First steps in DM 16-18 (a.k.a Kel's MB Journey)

I've decided to add to this when my group gets up to something that I want to share, I'll update the title to reflect the newest 'adventure', but I hope no-one will mind me adding to the thread rather than making a new one each time.

This post will probably be rather lengthy and is partly a 'this is what I did over the weekend' as well as a reminder to myself for 'what to do next weekend'. You have been warned. :)

So I had a couple of days holiday over this weekend and decided to see if 5 accounts would run on my machine. I picked a new server as there is a guild there that runs pre-BC content, requiring members to have pre-BC accounts (which I don't have at the moment). The plan in my mind is to level up a group of 5 to 60 and then run instances with myself to gear them up while one or more of the pre-BC accounts joins the old style raiding guild for some casual old-school fun, the two BC characters can head on to Outland and so become better baby-sitters for the level 60 toons. This of course will never materialise, if I eventually did get around to levelling them to 60 I'm sure by that time the pre-BC guild will have long since finished all their content and moved on to other ventures, but it doesn't hurt to dream.

Set-up

One PC, one monitor (19" TFT), Keyclone.

Here's some specs for my computer:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3800+, MMX, 3D NOW, ~2.4GHz
Memory: 1022MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.000.0904)
Graphics Type: 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 PRO
Total Memory: 256MB

I was expecting my machine to keel over and die, when I tried to load it up, but on the whole it seems to have coped well. I set the screen up to have a big main one and 4 small down the right hand side (I think I copied that from someone elses set-up). I can't run through cities on more than 1-2 toons at a time (oddly enough) and I had a few occasions where Keyclone crashed, luckily those were all whilst in safe locations.

My Group

http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...208_114159.jpg

I seem to have taken a screenshot of my carefully arranged group from one of the alt windows. Which is the reason for it being so small.

http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...208_114307.jpg
Here's a slightly better picture of my group, but unfortunately you can't see all the members very well.

With a view to doing instances and then moving on with 1-3 of the characters to raiding I went with the following group:
Draenei Paladin (tank), Draenei Shaman (healer), Gnome Warlock, Gnome Mage and Night Elf Priest (dps to 60 and then probably healer).
I was thinking of making a dwarf priest for nostalgic reasons, but looks won out in the end. Unfortunately I ended up with two advances made to my priest, so possibly I should have gone for a nice ugly dwarf instead.

Addons

Twoboxtoolkit - nice handy little addon, though I do keep whispering to myself when people whisper my alts
Back Seat Quester - I got this after the first 6 levels, I'm doing all quests at the moment (partly out of habit, partly because I want horses for my characters if I ever get them to 40, which means SW rep). Really nice addon which lets me monitor progress on all my alts (even easier after binding a key to get it up).
Trinity Bars - ARRGGHHH! Worked really nice at first, easily set up different bars and bindings and no worries about macro numbers. Unfortunately right near the end of the weekend I was getting a few more skills and so decided that some modifiers would be useful and I don't know if it's just me but I cannot get modifiers to work. If I put them in a macro then they will work on a keypress, but not if I press the button (so not very useful for my alts). I realise I could set-up modifier bars for this, but that would involve mirroring actionbars for all of my characters which is plain too much work when a simple [mod:shift] on one character should be able to do the trick.
I will be trying out different bar mods.
X-Perl - Not the clearest party frames, but they show me party targets and casting bars, which is the functionality I'm after, I may have to see if I can get them looking less cluttered though.
Smartbuff - with all of my characters being able to cast some form of buff this was pretty much a necessity. Couldn't work out how to keybind it though (so I was switching my focus to different windows and mouse scrolling), but I think I need to do this under the Blizzard keybinding options.
SpamMeNot - Because having gold spam forwarded to myself is not fun (and I don't like the thought of Blizzard monitoring this and seeing my alts spaming gold adds at my main). SpamMeNot blocks the wispers and auto-complains about any above a certain threshold.

Actually getting around to playing

By level 8 I'd clocked up around 16 hours on my main (the paladin), some of that was afks, but I think a lot was setting up addons/macros and general thinking time, I'm hoping things will go a little quicker after tweaking a few addon issues, as I really would like to try out an instance run before my trials (the 3 non-draenei) run out next weekend.

First thing to do was get my two draenei and priest to the gnome starting area. I died a few times on the way (and worked out that [exists] is a very handy clause in a follow macro if you don't have all toons on at the same time) and got my first bot whisper at the tender level of 2 (I'd just dinged).

http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...208_082419.jpg

My second whisper (discounting gold adds) was some helpful advice from a fellow player:
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...308_110550.jpg

For some reason my follow macro would not work with [help] included, but taking that out seemed to fix it, hopefully I won't end up one day following a random horde around. I am on a pvp server, but luckily I didn't meet any on my way through wetlands (though I couldn't sleep due to being ill so it was about 5:30am).

So I get all my toons together and start the pewpew. My non-gnomes are ahead in xp due to discovering places on the run through, my gnome mage ended up last in xp due to a disproportionate amount of deaths (I'm glad my priest has now learned resurrection, running one toon back is not fun).

