toon. The macros are not the issue.

My biggest problem, is that if I see the healer taking damage, and take control of the healer window to initiate evasive movement, barkskin, heal self, cleanse, etc, then it takes a few seconds, and during this time, the tank is only auto-attacking, and not doing all of the things that are mandatory for the groups success (moving, tanking, taunting, AOE'ing, cleansing, most importantly dps'ing). The tank has to run a flawless rotation for best results.

Is this as good as it gets with 2 toons? I read alot of the forums here over the past day or two and some of you are doing amazing things with 5, 10 or more toons. Am I just that skill limited? I don't think I can afford 5 toons. Uggh. I didn't want to turn this into a QQ. But I don't think that heroics are in my future, even with 2 80's. Am I expecting too much?

Thanks for reading. I appreciate any advice / support I can get.

I have done most if not all vanilla instances and about 2/3 of BC instances. WotLK instances just suck to me. They aren't fun, and are hard to box. So I just do them when I outlevel them and quest about 90% of the time. All my rewards are from quests or crafted. I could not even imagine running an instance multiple times for a percentage that the item even drops while having to move every few seconds and heal through AOE damage. That just doesn't sound fun to me. I really just want to upgrade, so missing an instance isn't as bad as it used to be for me. I didn't box to make WOW work. I wanted to do things that I couldn't do alone.

My suggestion (just my idea) is to do what you can, and skip the rest and have fun a duo near the same level. Make a 70 something and level it with your druid and do the group quests. Nice blue rewards and might be a challenge with only 2 people.

If you have hotkeynet working why do you need to change window to move and heal and why is your tank not mashing his tank macro whilst you do that. Assign a seperate set of movement keys for your druid and have an easy tank macro that you can mash whilst you are doing anything that requires concentration. With only 2 characters to worry about you shouldnt have as many issues as a 5 boxer who sometimes has to spread out his chars or move 1 at a time out of fires etc.

To put it more simply, you need to break both characters abilities down to their basic form, have 1 button for tanking, 1/2 buttons for healing (hots/big heal). Learn to strafe your healer whilst still tanking and healing.

Hope this helps :)

Edit: I forgot to say that with only 2 80's I think asking for heroics will be a bit much unless both your characters outgear the content by a mile. There may be a couple of bosses that you could do but for the most part you wont have enough dps to kill the mobs before your healer is oom.

Thanks for replies. Yes, I want to stay in the new LK content, and I would like to see how far I can progress with 2 toons. I like the challenge, and more importantly, I really feel great when I can clear a LK instance run with no deaths. It means that I have accomplished something, even though it feels like I am exerting 50% more effort, in doing so.

Clone, I think you are on to something here. I need to incorporate more automation into my Hotkeynet and macros. Tank rotation consolidated to 1 key, and healer movement are going to have to be the priority. We will see how that goes.

Could it be that most multi-box'rs do not run the tank as the main focus toon? And that they are more confortable running the tank as an automated script, even though the tank might operate with less effectiveness (which can be debated no doubt). Maybe I am looking at this from the wrong perspective. Maybe I can gain more by automating the tank, and having the healer nuke/heal as the focus? Hmm. Good food for though. Thanks.

If you've got it set up right you should never have to take control of another window in combat, right up until the character on the main one is dead.

You need to have your normal movement keys bound so that with a modifier they can control the slave (I use shift+WASD for it's lateral movement, and ctrl+AD to turn it).

You also need to have the healer set up so as many of it's abilities as possible are passed through HKN. You can use HKN's <If MouseIsOverWindowRect> conditional to pass click casting over to the healers window, which will free up a lot of keys for other abilities the healer has.


2 boxing high levels I've only had my 78 warlock's pet available to tank with, and even doing level 70 stuff (and trash pulls in MC) I was only really successful because I was healing with my 80 disc priest, which can also put out DPS while not healing. A tree form druid has the disadvantage that it can only heal unless it shifts, and it can only DPS at range unshifted, so becomes more susceptible to damage, not to mention the delays and mana use that shifting cause.

Tank and healer is hard to do, because you don't really have the DPS to kill things before they wear down the healer's mana, and boxing you tend to take a lot more damage from AoE than a normal group, simply becasue of the independent mobility issues. Becasue of that there's less mana to go round. That's not a problem on trash where you can always take a break between pulls, but on bosses it becomes an issue, and yeah some WotLK bosses do have overly complex fights, even for non boxers.

You also have the option of having the bindings and macros mirrored on both characters, so if you need more control of one at any time you just drag the mouse over.

Of course that would make a real mess of your setup if you ever want to solo on them, but there is a way around it.

Most of my boxing characters have their own sym-linked WoW directory, so they have an independent set of config files from my main unlinked folder (it only uses up a few megabytes per character). Using something like this you could make duplicates of both your tankadin and resto, give them identical casting bar layouts and bindings, and with a little work in HKN, the only difference you'd get with the mouse changing the focus screen would be which one turns with the mouse, you'd still be able to use both character's abilities without any downtime.

With this you also get the bonus of having a lot more macros available, as you can use the General Macros tab for character specifc macros too, that character being the only one used on that WoW 'install'.

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I need to incorporate more automation into my Hotkeynet and macros.
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And that they are more confortable running the tank as an automated script,
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Maybe I can gain more by automating the tank,

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Please stop using the term automated, we do not use automated scripts and a lot of people have been talking until they are blue in the face to make people understand the vast difference between automated bots and multiboxing.

As far as trying to do Wrath dungeons with two toons, that's going to be incredibly difficult if not totally impossible in many cases. Wrath is full of content that is gimicky and requires things like killing quickly to avoid stacking debuffs, adds or enrages. Even with a full team of 5, people will still struggle trying to find a good balance between required DPS and healing until they have the gear to make up for whatever they lacked.

Thank you all for managing my expectations on how far I might be able to progress. I have come into this a little naive. I am having fun right now, for sure. I could see this develop into a full blown addiction if I get this right, and keep at it. If it ever starts to feel like work though, I'll drop it. I would be lying if I didn't say that I might have had visions of Emlems of Conquest (3.2) dancing in my head. lol.

I had considered the consequences of fully adjusting my main (tankadin) to handle the multi-box sessions. And having another separate WoW directory (folder) for solo play would preserve that. Great suggestion! Thanks.

I will try to stay away from the "A" word on future postings ;) , and be more specific about incorporating variations of the /castsequence macro commands into my slaves, which can be executed by pressing a single key repeatedly. I have an idea about which 6's and 9's I could weave into a macro or two. I could even bind them to a mouse wheel forward for 6's, and backwards for 9's. Who knows.

Once again, I am very appreciative of all of your suggestions. You have given me a great deal of possibilities to try out!