5 boxing 5 classes

[Steph]

I just want to mention something that I think you are overlooking a bit in your reasoning. You are looking at the classes as if there would be one person to play each class. That however not going to be the case. You will need to split your attention between the characters. For that purpose, everything that makes doing the job more efficient or just less difficult to control helps.

A properly played rogue requires correct positioning and timed attacks for example, making him an inferior choice as multibox dps due to the horrendous amount of attention required.

In my setup, I use three felguards as tanks if needed and use a holy specced priest to heal. The benefit is very simple and clear: I dont need to do do anything about the felguards, they do the tanking part by themselves, leaving me responsible for dps and healing, rather than dealing with all three jobs.

Next, I can use Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing and Holy Nova as heals that affect the whole party, including pets. Fortitude also includes pets, as does arcane intellect. When going into a group of 4-5 elites, I can kill each of them very quickly with focussed DPS, but I dont have proper threat built on each of them. That is when Holy Nova as threat free AoE heal/dmg comes in handy. Doing any normal heal, the untouched Elites would go straight to the healer, Holy Nova avoids that problem. It is not very mana friendly, but I dont need more than one of two of them really to cover the time while there are unattended mobs around.

[Bunny]

I agree on most points you mention steph.
I have a group of 2 locks 2 mages 1 priest at 43 right now and quite frankly I am a little burnt out. I am going to let them collect some rested exp for a couple of days.
The melee group will never perform as good as 5 players with the same classes and they will probably never be as effective in the instances < 70 as the cloth group (aoeing your way through RD is really funny 8) ) but I want to try it anyways.
I have always liked melee type characters and never played a shaman or paladin before, so the worst that may happen is that in a couple of weeks I find out that I can't accomplish anything with that group. So I return to my clothy group with a couple of new macro ideas.
Anyways,
I will try it this weekend and see if it's fun.
Bunny

/edit
Thanks for bringing up the point that holy nova is thread free. I have never fully utilized that fact in my clothy group. Gonna need to change that

[Xzin]

I suppose I should have mentioned it before because it seemed so obvious but I completely agree with Steph. You have to be able to "set it and forget it" when it comes to multiboxing. You cannot and will not (without scripts, bots, etc) be able to time everything perfectly, which is why almost nobody multiboxes rogues. Positioning characters is a challenge and always will be with five ones to position, on top of everything else.

What really makes the Zins so powerful was my class selection. Mages have ranged damage, they do need to face their targets (unlike Warlocks dots) but many of their spells are instant cast and they have synergy with the Priest's aoe heals. All four of the mages (most of the time) act as a single mage, so I am only dual boxing really. Healing and Damage. Once you go beyond that, you start to get really complicated and things start to break down fairly quickly. Some people can and do box 5 different classes but personally, I feel that unless they were played so flawlessly that the expected results would just not be there, for the same reasons I did not box in Naxx. I would have very quickly caused us to wipe on many encounters that were so critical attention wise.

That all said, you can be very successful multiboxing with 2 or even 3 different classes AS LONG AS THEY HAVE SYNERGY. Warlocks and Mages are perfect due to their very similar "types" of spells. Shamans have great synergy with themselves (and perhaps a warrior) and a priest gives great aoe synergy as holy or shadow.

[Kyosakana]

Micah 5-boxed a melee group, including a rogue. His blog is here:

http://5boxwow.blogspot.com