Thanks for the welcome all.

I'm still kinda stumbling through my set-up I guess. It's not so much a matter of figureing out how to do it as trying to figure out what I want to do. The more I read here, the more I want run to the store and buy 4 more accounts. But then I go back to raiding with my guild and my main and I wonder why I was even thinking about multi-boxing in the first place.

I'm kinda back where I started. I originally stumbled upon this site when searching for some hints/tips/macro's on how to play one char and have a 2nd char in /follow. I was interested in this because I wanted to start an alt and figured I'd see if I could do 2 at a time. Pretty much everyone in my guild runs several alts (all at 80) except me. I've always appreciated their versitility and thought it would be nice to have the same capability.

I guess the root of the question is do you multi-box to support your main or do you run your main to support your MB team? I realize that plenty of you probably do both, but I may be a bit more limited on time, so I feel that I have to make a choice to focus on one or the other (at least for now). So my goal is to level some alts up as quick as possible - and multiboxing with refer a friend, looks to be a great way to do that. I have little/no experience with other char's ourside of my mage, so I'm having to learn that as I go too. I've also decided that I'm only going to keep 2 accounts when this is all said and done - but I may run a 3rd or 4th account for a little while to help level.

I figure my focus for my first few alts should be a Druid and a Paly. With dual-spec comming soon I want some chars that can play all 3 rolls (Tank, Heal, DPS). My 2nd priority is to get a shaman and priest leveled up. That would give me all 4 healer classes and each one can DPS as well. I also get 2 tanks. Beyond that I'd like to get some of the other classes too - but I can't do everything at once so I'll wait on my Warrior, Warlock, Rogue and Hunter.

So now I'm trying to figure out what's the fastest and cheapest way to do this. One one hand I can buy 4 new accounts, rolls one of each of 4 toons I want to keep then boost them all with my 80 mage. I probably couldn't effectively control 5 classes at once, but with my mage nuking everything in sight I can probably boost them well into their 60's before I can't just solo with my mage and keep the others behind for healing support. Mage tanking FTW!!! But that would cost me 4 accounts and in the end I'd have to pay to transfer 3 chars to get back down to only keeping 2 accounts. I'm also really pushing the limits of what my hardware can support. It handled 3 accounts pretty well - I'm still trying to get 4 accounts to run at once and having some problems. I'm not sure 5 at a time will be playable.

The cheap option is definitly to only pay for 2 accounts and then just level them in tandem. I effectivly loose my ability boost, and only doing 2 at a time would be much slower. Obviously this would be much easier to control and actually play my new alts as I level them. And I won't smoke my hardware playing only 2 at a time either.

The option I'm leaning toward is picking up 2 (or maybe 3 if I can get playable FPS out of my current hardware) accounts and then transfering 1 (or maybe 2) chars back to my main account when I'm done. I'm wondering how tough it would be to run instances with 3 (maybe 4) chars. Thoughts? This would still let me level all 4 classes at the same time, so I'm not having to make multiple leveling runs.

As kinda a seperate thought with 3 or 4 accounts, I could run a more "normal' multi-box setup and try groups like: Paly, 3x Priests or Druid, 3x Shaman. If I just pick of these and level them to 60, I could then gift my other 2 toons to the accounts I'm keeping. So that means only 1 run to 60 to get 4 seperate chars's to 60 and I don't have to pay to transfer any toons, although I would have buy 3 more copies of vanilla WoW.

Hmm - still thinking of the possibilities I guess.



@BigSmitty - if you ever decide to come to the dark side and roll a horde - give me a yell. Natural Order is a great guild. I don't see to many other guilds that can keep it casual and fun, but still see some end game raid content. Glad to see some fellow Farstriders out there - there's not a lot of us. (Fair warning, the /trade chat on the Horde side is terrible - our entire guild is actually thinking about relocating to a different server. Not that I think it will really go anywhere as no one is going pay $100 to move 5 toons, and people wouldn't want to just move a single char.)