One week into Lotro

I'm going to use this thread to get some of my thoughts out, I may or may not then compress this information into a blog post.

Like many of you I've been multiboxing in wow for years, but the recent unfriendly changes (plus my own hatred of dailies) has kept me away from it for the last couple of months. I miss the challenge of working out MB systems and methods, though, so I thought it might be a good time to try a different game. I recently had an interesting time delving back into Tera, so I thought I'd like to try an f2p game, to see if it is easier to keep from burning out on multiboxing a game if you don't have the pressure of subscriptions making you feel like you HAVE to play.

In order to six box, btw, you need to get customer support to issue you six keys, this took me a total of three emails last summer (I personally already had my original key from four years ago, and then I got 1-1-3, obviously only the last person actually read my customer service note about how many keys I wanted). This process might take a while to work through.

I chose to download the non-HD version of Lotro, and I'm running six boxes (plus my usual smorgasbord of other programs and tabs) easily with five of the boxes set to Low graphics and my master box set to high. Each box takes up about 1 gig of memory and 11% of my cpu, except for the "high" box which chews 19/20% of CPU.

I've spent about 8 or 9 hours playing and tweaking this setup, http://www.alluxi.com/multibucks/isboxer/Luxlunae-Lotro-4-14-2-13.xml, which looks like this http://i.imgur.com/f8Er9VJ.jpg

Obviously the leftward screen is my main screen, with quest tracker feeds running down the left hand side and the six cast bar feeds underneath the chat box on the master box.

My impressions of the game itself are what I remember, that it is charming and the story is interesting and the world is filled with neat characters. Multiboxing however, is about 3x more painful than in wow. Quality of life is just lower. Anyone who likes is welcome to start with the setup that I shared above, it works off of assisting and following the leader of the fellowship. There does not appear to be any way to automatically transfer leadership, and hence master, when swapping boxes. In my setup, I used "=" as the "assist and interact with target" key, but unlike in wow this isn't a smooth process. For some reason it often takes many clicks to get all six boxes with the quest dialog open. You often get an error when trying to interact, with "that object is busy", and you have to toggle repeater on to select, accept, and turn in quests once you do have the box open. One quality of life thing that I did add was a second repeater toggle key, titled "repeater click" on this config, which is a normal repeater toggle except that it is a press/release so that it can be bound to one mouse button, giving you the option of holding down that key, clicking with the normal button, and then releasing that key. I find I've liked it enough as a concept I'll be using that whenever I return to wow.

That said, the place that I got bogged down on my original run through the game was questing in the late 20s, and for now I don't think I need a full group of six to quest better, and I don't feel like the frustration of a full group of six is giving me what I want in terms of an experience. I'm going to start over with a group of three (a "small fellowship") and see if that suits me better.

I switched to 3 boxing and it is much easier going. I'm getting a lot less "that object is busy" when trying to interact with quest givers x3 rather than x6. 3 will also be cheaper if I decide to get the mithril edition after I come back from vacation. Another note to those starting mixed groups, although the elves + dwarves and the man + hobbit have the same introduction (first 7 levels), at the end of that you will have a solo instance and then each will end up in a race specific area. My 6 man group I made the mistake of having a mixture of hobbits and men and then had to burn my level 5 temporary mounts to get everyone together. For this three man group I'm just sticking with elves.

I just discovered that you can put NPCs on follow, making the annoying solo instance easier at level 7.

Most recent discovery, for melee characters the IWT + CTM combat is imitated by the combat option "enable movement assistance in combat". This will cause characters to move into melee range when you trigger a melee ability.

Also with the unpredictability of threat at this stage with my team, when I put my healer into healing mode (by swapping her action bars) I just let her use the "enable skill forwarding" with a priority of four spells.

Writ of Fire (5s CD, no attunement requirement, stacking dot)
Epic for the Ages (15 second big heal, 6 attune requirement)
Writ of Health (5s CD, no attunement requirement, stacking hot)
Rune of Restoration (15 sec cd, small aoe ground heal statue, technically I precast this, but the addition to the rotation means that it gets recast after the mobs kill it (which they do).

I've only had to heal one difficult thing so far, three manning the 6 man weathertop mountain quest instance, but this worked reasonably well as a heal strategy until I got to the final boss where I did need help to kill the troll. My champion might become a lot more tanky once I've switched her to mail, she's still using mostly leather at level 23.

Feel free to share any other tips, I'm sort of flailing about blindly here and working things out as I go!

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Originally Posted by luxlunae

I just let her use the "enable skill forwarding" with a priority of four spells.

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What exactly is that enable skill forwarding thing? I've never boxed LotRO beyond the intro escape sequence, so I know nothing about the game really; but I heard another 'boxer talk about that skill forwarding thing and didn't know what it was.

It means that if the spell is a heal and you are targeting a mob it will heal the person targeted by that mob. It also works as an assist for hostile spells, I believe. Since I'm bouncing threat around a lot (and 3 boxed a 6 man dungeon last night, calling for heavy healing), this was the only thing that saved me. So nothing special, but since lotro doesn't have macros it replaces [@target, help][@targettarget, harm] qualifiers. I found that it spread around the 5 cooldown stacking hot to all team members during most of the messier trash pulls.

I've been dual boxing a couple of Lore-Masters and having a pretty good time. The LMs just rape regular mobs when they have their Friend of Nature pet out. With their crowd control abilities and limited healing for others, it works out pretty well even in areas that require a small fellowship. I'm not doing any instances because I just don't really care about them that much. Skirmishes are a breeze as I picked a warrior and healer for their two companions.