Collection quests are ok at lower levels and I'm not finding it too problematic to click on the little windows (though it can be tricky to target the corpses sometimes). One thing that does bug me is that trial accounts can't trade. I see the logic for it with all the gold buying issues (uet another reason for me to dislike people that buy gold), but it's a bit of a pain for my characters as I would prefer to be able to loot everything on my main and then share it out as needed. Also I had to make sure my alts got enough random loot to be able to afford training. Also means that my mage can't trade water to my other characters *sigh*.

I didn't get as much play-time as I'd have liked (RL, guild and bf getting in the way :P ), but I got my little party to level 10, hopefully I can get them to deadmines level before the trials run out, but I'm rather concerned by the shocking state of their gear (I have 3 green's between them).

I'll try and get some pictures up tomorrow and will add an update next week to summarise my trial period.

Lastly, here's a picture of a weird bug I had in SW, not relevant to MB, but I still want to know who stole the water.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...408_145527.jpg

Quote:

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Back Seat Quester - I got this after the first 6 levels, I'm doing all quests at the moment (partly out of habit, partly because I want horses for my characters if I ever get them to 40, which means SW rep). Really nice addon which lets me monitor progress on all my alts (even easier after binding a key to get it up).

---

I had not heard of this mod before so, thanks for that! G'luck!

Back Seat Quester

[quote='Kel',index.php?page=Thread&postID=60471#pos t60471][b]X-Perl[/b] - Not the clearest party frames, but they show me party targets and casting bars, which is the functionality I'm after, I may have to see if I can get them looking less cluttered though.[/quote]
Try [url='http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8401-PitBull3.0.html']PitBull[/url]. You can put together some really clean unit frames with it. Here's a picture of mine. They have a thin cast bar running along the bottom that you can't see in that pic and the player unit frame has a thin XP bar too. PitBull was a bit intimidating at first but I'd mastered everything I needed to within a couple of hours.

When I run my multiboxing teams I use Trinitybars, Pitbull, JasonQuest and Carbonite Quest. Plus a bunch of others, including some multibox-specific ones from this site.

On my main I'm still using Bongos and XPerl though, due to not taking the time to set up the new ones yet on him.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Kel',index.php?page=Thread&postID=60471#post60471

Trinity Bars - ARRGGHHH! Worked really nice at first, easily set up different bars and bindings and no worries about macro numbers. Unfortunately right near the end of the weekend I was getting a few more skills and so decided that some modifiers would be useful and I don't know if it's just me but I cannot get modifiers to work. If I put them in a macro then they will work on a keypress, but not if I press the button (so not very useful for my alts). I realise I could set-up modifier bars for this, but that would involve mirroring actionbars for all of my characters which is plain too much work when a simple [mod:shift] on one character should be able to do the trick.
I will be trying out different bar mods.

---

I've been struggling all saturday with this,
I had bound the modifier +key to Trinitybuttons in an early stage of ui design.
and removed them after.

It seems Trinity keeps the keybindings in it's own file,
If you unbind them from Trinity they get unbind, but they're still remembered, so the key + modifier is looking for an own button to push.

The following worked for me (on most keys, i'm still not completely satisfied and will have some more trouble with it for sure)

Unbind them from Trinity (mouseover and Esc)
bind them within the keybindings from WoW to something you don't have a keybinding for and unbind that again
(I'm not sure if you need to apply the changes in between that tbh, maybe that's why it's working on "most keys")

I've added some pictures and I'll try to get a better one of my group sorted out and a picture of my screen set-up (once I work out how).

Thanks for the advice on unit frames and bar mods. I'll probably try a few other options before attempting to get Trinity working again.

Pitbull is the best looking Unit Frames addon. But it is the biggest pain in the ass to configure.

You can bind smartbuff to a key using a macro, but I'm work right now and can't check my macros :(

You can bind smartbuff to a key in the keybindings from Blizzard,
it just won't start working right away.

I've been screwing around with it a lot so i'm not sure how I got it fixed exactly.
It might help to just open up the menu with "/sb menu" and close it.
It might help to show the action button, push the hotkey a few times and then turn the show option off again.

Last weekend was a bit of a fail, when I did manage to log in I had a lot of trouble with the new addons i was trying, so didn't manage to get any levelling done.

But.....


http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w...ultiboxing.jpg :)

Bf went from No, to Maybe to Yes regarding me having extra accounts, so here they are.

I've been busy unbinding all of the defualt bindings which might conflict with trinity (so shift-1, ctrl-1, etc) and hoepfully this will make it much easier for me to get my macros working. I'm naturally a clicker, so I didn't realise until recently that pressing shift and a macro on the defualt blizz ui won't work.

I still need to set up my unit frames, and I might try for something a little more creative as so far I've just been mirroring the blizzard default layout. With clones down the right-side of my screen keeping track of stuff on the left is not being so easy.

Hopefully I'll be able to update a bit on Monday, as I finally have 5 full accounts, I'm most excited about being able to start trade skills for all of my alts, but I'm hoping aswell to get to try DM out.

