I Think I'm Missing the Basics

I have three new accounts. I'm starting level 1s for fun and profit. What do I do different when multi boxing? I can down the rats in a couple of hits, so if I switch screens to target slaves, the mobs are usually dead.... My biggest threat right now is that the main will have trouble tanking am entire swarm.

Is the problem that level 1 rats don't hold up long enough? Should I have my slaves fit for logistics? Is there some obvious use of repeater keys/commands that I am missing?

It isn't bad, but it isn't the experience I thought it would be.

Thank you for your help.

There's a sort of sliding scale to missions. When you get into your first good frigate fit, you'll kill the enemies in 1-3 hits and your only real concern is being swarmed because you don't have the defense (shields or armor repair) to survive much incoming. That lasts through your destroyers. When you hit cruisers, things get a lot better as your tank goes WAY up, though your DPS doesn't improve a whole bunch due to low skills. You'll feel like you become more and more powerful doing level 1s and 2s in your cruiser as everything you face is usually frigates or destroyers. Once you have enough faction to do level 3s, you start running into swarms of cruisers, which will again gang up on you and exceed your tanking ability until you get into your battlecruiser, when you'll again feel like a god among mortals. That lasts until you do your first Extravaganza L3 mission, where you'll get jumped by like 20-30 ships. Your skills will continue to improve in tanking to the point where you don't really worry about dying any more -- just waiting for your 5.0 faction to start level 4s. At this point you'll have some T2 gear and probably training for those week-long skills for T2 weapons.

That's been my experience, anyway. :p

Another point is that missions are mostly designed to be doable by solo players. So you'll always have the problem of having too much firepower for single ships until you hit active-tanked cruisers, BCs and BSs in L3/L4 missions. The way I worked it was focusing on skilling my missiles up to L3 for max range, then focused completely on tanking until I have full passive T2 tanking abilities, including the 4 resistance skills to L3/L4. I'm back to working on missiles now that I can actually survive L4s without having to warp out constantly.

As for fleet configuration, most of us run (or ran) 3-4 DPS plus a dedicated salvager in a destroyer or Noctis. No real need for logistics in everything up to L4, IMO.

he most damgerous thing about missions is when the next wave spawns - becasue they'll choose a target, whihc won't always be your 'tank', and stick to it regardless. There's no aggression mechanics for NPCs in missions they just choose a target and pursue it until it's gone.

Therefore, every ship thats going to be in your gang needs to be able to tank the whole mission - including your salvage ship. Anything that can't tank needs to stay out of the mission space until it's cleared.

Regarding key repeating I've been working on this recently using ISBoxer. The crucial point is that 'hold' needs to be on for keymaps: http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1128

There's a guide on the ISBoxer forums too, although it was written before the new keyboard shortcuts were introduced: http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=878

Using the keyboard to control multiple toons really works well. You need to set up your overview for missions to filter it down to just enemy ships (or even single enemy ship classes) so that target selection is easy. EVE are introducing more default overview settings soon as well. Using a fleet means that your 'main' toon can warp the other toons around whihc is the only form of 'follow' there is.

EVE can be very boring to play, from one point of view it's all about PVP and every other activity is there to support PVP, from another point of view it's about making the most ISK and playing for free, from yet another it's all about how many people you can grief. That's why they call it a 'sandbox' game.

Don't forget there's a guide sticky right here: http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=21126

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Originally Posted by jrkilroy

I have three new accounts. I'm starting level 1s for fun and profit. What do I do different when multi boxing? I can down the rats in a couple of hits, so if I switch screens to target slaves, the mobs are usually dead.... My biggest threat right now is that the main will have trouble tanking am entire swarm.

Is the problem that level 1 rats don't hold up long enough? Should I have my slaves fit for logistics? Is there some obvious use of repeater keys/commands that I am missing?

It isn't bad, but it isn't the experience I thought it would be.

Thank you for your help.

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I can't multibox the spreadsheets too well.... :P