3 or 5 box....

[Perrigrin]

This is a question to you boxers out there, myself I havent really boxed since back in EQ (on WoW now).

Found this site and got real inspired, but I have a question:

Is 3 boxing worth bothering with in the following scenario, or is 5 boxing the waaaay superior thing:

I want to run priest+2 (or 4) locks, from level 1, stopping at 19 and 29 to pvp a LOT and then run pvp including arena at 70.

I would have liked to be able to run instances with them - but not sure if 3 can do it.

The reason I'm asking is that today I have 1 rig that can run 1 main and 2 tiny subs, which works ok for it seems - to scale to 1+4, I would either be using a few lower end PCs as secondaries, or upgrade the main to a monster - but for space and cash reasons I rather play with 3 -- but then again the question: would 3 (1 priest and 2 locks) be viable and fun in PVP? Or would the loss of detailed control not be worth it over just the fire power of 3 toons instead of 5?

lots of rambling, but I'm sure you understand the question

[Gallo]

Well, 5 toons can EASILY 1-shot other people at will. 3 toons may not be able to do it as readily.

If you're planning on doing instances as well, I'd go with 5 boxing. I have a pretty good system running 2 wow's, and I bought some cheapo used 1.7ghz athlon PC's, and tossed in the lowest video card that would run WoW (like $35 each). It was fairly cheap, and works for me.

[Perrigrin]

biggest issue is space tbh -- do you use 5 screens for your boxes or just 3? and how many low end boxes do you have?

[Gallo]

Here's my overall setup:

Main Rig: Athlon 64 4000+, 2gb RAM, Geforce 7800 GT 256mb gfx card. (I run 2 WoW's on this... my tank and my priest)
Secondary Rigs: They are all 1.7ghz Athlon's with 1gb ram. I have 3 of these and they each run 1 instance of Wow each (my 2 mages and 1 warlock).

I use a 19" LCD Monitor for my main rig, and I have the 3 secondary rig's connected to my old 19" CRT through a KVM switch.

I mainly do PVE... but a lot of the guys here that PVP insist that having a monitor for each character is critical. In the interest of cost and space, you might want to try it with only 2 monitors.

If your main rig can run 3 wow's, I'd look into making a rig that can barely run 2 WoW's.

[Xzin]

PvP at 19/29 with cloth is an exercise in futility.

[Wilbur]

PvP at 19/29 with cloth is an exercise in futility.

Yeah

biggest issue is space tbh -- do you use 5 screens for your boxes or just 3? and how many low end boxes do you have?

What you could do, is buy 2x 19" or 21" Widescreen monitors as well as 2 Medium spec Dual-Core Machines, turn the monitors vertically and have them flanking your main monitor. Then using WoW Maximiser cut the 2 Widescreens in half and have them running 2 characters each.


This would give you pretty good performance and would save on a fair amount of space. Of course, this isnt the cheapest option ;-)

[Quix]

To follow up on the 19's bracket specifically, your only option is WSG

Multi boxers = Reason to LOSE WSG games.


Don't get me wrong, I love PVP on my 5box group in the larger battlegrounds, but its just not good having 1/3 or 1/2 of your team doing 1 thing, in WSG when the other 7 (or 5) are usually "PUGS" not in vent with you.

[grimfandang0]

to follow up some more about 19 brack PVP and WSG, you will see this bracket dominated by hunter twinks, Casters don't start getting spell damage gear till around their id 30's but melee can get AP (from Agi and strength) from the get go. You are going to want to wait till the playing field is even (or in your favor to be safer)

[Xzin]

I did A LOT of WSG.

We won A LOT.

But, I had 5 guys going for the flag. 5 GOOD PvPers who were there for one thing - as many points as possible with the least amount of effort.

1 runner, 4 on offense and myself, on vent, one shotting their flag capper and my guys ready to cap ours as soon as I returned. With priest (mindvision, now nerfed), some UI mods to allow me to sticky target the flag carrier and 4 mages - we MOPPED UP WSG pretty hard.

But if I did PUG WSGs..... it was a different story. People would follow me around just to watch me. Which meant nobody would get the flag. Same with AB.

AB we would almost always 4 or 5 cap but it took 10 people WITH A KNOWN STRATEGY and ABILITY TO QUICKLY ROTATE AROUND ME. You have to play a completely different game and go where you are needed when you are playing with 5 guys who HAVE to stick together. There is no room for individual superstars. If you are needed to go somewhere, you go there. By and large it worked very well. The Zins would come in and bring down the hammer, take the node then I would rotate out and 2 - 3 would rotate in to take the node.

I could take out 4 or 5 guys nearly 100% of the time if all of my cooldowns were up. But you had to keep moving and well, not suck.

If we caught them off guard in the beginning, we would push them up into their GY and AoE camp them as they spawned for a quick 5 cap. We had a lot of 5 caps. If they got momentum or somebody stumbled, we would 4-1 which was still pretty quick.

As sad as it is to say, if we went up against organized teams, we generally opted not to play them as our queues were instant, I could hang my Zins back and invite people out and we wanted points, not slow games that we could lose (but generally didn't, they just wound up being 3-2 matches and thus far slower). The PvP system has been revised somewhat now to prevent some of that and encourage people to actually play games. But when you incent people go for max points and not reward them for considerably harder matches, don't be surprised when they avoid them in favor of better alternatives.

[Xzin]

But again speaking to 19 PvP as casters vs melee.

Don't waste your time. Seriously. You will go in, get your entire team 5 shotted by a super twink rogue that has 1200+ hit points and all sorts of armor and weapon buffs. And you will have 300 hit points and no armor.

Oh and your spells do 5 - 10% of his health. All 5 of your spells. You can load them up with a full round of dots and it will not even kill them.

If you want to PvP at level 19, figure out a way to melee. Maybe hunters.

But don't waste your time with cloth at 19. It is seriously unbalanced towards melee classes. 29 isn't much better.