4 vs 2 box

Hi guys,

Got back into D3 again, been duo-boxing it on and off and now back and duoing season wizards.

I keep thinking that 4 boxes will add more synergy than 2, without adding to much effort - But sadly there is no way to try that without buying 2 more diablos is it? No trial?

So a few questions to the 4 boxers out there:

1) Personal opinion: Do you think 4 instances is worth it over 2 (or even 1 I guess :P)? Hassle vs loot and xp bonus rewards?
2) Technical: I can run 2 boxes fine, I run 5 wow instances easy and no lag in 4 man parties in d3 - Would I be able to 4 box on that machine likely?
3) How viable and hard is it to multi class? All duoing I've done so far has always been same spec and straight key and mouse broadcast?

Thanks!

Just occurred to me one drawback to 4 boxing since 2.3 (or any boxing) is that you are required to farm bounties, and boxing reduces the ability to do split farming for quick rewards :(

1. Worth it? I would say yes. It's more loot, its more challenging and to me, its more fun cause its harder. But, it's slower to begin with since it requires far more coordination and looting can take forever to the point of boredom. But once u gear decently all for chars, it's very rewarding.

2. Hard to tell without knowing your specs, but most likely yes. Just make sure to check Low FX on all 4 chars. From my experience, GPU means pretty much nothing to Diablo. CPU is all that matters so forget about that 4x Titan X SLI and just get the best CPU there is and overclock it. That will give you FAR more performance than the best graphic card out there. Maybe it's my case, but I have an Intel 4770K + SSD + 32GB RAM + Geforce 780 Ti and I have never seen the game reach even 80% of GPU. It's all on the CPU and overclocking my 4770K from 3.5GHz to 4.2GHz was noticeable.

3. 100% viable, u just need to pick the right combo. Sure u can use with straight keys but honestly, it's quite boring. I like boxing cause it's a LOT more complex and the real fun starts when you start working on class synergies, skill rotation, round robins, different keymaps, etc. That's the part I just can't get from playing multiplayer with friends. It gets boring cause the game is too easy. Sure I miss the human interaction and all, but I love puzzles and figuring something difficult and see it work in game. Multiclass is all about making sure: 1) U get real benefit from leveraging synergies (buffs, debuffs, etc.) 2) you dont have dsyncs (movement speed buffs, teleport skills, long attack animations, etc.), 3) Proper keymapping so u dont need 20 keys to control your party. For example I'm planning to test a 3x HotA Barbs + 1 zDPS monk team or 2x HoTa Barbs + Hammerdin Crusader + zDPS monk to try GR70+.

You cant do split bounties. Even with 2x, it's less efficient than regular multiplayer. Still, once you do like ... I dunno 10 bounties? U don't really need to do them more unless you wanna cube every single item in the game every season. That's gonna take FOREVER. But if u just cube the less than 15 items u need for your class, there's no real need to do that many. Also, if u do them on T10, u should get what u need quite fast (RoRG, GoW, etc.).

Bounties are not the problem ... farming Keywardens is. Hellfire amulets are a MUST for certain classes and those can take forever. Sure doing T10 can help cause u get more map drops and more organs as well, but still, be ready to invest a few hundred hours on just this. Still its very rewarding and fun in a way :P

I would say go for it, but again, it will be slow at the beginning. Also controlling 4 accounts can have a steep learning curve. U need to learn more about round robins to fully use IsBoxer and leverage those class synergies.

Thanks!

One thing that occured to me is that I only have 2 screens - How do you manage to pick up gems and death's breath on the 3 slaves if they are not fullscreen? legendaries is easy enough, but the other stuff that drops randomly?

I have 2 screens as well. My left monitor is the primary and I have the active account there. My secondary monitor has a dxnothing screen running 4 VideoFX. It's a 1920x1080 screen so each char has a 960x540 space using the whole screen. Each VideoFX shows the exact account always and they dont move positions or rotate, so it's a lot easier to watch. U know that top right is #2, bottom left #3, bottom right #4. Top left which is #1, I just place a movie or chat there since the main screen already shows the active which in 95% of the time is #1.

Besides this I have a few overlays on the main screen with VideoFX as well to show the mana pool from each char right beside the main char mana pool. Also 3 small minimaps from each char near the minimap of my main. With that and audio, it's fairly easy to loot.

Death Breaths are a pain now. Just do T7+ and u know for user each elite will drop a death breath. Or have a farming set for Death Breaths with Sage set and just take a full day just to do this and mass a huge amount so u dont loot them in weeks. What I usually do is just loot Death Breaths whenever there's a legendary. Every time I hear the sound, I stop and loot on each account. That or just use a macro on my mouse to spam left click like crazy and loot on the fly ... it will most likely pick some :D

Regarding deaths breath, I amassed a few hundred in preparation for 2.3 just by doing T6 rifts and looting whenever several elites die at once in the same screen, which happened a few times per rift; sure it slowed things down, but in spite of the cube I still have 300 or so on each character which is plenty. There's also a goblin that drops several DB's, I make sure to always loot that goblin.

For my setup I also use a DXnothing window with all 4 characters shown. I also have a few overlays (like the minimaps and mana bars; which for me I just take a rectangle out of the center of the globe as a source and line them up in a little rectangle. I do the same thing for health. I have miniaturized buff bar viewer's above the actual buff bar, those aren't as useful. I lately added a viewer for the pet/companion area too, also of questionable usefulness.

Being able to gauge all 4 characters health and mana at a single glance is absolutely invaluable though; and the minimaps make catching legendaries pretty reliable. I don't run with sound though.

About Death Breaths, they drop x2 on most of the packs in Torment X. But you need a team that does Torment X fast...

About mini-map, I use DxNothing too.

About bounties, I'll start a separate thread ;)

DxNothing - Is that the normal Screen Setup in IsBoxer?

I wouldn't say normal but it comes with IsBoxer. Guess a lot of ppl just use the default display setting. DxNothing is just like a character screen but blank where you can add video feeds called VideoFX. U define a particular part of any of your account screens to be showed (source) and then u show it in the DxNothing screen (viewer). I have the DxNothing screen using the whole secondary monitor screen and send all the feeds of my 4 char screens in half their resolution to fit the whole 1920x1080 display. Just like the default display settings but without rotations and any annoying shit that makes very difficult to swap chars. I dunno why this setup is not the default display setting for 2 screens. I was never able to make it work just like this without DxNothing. No clue why they make u jump thru hoops for such a basic config. I also use VideoFX to show mana pools (just a rectangule) and minimaps on my main screen.

Configuring this has its learning curve. IsBoxer documentation sucks IMO. Sure, everything is kinda documented in the wiki but its like done by a developer for a developer and not for an end user. Can get confusing sometimes. Not to mention the whole thing about IsBoxer top/botton panes + Menus + InnerSpace makes absolutely no sense to me. It's a nice piece of software but its far from userfriendly. And I'm an IT user, not a regular user, still I find it over complicated and far from simple.

Another thing about setting up viewers and sources is that you can define them on keymaps which is a bit more dynamic than setting them up graphically per character set. E.g. my global keymap creates all my viewers and sources on load and toggles certain ones on a hotkey. But as dev said, initial learning curve is steep. Not quite dwarf fortress steep but far from easy.

There are videos, watching then might help. I remember mirae videos that did a good job of explaining things.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk