New to 3-boxing (WoW)

Hello all,

I've been lurking here in the forums for a while now, reading up on the experiences that
other folks have had with playing multiple toons simultaniously and fueling my own desire
to give it a shot.

Recently, I moved to India. Because all of my WoW characters are on US servers I
have been unable to raid. Due to time zone differences my play times are limited to the
very early morning to about noon server time. I've been occupying myself with heroics,
but have basically exhausted my ability to progress through heroics having acquired all
the badge rewards and heroic drops that I could possibly use now.

My options for character progression now are basically farming rep. Ick.

Anyway, I figured this would be an optimal time to mess around with multi-boxing to give
myself something to do. First, I tried setting some stuff up with characters that I already
own. So, I transferred my Warlock, Paladin, and Priest to separate accounts and spent a
few days messing around with them. But I found dealing with three different classes to
be very awkward.

In my 2nd go at things, I created three brand new warlocks. Levelling from 1 has given
me some time to get accustomed to each ability on 3 toons vs. just jumping in with three
at 70, and I like that. So far, I've found everything to be a lot smoother. I love the
synergy of pressing one button for 3x the firepower, and seeing 9 dots appear on a
monster in 6 seconds gives me some sadistic pleasure. I'm just imagining being able to
put up 15 later on.

Anyway, I have some questions for those of you more experienced :

1) I knew levelling would be slow, but so far it's been painfuly slow. I've been skipping
collection quests, but killing every single monster that I see and doing any quest that
doesnt involve 3x the effort for my little team. Is this just a price I pay for levelling three?
Or does it speed up as I get more accustomed to the playstle and get into later zones.
(My guys are just level 9 now after two afternoons of play, most of that time spent fiddling
with macros and refining targetting issuse)

2) I like PvP, but I am also an avid PvE player. Have any of you running two or three
toons had any experience with grouping in 5-mans? I've seen a lot of threads on soloing
5-mans by boxing, and several about bringing 4-5 boxed toons to a raid but so far I
haven't read a lot about taking a 2-3 box in a heroic group and being the dps/cc but not
tank/healer. I'd imagine explaining things to a PuG would be entertaining at the very
least.

That's all really. Just introducing myself here on the forums. I'm hoping to get my team
to 20 this weekend, we'll see how that goes. =)

- Chantz

Welcome to the Forums man.

As for leveling... Do everything you can, even some collection quests. Is what I do is grab all the collection quests go to the spot and kill a few mobs to check the drop rate. Sometimes its fast. Doing that for 3 characters is or could be better xp that killing mobs on one toon. SUre it takes longer.. But whatever.


Also, get someone to pwr lvl you threw instances. My /played with my 4x shamans is 1day 5hrs at lvl 28. In my opinion that pretty fast.

I have no experience in PVE or PVP yet. So I cannot help you with the second question.


Hope this helps.

Hi Chantz, and welcome to our little corner of the universe. Reversing the whole outsourcing ethos, eh? I like it! ;)

I'll let others, with more experience of playing fewer than a full team of 5 characters, advise you on the speed of leveling, etc, but do remember that once you hit level 20 the "xp boost" built into the last patch kicks in, and your xp from questing will go through the roof.

You may not be able to instance alone, but you'll certainly be trivialising all of the non-instance quests.

I would imagine that most of your xp will come from questing, and hopefully you'll make a few understanding friends along the way who will be happy to include you in their instance groups.

You might have had more luck in that regard if you'd made a different choice of classes (lock, mage, priest perhaps), but you've made a great choice for getting to know the mechanics of boxing and you can always switch if things don't work out for you.

I considered including a priest in the group, but after my initial experience trying to
coordinate three classes with totally different abilities I thought using three identical
characters would be a better starting point.

Additionally, I have a decently geared paladin, priest, and warlock all already at 70 that I can
incorporate into my team later should I so desire. Or if getting groups with three warlocks
proves difficult. >.<

*Edit*
As for outsourcing, coming here is great so far. I live in Bombay, and it's pretty darn nice in
a 3rd world and really wierd sort of way. =) It would be great if I were here to work in the
phone services industry, but I'm not.

Do the Collection quests that have good drop rates, avoid those with poor drop rates(Goretusk Liver Pie, Southshore Murloc Heads, etc)

I twin-box and so far as /played time goes I'm average for my playstyle, not ahead or behind of my usual solo time. As far as quest progress goes though I'm zones ahead of where I'm usually at. Pre-2.3 I'd be scraping for exp and quests to hit the next "threshold"(Such as clearing duskwood to barely hit 30 to start STV, and having to do most of those quests before I could move to arathi); post-2.3 at lv41.5 I've barely touched wetlands, done maybe 4 or 5 STV quests, not run SM but twice for Library boss weapons(and no quests from SM to boot) and basically have dozens upon dozens of quests to still go through.

Yeah, the patch made some niiiiiiiiice exp changes. And there's also the new Dustwallow marsh, which took me from 36ish to 39 in a single afternoon of play, highly recommended to go there once you can handle it