4x Engineering

During stress I messed around with targeted AOE effects, namely using rough copper bombs on one of my slaves. There is a semi-inelegant way to do it in ISBoxer where a hotkey press will bring up the ground target ring (the big green circle that you move around where you want it) and then basically my next click will be broadcast to that slave to commit to the target and throw the bomb.

It's a little clunky but overall effective. It was questionable whether it'd end up being useful at all if only one character was using it. That got me to thinking, what if most of my characters took up engineering? Then this clunky method to throw one bomb could instead throw four bombs. Now it's efficient!

The question I have is whether taking engineering on four out of five toons is worth it. Will there be enough incoming materials to keep them all progressing? Will I be able to build enough bombs such that I can throw them four at a time and not run out? Is taking engineering on four dudes worth the cost of offloading other tradeskills (e.g. alchemy, enchanting) to alts who will not be in my main box group? What other considerations am I missing?

You can probably use macro like this (I haven't tested it, but I assume it will work):
/use [@player] GrenadeName

For ranged it would be good if you could get round robin on the grenades so you can have another way to interrupt but not too convenient to use.
To reduce amount of keys you need to press you can try to see if you can get this to work to just have to just have to press hotkey and not mouse click, need to have cursor at right location though:
/use [@cursor] GrenadeName

I don't think the damage will be worth using grenades.
I think for pvp you want to use Goblin Sapper Charge.

You will have to spend a lot of gold to lvl engineering and to use the consumables. For pvp it can be worth it, for pve it is not worth it imo.
5 Goblin Sapper Charge = 10 Mageweave Cloth, 5 Mithril Bar, 40 Solid Stone. Quite a lot of gold to throw away with a press of a hotkey.

Thank you. Good input.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xandorz

For ranged it would be good if you could get round robin on the grenades so you can have another way to interrupt

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That was actually part of my motivation. I am running warrior, priest, 3 x warlock. I was thinking about how I was going to get through WC and the pulls with multiple druids had me concerned. My tank should, by that level, be able to interrupt a single target, but what about multiples?

I started thinking about using bombs on one of my slaves for that reason, and that led me to, "If one bomb is good, four bombs must be four times as good!"

But you bring up a good point. The damage isn't great. It's the stun that's relevant. And without a contrived round robin workaround, four stuns at the same time gains me nothing.

With ISboxer rapid switching between clients is also an option if you want to actually target from a given character.

Ye, I will probably use a mix of @player grenades and swap between windows and use grenades with something like:
/use [@cursor] Iron Grenade

Should only take half a second to a second to start throwing it when switching and Iron Grenade is really cheap (1 iron bar, 1 heavy stone, 1 silk cloth for 2 Iron Grenades I think).

A little hard to pull off without stopping to cast spells with every character for a second, but might be doable, especially when using it from healer.

It seems like people start the cast for grenades and then keep moving while waiting for the actual grenade to land after a delay so it may not be that bad.