Suggestions on triple-boxing WOW

[Adronson]

I dual boxed WOW when it first came out with a Pally/Lock combo and had some fun with that.

Now that BC is out, I've come back and think I'll try out triple-boxing.

I'd like to run three sets of three, covering all nine classes. Combos I'm thinking about are:
1. Pally/Rogue/Shammy (Seems like this would work with Pally Tanking and Shammy healing -- a lot of buffs here)
2. Warrior/Mage/Priest
3. Lock/Hunter/Druid (I have no idea if this would work)

I will either be running two toons on one machine and the third on my laptop or all on one machine (equipment seems to be able to handle it but not sure I can)

Does anyone have any thoughts on how this would work? Any suggestions? My goal here is PVE and having some fun running a group on a RP server.

[Xzin]

For PvE, almost any combo is viable. But 2 melee range classes at once, especially rogue + anything is going to be REALLY hard to play.

Don't even think about running 3 WoWs on a single machine, unless you have a quad core triple 8800GTX box with 3+ gigs of memory.

Which I happen to have. I still wouldn't play three copies of WoW on it. Pretty sure my rig can handle it at playable settings but not sure if a dual core or lower could cut it with what I would consider playable in high lag / player density situations.

It would be far cheaper / better to simply use 2 or 3 computers. You are going to be switching back and forth so fast, I think you are going to have a hard time, especially with the classes you are proposing.

Think carefully about what each class has to do - their position requirements, their tanking ability, how you intend to run heals, form shifts, etc. What exactly do you want to achieve in PvE? A fun and interesting group? A powerful group?

Of the three you suggested, priest mage warrior (holy trinity) sounds the easiest to manage and most likely the most effective for most requirements. But YMMV and what you are looking for may not be the same as me.

[jabowah]

Warrior/Mage/Priest would be difficult due to the mage needing to face the targets plus with the /follow walking thing now there's an extra 5 seconds of them catching up to you (unless you have an easy way to break follow early if the warrior charges) That was my experience from doing my 60 war/60 sham/64 mage.

Tonight I'll give a war/sham/rogue group a chance, I don't think it would be that bad compared to a caster with a 2+ second cast time as long as I back up a little for the mob to get in the range of the rogue's melee. Plus windfury and chain heal in case the rogue pulls aggro where I can keep the group up.

I'm currently saving up for an x-keys pro and multicaster so I can start moving away from using software to broadcast keys and get rid of using the boring old ` to = with alt and shift modifiers for keybindings.

[notole]

I usually use two keyboards for my grouping. With the second keyboard on the right controlling all my secondary chars. (ie; Priest, Mage, Warlock, Druid, Hunter). Its really quite easy on that secondary keyboard to set up your key bindings in a logical and easy to find pattern.

The key I use the most actually is tilda ( ~ ). On every single secondary char this is bound to move backwards. So the way most fights flow is. Warrior charges and does warrior things on primary. On secondary keyboard I hit ~ stopping them in place, and start my sequence of attacks with 1,2,1 etc...

I'm not really sure how this would work on a computer running two wow programs. Does one keypress send info from the both clients to the server? Or do you have to alt tab? I don't know.

Just food for thought. I think the holy trinity would probably be the easiest.

[Adronson]

Thanks for all the comments and tips. I decided to start out with the trinity. I normally play hybrid classes, so I’m not really used to playing either of the three. I’m also trying out a pally/mage/priest. The healing seems redundant, but it’s nice to have two characters that can rez.

Xzin, I guess you are right. I have a pretty good machine – a Core 2 Duo with 2 gig of memory. It was working fine running three WOWs in Elwynn Forest and Stormwind, but when I got to Ironforge I’d get disconnects. No real latency problems, but the secondary characters would drop. It always happened when I was moving from place to place. The accounts following the lead would disconnect from the server. Never happened to a character when I was playing it directly, always on “follow.” The latency meter never indicated a problem. Anybody know what was going on there?

In any case, I played for about eight hours and I’m hooked on it now. Got to figure out how to set up two machines.

[Xzin]

As much as I would love to take credit for being right, you may be experiencing the disconnect /follow bug as discussed in other threads.

If performance is ok for you in IF or other clustered areas then box as many as you can. I would imagine that 3 would be playable at the same time with a high enough graphics card, enough memory and a dual core or better. Your version of playable and mine might be different though.

Check the other threads about the /follow bug and (hopefully temporary) workarounds.

[Adronson]

Well, that /follow bug does seem to be the problem. Thanks. My symptoms are exactly those reported by others here and in WOW tech support. I guess I'd better figure out how to deal with that before adding new machines.