AOE Madness

I wanted to talk a little about where I came from and where I would like to go. I have been two boxing for a long time. Back in the EQ days I used to three box. Of course I did it all manually, as I never knew about or even considered using something like Keyclone etc. Needless to say, my eyes are open now as I realize I am still in control of all characters using this product.

I am the king of AOE (Area of Effect) killing. I like the challenges it brings and the massive destruction it causes. I have leveled a priest/mage combo to 70 twice now. It is quite fulfilling, and they are a great team.. They have nice buffs that compliment each other with Fortitude, Spirit, and Int. My technique has always been to pull 6-12 mobs (depending on the mobs) with my priest. I usually pull with Shadow Word Pain and let the dot create nasty agro. The purpose of this is the priest’s armor buff coupled with Power Word Shield (And possible racial shield) buy me time to bring the mobs to meet my Mage. My mage is a killing machine. She is designed to kill in quantities. She basically spams Arcane Explosion sharing the love with many mobs until they succumb to her affections. Additionally, my Priest will Power Word Shield the mage to start, followed by Prayer of mending, and then spam Holy Nova putting out additional damage and healing for the priest and magel. If you run into trouble Priest drops a Fear Bomb sending most of the mobs away long enough to heal/evocate and rinse and repeat.

This is a pretty straight forward method of killing large quantities of mobs.

There are some disadvantages. Casters suck. You quickly learn to take the mobs to the casters or try to avoid them all together. Hard hitting mobs eat through cloth wearers fairly quickly.

I am just a two boxer, but.. I am starting to get the itch to add box #3. I can only imagine what a pair of mages with my priest could do. I am sure it would cut my downtime. I bet that 4 mages and a priest would be insanity, but being that I recently leveled a Prot Paladin up to 70, I have wondered about the idea of a Priest, a Paladin, and three mages. I am toying with this as.. now we are talking about holding aggro, keeping everyone alive, and major AOE damage. In higher level instances I would think it would be a more realistic approach.

I do have a question though. Is it possible to tell the mages to target the Paladin with the Blizzard Spell? Right now it draws that round destination circle on the floor. I was hoping to find a way to center it over the Pally. Using Blizzard will help manage and slow down mobs during a battle, and might be more realistic relative to mob aggro in larger fights.

Either way, I am sure some of you can see where I am going with this, and all of your input is valuable. I look forward to hearing your 2 cents. Keep in mind, I am a PVE guy not a PVP.

All the best,

BigBearJeff

“Sharing AOE love with the multitudes”

I completely understand the AoE love you have. I'm in the same boat with Prot Pally/Priest/3 Mages. There is a post in the macro forum on using Blizzard to target on top of your 'main" (paladin) - but it only works in certain areas/map textures. I've gone with Arcane Explosion (20/0/41) and Frost Novas. Works insanely well on non-elites, and decent on instance trash (pre-Outland, not yet 70 so haven't tried AoEing Outland instances...I imainge non-heroics wouldn't be hard). All 5 of my characters are Blood Elves, so they have the AoE Silence Racial which I stagger/sequence to good use.... casters are not an issue ^^ Archers are sometimes a thorn tho.

i'm at work... but . i think you could cast the spell (blizzard, flamestrike, whatever) ... then do a /target <paladin name>
since the mages are waiting for a target... and you give them one... i think that will work.

let me know if it does (i cannot confirm from here)

good luck

The minimap p ing hack works faily well for blizzard. Nothing short of a ping on the minimap or a click on the screen will do that for blizzard. For what it's worth I leveled Team Doublemint to 70th without using blizzard at all. 2 mages, 1 priest and a paladin... joined by my shadow priest @ 70th (I'm considering pushing another mage to 70 to round this out better, but the shadow priest has nice synergy when I remember to use)