First post. Great forum. I'm about to jump head first into it, likely buying my newest comp in a few days.

I really wanted to run my plans by everyone to see if anyone had any feedback (especially of the form "oh, that's a really bad idea, you really need to do X").

My primary goal is doing as much 5-man content as I can, up to and including heroics. I am far less interested in PvP. That being said, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna roll my characters on Magtheridon because, all other things being equal, seems like a good place for tips and what-not. Even though I'm interested in PvE, every server I've ever played was PvP so I don't really have anything to gain by being on a PvE server (gonna be a totally new reroll, either way).

I plan on getting a quad-core machine (core2 q6600), with 4GB of DDR2 ram. I'll probably get a 8800GTS vid-card using 2 monitors with 1 main and 4 quad-screened. I may buy a second cheap vid card to render for the second monitor if I have framerate problems. I have an older comp to dump an account (or two) onto if I need to.

As a proof of concept, I got 2 warlocks and a mage up and running on this comp (an archaic 1.7ghz machine), and got them to level 5. I got keyclone working. Got all my macros up and running. I ran at about 20-25 fps when the other two were minimized and dipped into the low-teens with them all up, but it worked.

Here's my first question: why do people install multiple copies of WoW? It seemed to work great with just running the same executable 3x. The only reason I came up with is that you can have diff. video-settings for diff accounts.


Since I'm most interested in 5-manning instances, I've put an inordinate amount of thought into my party make-up (and read every thread here and elsewhere) on the issue.

Here's my thought process. I need a priest, a tank, and 3 dps. Priest is a no-brainer, for me.

For DPS, obvious choices, are: Magex3, Warlockx3, or some combination.

For example, a hybrid approach gives a huge amount of utility... portals/summon/food/water/soulstones/etc... but is it worth the hassle? The way I see it, you'd have to pretty much treat either a lone mage as a gimpy warlock or a lone warlock as a gimpy mage.

I know absolutely nothing about hunters nor how viable they'll be as part of a multibox with the 2.3 changes. Do they bring enough to the table to think about putting them in the mix for dps?

Tank: Warrior, Paladin, or Druid. From my reading and experience, warriors require alot of micro (a bad thing) and aren't as good with large pulls (a really bad thing, as I see it). Plus, I have a friend who stopped playing with a 60 warrior I can swap in, at the end, for 25$. So, for me, warriors out.

That leaves me with Paladin or Druid. This is a tough call for me but I'm leaning towards druid for the simple fact that for most of the game, you don't need a tank. In all those cases, I can use a druid in caster form adding in dots and rooting and things like that.

Here's the group I'm leaning towards: Druid (main), Priest, Warlock, Warlock, Mage.

Anyone got any thoughts on druid v paladin? How about mages x 3 vs warlocks x 3 vs WWM (or even WMM?). Anyone have any worries about my hardware for running 5xWoW on a single comp?