<Screenies to come>

Finally made it to 16 after what seemed like a very long time (I did all of the collection quests in westfall), so decided to head to DM. The traitor escort gave me quite a few issues as he seemed to pull all of moonbrook onto me, eventually I tried it and luckily someone had just cleared it out, so plain sailing there.

The group was all level 16 to start apart from the shaman who was 17, in half greens at most (the AH prices on this server are crazy). I think my tank had around 560 hp fully buffed.

I started off doin gthe undead quests, much easier now they aren't elite. Inside the instance my first elite pull ended up with a dead tank as I had runners, luckily I could res myself and carry on.

Instance Tip 1. Remember to repair before heading in.
My tanks weapon went red before I got to the first boss. I tried tanking him with a grey 2h sword that I'd picked up, but a mix of 0 sword skill and him hitting like a truck meant that I tried it twice and then decided to res my tank at the gy and repair her gear. She managed to die a couple more times on the way into the instance, she's not quite as tough without her back-up ensemble.

Rhahk'zor
So, got my 1h and shield back for another go at the boss.
I already knew that he does a stun and also that you need to pull him when he's away from the two defias or they will join in the fight. I decided to tank him away from my group as I wasn't sure if the stun was an aoe or not.
He hits bloody hard, but with my shaman healing, priest as back-up and pots/stone statues I managed to get him down.

No Miner Johnson and I didn't see him the second time I went either :(

Sneed + Shredder
Firstly the goblins, I seem to only be able to get 3 at a time for the first couple of pulls, I must be standing in the wrong place to get them. The do a cleave, so it's a good idea to tank them facing away from the raid. I sheeped one and managed more or less to tank the other two.

Again I tanked the boss away from the group. I cleared the whole room first as I know he can do an aoe fear, but he didn't use it either time I killed him. At 16 this is a really hard fight, still not easy at 18. First time I used everyones mana just killing the shredder, he's level 20, so prepare for quite a few resists with a lower level team. Sneed pops once the Shredder is dead, first time lack of mana killed me, second time I thought I'd have time to eat with my tank and so she was one around 30 hp when he spawned - not good.
Both times I wiped after killing the shredder and ran back in to fight Sneed (the shredder doesn't despawn luckily and I had enough time to run back, buff up and get to full mana before Sneed). Sneed himself is about the same as the shredder, quite high damage on the tank, but nothing terrible. Next time I'm going to try killing the shredder at the far end of the room and then running back before Sneed spawns, I'm hoping if I go far enough away he won't agro and I'll have time to drink up before killing him.

Defias Taskmasters - These mobs will run away from people in melee range, I found it easier to let the ranged nuke them down and heal with my paladin.
Goblin Craftsman - They do a move called Melt Ore which is a fire aoe, I tanked them away from the group to minimise healing needed (same with the evokers).
Goblin Engineer - Summon a little robot and shoot at you. I tried to LOS pull these, but in hindsight i might just be easier to nuke them down like the taskmasters, leaving my pala free to tank the robot.

Gilnid the Smelter
I pulled one of the goblins away from him when it walked far enough left, leaving me with Gilnid and one other goblin. I sheeped the add and focused on the boss, unfortunately my mage decided to attack her sheep (bad macros) and so the fight was messier than it could have been. The patrol after this boss has 3 mobs in it, I sheeped the evoker and ranged nuked the taskmasters.

After looting the Defias Gunpowder to blow the doors up an elite will spawn, I took my group into the little alcove where the barrel is and faced them looking ut in preparation for this. When you blow the cannon two mobs will run for the door, but if you're stood far enough back they won't agro.

Mr Smite
My favourite boss in the DM, he will agro as soon as you get in range of his stealthed guards at the bottom of the slope. He also stuns the group at certain % of his health so I find it easier to dps the adds down before the boss (or cc can break on the adds and you end up with a dead healer), I sheeped one add, killed the other and then killed the sheep. My tank was level 17 by this point, but it wasn't too hard to heal (with the priest acting as back-up if my pala dropped too low).

I went for Cookie next, again not too problematic, but I do remember having a bit of sdpike damage to contend with.

I was going to head up to try Captain Greenskin (didn't think I'd have a chance on VC at that level), but my silly mace decided to break again so I had to hs out. I did find that my toons had quite a large agro range and I managed to pull some adds from the upper platform, luckily it was only 1-2 at a time so no wipes here.

Summary for DM:
Trash is fairly easy if you adapt to the mobs (aoe away from group, don't chase the ones that run from melee) and the pulls are small, max 3 mobs if you're careful.
Remember the patrols that spawn after each boss, there is also a patrol of two mobs that will wander around if you wipe too much (I assume it's time based, maybe linked to a boss).
The bosses hit rather hard at lower levels (and lower gear levels) so I'd suggest having a back-up healer.

Notes to self for next time:
1. Try running away after the Shredder dies.
2. Change priest macros to a smaller heal when the shaman heals and a big heal instead of a nuke (to conserve mana).

I can't wait to try stockades and BFD, but as I've not managed to get any useful gear in DM yet I'm happy doing more runs through that (plus getting the last two bosses down). I'd like to go to SFK because of the rewards, but I'm worried about the long walk through contested territory aswell as the mobs that silence and shield against magic.