Considering coming back - what's new?

After an 7-8 month break, I'm now considering taking up boxing again. I see Cataclysm is now announced and looking nice - are there any news in the boxing community? Are there any significant changes?

Is my gear completely dated (was a mix of badge gear, heroic drops and naxx10) - what's with the new emblem system? Armory link here - although my char doesn't show up at the time of posting: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...horn&n=Bitling

Are there any new challenges to try out for a 5-man team? I was working on my proto-drake heroic achievement last I left off and I see a few people have gotten theirs since - did they change anything on the achievement system? Buffs/nerfs?

Anyway, I hope someone will be kind enough to get me up to speed - I'll be browsing the forums in the meantime :-)

Good to see someone else multiboxing something else other then shaman teams- hopefully that's what you do :) I don't know all your answers , but I can say there is more rewards for you to pick up from new content, such as TOC, ulduar etc. Beerfest is on now, and its gear is "vl200 or higher. Onyxia is redone, and has new loot. Servers have tons of people on them. Seems like this game will never die- honestly, dalaran has become even more laggy in the last 3months I had to up my ram to handle it lol.

Sorry I don't know much more, I'm just starting naxx now.

I'd also like to know any major changes made to pretty much any class or gameplay. I mean, it's so hard to figure out what's really new from reading patch notes when you've been gone this long. I've also been away from the game since February.

Fuzzy!!

Glad your thinking of coming back. Your videos and macros from your blog were a huge inspiration / help to me when I first put my team together.

As already outlined, the badge system has changed and TOC is the new 5 box challenge. Shaman have had a few buffs, Pally's had a minor threat nerf. Nothing to worry about though.

Cast sequence has been trashed, so investigate the posts by Fur and others in relation to /click macros and you should be good to go.

Sihl
Medivh US

I don't think all that much has changed. The badge gear you can aquire is much improved, equivalent to Ulduar 25 level gear, you can get 2 pieces of Tier 8 with relative ease. The Heroic Daily lets you get the current max lvl badge gear, albeit slowly.

You can also do regular ToC and farm it for ilvl 200 gear, and I believe the heroic version drops ilvl 213 gear.

As far as challenges, At least one person here has 5 boxed (solo) some of Naxx 10, so you might try doing that. A guildie of mine regularly 4 mans Flame Leviathan, alternating in lower geared toons for a chance at some good drops, you might try that.

o if u bind "interact with target" to a button, the target will select the target the main is targeting.. then if u have click to move on .. right when u press interact target (broadcasted to all people), all the alts with run to the person ur selecting and interacting with what they have to do,... ie open quests auto. So u never worry about getting them up to him close enough.. they go right up to them . and do all there stuff for u..

o this allows to multibox with melee eaaasssyyy

Wow, thanks for all the feedback. I will definately give some serious thought to coming back. Sold my secondary PC though, but upgraded my main PC (i7 920 water cooled at 4.3 GHz with 12GB RAM and an 2nd gen. Intel 160GB SSD :D). Might have to upgrade my old 8800 GTX though :P

How hard is ToC heroic compared to the regular heroic instances? And are there any group friendly quests with the argent tournament?

Most of the dailies at the argent tournament are group friendly actually.

There were some great mount changes made recently.

Normal ground mounts at level 20 for 5g total
Epic ground mounts at level 40 for 50g total
Normal flying mounts at level 58 for only 225g

your level 80 can purchase a cold weather flying BOA skill book you can mail to a lower alt. They can use it at level 68 for full flight through Northrend. So if you have an 80, your lower alts on that account can fly all the way from level 58 - 80!! :D

Other changes include heroic 5 mans now drop Emblem of Conquest (same as uldar bosses) so you now have all of the conquest, valor, and heroism badge vendor loot available for just running 5 man heroics. In addition to that, the daily heroic quest rewards 2 emblem of Triumph which only drops off bosses in ToC raid dungeons. The new 5 man ToC dungeon is challenging, but doable for boxers and drops 5 epics in both normal and heroic difficulties. (item level 200 for normal and 219 for heroic).

