Returning to WoW after 7 years, feeling a bit overwhelmed

Good morning everyone!

I ran a quadbox shaman team during WotLK, and quit when cata dropped and never played wow again.

My wife has recently showed an interest in playing WoW (do to some of our friends who moved out of state have started playing), so I'm considering jumping back into it.

When I left it seemed that quad box shaman teams, and 4dk 1 holy paladin was the hot team for arenas.

Last I remember hearing PVP boxing was going to be killed, because they were removing the follow command in battlegrounds, and pvp zones, and they killed the comma macro system where you could sort of set up your cast order in one huge macro, and simply tap the key every second to execute it by adding in extra commas when you wanted that particular character to not cast something that tap.

So I guess it seemed like they were killing pvp boxing, as well as multi-classed pve boxing(by removing the comma macro system, making it too hard to control different classes).

Is all of this still the case? I see a few posts about people talking about pvp zones, have they reverted their decision? Was I simply mis-informed, or have you found some kind of new work around?

It sounds really fun to try and clear all of the 5 man dungeons with my wife, while she plays the healer and I run a 4 box, but I'm worried I'd have to make them all of the same class, or just a tank and 3 mages or something, but I have always loved the idea of having all different classes.

Is leveling a pve team of separate classes viable currently? Are people still able to multibox pvp?

Sorry for the epic post, I've tried to educate myself by reading the first few pages of the forums, but so much is different and I have so many questions I thought a post would be the best.


Take pity on an old boxer and help clue me in?

Heya, and welcome back.

PVP has taken hits since WoTLK. /follow indeed no longer functions in random battlegrounds. For a while we had sudo-follows utilizing battle pets, but they've since been nerfed. Only multi-seater mounts work for moving around, and that obviously excludes indoor areas and while you are in combat. So outside of exciting "turret gameplay" BGs are basically undoable. As far as arena, we've seen a decline in viability. Gone are the days when just targetting the same target meant getting one-shot after one-shot. Partly it's down to game balancing being improved to where those insta-gibs are not nearly as common without very specific conditions being met. Additionally the amount of CC, and in particular AOE CC has gone up. Add to this the substantial increase in the skill level of the "average" arena player and we have conditions where boxers are struggling. The 5s ladder has also been removed, so you'd have to go for 3s. However I would point out that outside of seeing how far you can climb, there is literally no reason to do ranked PVP, as there is no real PVP gear anymore and you'll most likely be able to gear more efficiently in PVE.

Delay macros (as I think they were called) were done away with. However other methods of creating similar "rotations" and priority ques exist through ISBoxers pro-config and addon solutions such as Gnomesequencer. Results vary between specs and setups as you would imagine. I would say mixed class setups are just as viable as ever. The separate class halls might add some extra work, but atleast for small groups it's no real issue...

The expansion itself is fairly boxer friendly. You'll have to do some individual instances for each of your characters while leveling to unlock all the areas and finish your class hall / artifact quest lines, but once you are done with those it's all good. There's plenty to do and instances are doable even to M+ levels. Although the best success has so far been found in stacking tanks, I think they're perfectly viable to clear on normal trinity setups as well. Add to that the scaling world quest rewards, world bosses, LFR and you should keep gaining gear fairly steadily. I'm playing fairly casually on 8x and creeping close to 870 ilvl.

Thanks for the very informative reply! I'm really glad to hear there's a work around for the delayed macro system. I really want to make a multiclass pve team with my wife, and from what you've said it sounds like you can do it!

From the way you describe how pvp works, it sounds like I could play my multi-classed group up in pve, then take them out individually to PVP with the gear I earn in pve, and that's pretty cool!

I can't believe they did away with specific pvp and pve sets of armor, but I'm find w/ it!