Before the server forced me to log out today for maintenance my team had almoast dinged 50 and will probably do so tonight. I am not sure *exactly* how people are getting to 60 in 20 hours but I am happy with the current progress of 30 hours to 50 for all 5 characters.

Here are some random throughts:


  • I really made it hard on myself going with a 1 pally/4 shammy for my first teamm. I have the hang of it now, but tank and spank is a lot harder to organize and run than just *spank*. And of course for normal questing the pally is pretty usless unless I can do AOE grinding. But for instances the pally is awsome. I went with this combo because I want to do heroics at 80 and pallys make awsome tanks.
  • 70 percent of my 30 hours have been spent doing things that make no experience. Most of the time has been spent making macros, moving the characters around the world, getting my config working, getting my computer setup, getting the accounts created and setup, etc. One day I spent from 8 in the morning until 2 pm just standing in an inn while I worked on macros.
  • I can see right now gold is going to be a huge issue. Everything x5 is expensive. Only using quested and dropped items has saved me some money, but also left my team a bit undergeared. I assume this will get better at 60 when I start doing more instances, but I do worry about x5 flying mounts, gems, etc.
  • I am not looking forward to buying 5 WotlK upgrades.
  • No matter how I tweak my graphics settings I cannot get 5 characters to run through Stormwind without my graphics card exploding (screens all freeze even though I hear sound). 4 yes, 5 no. Not a huge deal, but I assume I will not be able to take the team into Shattrath. I have spent enough time researching this to be frustrated of the problem. I have all the right drivers, great box and great graphics card. So I give up on this one.
  • It is difficult to handle two different classes with one keyboard (pally/shammy). So I gave 2-6 to my pally, and 7-0 to the shammies. 1 is the Big Button. B is mapped for everyone to "Buff", Num 1-5 is heal. I have the pally use his spell to pull aggro off the person being healed (this has been awsome). I plan to support ctrl and shift 1-5 to support Heaing Wave, Chain Heal and LHW, but it is mapped to Chain Heal for now.
  • The first time I tried a dungeon (Zul'furak) it took me about 5 minutes to wipe, followed by several other wipes in quick sucession. One of the big issues is that before 50 prot pallies do not have a ranged pull, which means my shammies were pulling and then my pally would attempt to pull aggro back to him. A lot of my wipes were also due to pure panic as I would freeze and freak out as my people started dieing left and right. So I tweaked my totems a lot so I could pick different earth/air/water totems for different shammies. I also created numpad 1-5 for "heal" of characters 1-5, with 2 healers responding to each person while rest dps. This all helped a great deal and I started moving through the dungeon. Took me 2.5 hours to clear it, and about 60 min for each run after that. Went from 42-47 very fast in there.
  • Another thing I struggle with is when my pally (which is controlling target) gets surrounded by enemies such that they are "behind" my shammies. When I move my pally, the mobs keep moving too. I do have my arrow keys replicated ( I use mouse to move), so I can do group moves and turns, but I have wiped several times trying to get my shammies able to fire. Still not sure about the solution when there is no wall to put my back to.
  • Mana is a bit of an issue, mostly because I don't have greater blessing of wisdom yet and I am not going to buff each char every 10 min. I have have the group drink after two elite groups of 5. I think chain heal is a mana hog, and so is CL.
  • I personally feel that the shammies are not really doing a lot of dmg. It takes a lot of volleys to bring down a single elite. I really don't have anything to compare it to though.
  • The pally on the other hand, is starting to really shine now that it is getting deeper into the prot tree. Block, block, block... She can take more and more abuse now. A little difficult to manage though, as she has a lot of spells on different cooldowns what she needs to juggle. I think each dungeon I do will be considered (by me) to be an appropriate level of difficulty for my team when she can tank each trash pack for 10 seconds without a heal. That seems to be the breaking point. The spell "Righteous Defense" is amazing. If I a shammy is getting hurt I kick off a heal for that shammy (so 2 other heals start to heal it) and at the same time my pally does a /cast [target=ClanXXX] Righteous Defense. This forces any mobs attacking my shammy to fight me instead... *even if they are ranged*... very sweet.
  • Looting is a big pain. If I want the non-main to loot for some reason then I either have to stop keyclone and use arrow keys, or move mouse to the other window and use mouse move. Sometimes this has diasterous consequences because for some reason my shammy will shart running away and the mouse will be zapped back to the middle of the screen. Everytime I move the mouse back to the other window it pops back to the main screen. I have had several spectacular wipes this way (ran right up the middle of the cathedral LOL). I wish there was a way for the leader to do all looting but have quest items randomly distributed to characters.
  • I have had lots of questions about the team. Mostly just curious and pleasent. The ones that really sort of creep me out are the people that follow me for like 20-30 minutes, not saying anything. I can just picture them filling out /reports and taking documentary screenshots lol. I have built some special macros to "entertain" people which has really helped good will. I also picked all female characters because they get an automatic 50 percent buff against mean people I did run into one other 5 person Multiboxer and we tentatively made plans to try the 10 mans in a few months.
  • Am I mis-remembering that you used to be able to have health and mana regen at the same time? (water and air?) I have been running instances with +healing totems and have the +20 percent glyph on them. This is a huge amount of healing even at my level ( about 40 dps healing for all characters). I do wish I could run with my +mana totems but I love the health more. Keeping eathliving weapon up on the shammies is a nice kick when healing also.
  • I notice that I am getting a RAF bonus for all rep as well as exp. I wonder if this goes away at 60 also.
  • Thank god for Jamba. Not only is it awsome for MB, but it is the only plugin that didn't break at 3.0 path lol


Thats it for now. I will keep you posted.

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