Lots of great changes since you last played for multi-boxers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sihl

Fuzzy!!

Glad your thinking of coming back. Your videos and macros from your blog were a huge inspiration / help to me when I first put my team together.

As already outlined, the badge system has changed and TOC is the new 5 box challenge. Shaman have had a few buffs, Pally's had a minor threat nerf. Nothing to worry about though.

Cast sequence has been trashed, so investigate the posts by Fur and others in relation to /click macros and you should be good to go.

Sihl
Medivh US

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What did they change about castsequence? Seems to work fine for me?

Castsequence is the same.
Castrandom is the big change/nerf.

Basically castrandom used to randomly try an option on each press.
And if that option failed, randomly try a new option on the next press.
Now it randomly picks an option and continues to attempt that specific option until it fires off.
So something like:
/castrandom Tranquil Shot, Rapid Shot, Steady Shot, Mend Pet...
Could get stuck on Rapid Shot if that was on cooldown and every press would do nothing.

Click castsequences are for most classes a ton stronger then normal castsequences.
Essentially pick the spells you'd cast for your class.
Pick how often you'd like them to fire off.
Prioritize which of them is more important.
Check how often you spam your dps key (spam it for 15 seconds, divide the number of clicks by 15).
Create a master macro, which calls all of the others.
Spam the master macro at your normal spam speed.
Set up the subsequent macro's with comma's (delays) based on your spam speed.

For example...

This will cast Faerie Fire once per target, no matter how many times the button is spammed.
It will then prioritize Insect Swarm over everything else, and recast every 18 seconds.
Moonfire is the next highest priority spell, firing every 12 seconds.
After that, it will randomly cast between Starfire and Wrath, with Wrath firing 2/3rds of the time.
I personally spam at 2 clicks per second, so have two comma's per second of delay in IS and MF.

Master:
#show Wrath
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton1
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton2
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton3
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton4

Button 1
#show
/castsequence [target=targettarget] reset=target Faerie Fire,Null

Button 2
#show
/castsequence [target=targettarget] reset=target Insect Swarm,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Button 3
#show
/castsequence [target=targettarget] reset=target Moonfire,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Button 4
#show
/castrandom Wrath, Wrath, Starfire




As long as I spam at my normal speed of two clicks per second, the spells will fire off on the correct timing.
Since wow executes top down, if two spells in a macro are both possible, the first fires off and the second fails due to the GCD.
Once the first spell is on Null (do nothing) or a comma (do nothing this press), the second spell can execute.

It's not worth coming back. If I were you I would wait until the expansion. I dont think thats going to get me back though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ualaa

Castsequence is the same.
Castrandom is the big change/nerf.

Basically castrandom used to randomly try an option on each press.
And if that option failed, randomly try a new option on the next press.
Now it randomly picks an option and continues to attempt that specific option until it fires off.
So something like:
/castrandom Tranquil Shot, Rapid Shot, Steady Shot, Mend Pet...
Could get stuck on Rapid Shot if that was on cooldown and every press would do nothing.

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I was actually using a technique not unlike the /click setup before I left and the only castrandom macro I remember having was my druid (/castrandom starfire, wrath) - I disliked the /castrandom on my paladin because I couldn't completely control what abilities went off when, so I opted for a /click scenario instead. Ironically the changes to castrandom haven't affected my setup at all, so that's pretty nice :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pinotnoir

It's not worth coming back. If I were you I would wait until the expansion. I dont think thats going to get me back though.

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I guess if it's worth it is a subjective thing - I did like SSO back in the days (argent tournament sounds good), and ToC + finishing up my heroic dungeon achievement could probably keep my busy for a while, so I guess I'm back in the game - at least for now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fursphere

The new 3-wing 5man dungeon in patch 3.3 is just *yawn* to you? I must really ask what you enjoyed about the game in the first place then.

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Seriously, new 3 wing dungeon with epic quest chain, yes please. brb changing pants.


meh, if it's not fun, quit. Less lag for me