Cross-Class setups: How do you manage it all?

[EvilSqueegee]

With my Vboxed shamans being 70 hordeside, I decided the time has come to finally start my drenai team. Always wanted to play a dreani anyways...

I kicked it up as a 4-box team: one paladin and three shamans. Seems to be a pretty tried-and-true setup, leaving out the doomkin for easier runthroughs and to play with friends. My question, however, falls into the keybinds department. I've only got one keyboard. How do those of you who cross-class box manage your keybindings? It's a lot more interesting in my eyes, keeping track of seperate sets of abilities and so on. I know some of you out there play on PVP servers as well, so any tips or info you might have on setting up the controls would be greatly appreciated.

Level 22 and counting.

[Clone]

Unless you have an amazing memory at remembering what keys are bound to what (I know I dont) I wouldnt go cross class boxing without one of these bad boys :
http://www.xkeys.com/xkeys/xkpro.php
The keys have caps on them which you can put the spell icons inside, this allows you to glance at the x-keys and know what spell you will cast without looking at the slave's screen and trying to read what key something is bound to.

Other than that Id say its just about making good macro's that allow you to get a decent damage spell rotation all by pressing 1 key.

[EvilSqueegee]

I've seen the thread about the keyboard-made-foot pedal, which leads me to believe there's a way to roughly re-prorgram a second keyboard. If that's the case, I'd love to save myself 150$. The lower the budget I run on, the better. I've got 5 copies of wrath to pick up soon, after all. :P

Anyone know anything about this?

[jurence]

Oh man thats a good idea. Like, get a racing footpad thing with 3 or 4 pedals, have each pedal assigned to a modifier (alt shift etc) ... brilliant!

as for the op, i have no idea. I'm going to be struggling with that myself here in a few hours. 2 shaman - 2 paladin team ATM at level 28. I have 2 level 70 shamans, and plan to do 3 shamans 1 paladin in the long run at 80... not too sure how its going to work out. Will probably make paladin the main. All shamans really need to have is 4 buttons (basically)

lightning bolt, earth shock, frost shock, chain lightning

Could add t-storm in there too I guess

Then the paladin just needs... paladin goodness to hold argo!

[uRabbit]

I'm running a Druid/Warrior team right now, and I don't use any addons or key cloners. I do use Healbot when it's working, but that hasn't been for a while. It's not hard for me to remember the bindings of two classes (which includes 1-6, F1-F6, alt+1-alt+6 for both toons). Druid is easy to remember, as I'm just spamming 2 and 3, and occasionally rebuffing with shift+1 and shift+2.

I imagine it might be the same when using multiple of the same class. Just keep all their bindings the same.

[Rigz]

I boxed a Paly, Druid, Mage, Warlock and Priest. At the same time.

It is not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. Just takes more setup time.

My advice is to stop thinking of them as separate characters and think of them as a single char doing several things at once, jobs if you will, like tanking, dps, healing, cc, ect. Consolidate as much of the same role, like tanking for example into as few buttons and macros as possible, then make buttons for dps.
With five seperete classes I managed to fit basic tanking and dps into three keys tops, and healing into 2 others.

Cast sequences are a must. you also want to make most of your macros as spamable as possible in my experience.

After you get the basics in you can make bind extra buttons for rarley used abilities and cooldowns you only pop for bosses.

[valkry]

For a 2 class set-up, you could try disabling hotkeys on your pally by using a bar mod or something and just click to cast spells. Use hotkeys for your shammies.

[jurence]

Well, you have to consider: What spell are you going to be spamming the most on your paladin? Make that the same key as lightning bolt.

Honestly I can set all of my shaman buttons i need (aside from totems which are alt + numbers ) to 1-6, then have the paladin for only letters and shift + letters

[valkry]

I have seen a mod where you click on a mob, and a pop-up window opens to the side of it with what spell you want to cast at it (all your instant casts mostly). Seemed fairly interesting but probably takes up too much foom for my taste. Shame I can't remember the name though.

[Solmaran]

I boxed a Paladin tank, Boomkin, S.Priest, Aff Warlock and a BM hunter at the same time.

It's really not that hard. I made a macro with a castsequence in it on each of the characters and bound them all to the same key.
On the tank I play normally, and when I want dps I just jam the castsequence button. I also have a castseq button for heals.