Next Step

[Tyval]

I've been reading trying to learn as much as I can from the forums and has been a great resource, though at the same time a bit overwhelming.

I've finally got my team to 60, mostly boosted chars via a lvl 80 feral druid to this point. Now that I'm 60 I figure time to start actually playing as a team.


My team:

Prot Pali (65)
Priest (80)
Shaman (60)
Mage(60)
Mage(60)

I could also use my Raf to grant up to 60 and swap a mage for another shaman, (also have a warlock in the back ground).

So any thoughts as to char swaps are welcome (My goal for first set is what works the best/easiest)

Started working on my macros (never really used very many in solo play).
If read/done the macro 1.5 and 2.0 guides, that was a big help.

So now I use the focus target, have follow/assist/attack macros.

Right now for dps with adds I pretty much am just spamming arcane missles and lightenbolt.

My questions:

1) prior to 60 was healing with shaman, and found it hard to directly heal non tank folks. I would just hit f2-f5 to target then heal. But that would mess up everyone elses target. How do most folks cast heals on other party members? Or should I rely on aoe healing for rest of party?

2) what would next step in macro work be? I was going to look into castsequence macros as well as buffing macros. Trying to add/learn a little bit as I go. Kind of overwhelming if I try and add/learn everything at once.

3) Cures/dispells etc. Don't really have these hooked up yet, figure I should be assigning keys etc.

4) addons, have just starting looking into addons helpful for multiboxing.


Plan of attack.

1)Learn tanking on my pali (never really have much ) but will have my 80 healer to soften the learning curve.
2) healing, making sure I can heal/cure party members.
3) Optimize dps.

Thanks for any and all pointers.

T

[Ualaa]

The pally will eventually have a 96969 macro.
You get the last spell for it, at 75th.
Basically one button spam, which is superb single and aoe tanking.

I like the priest as the healer for a team.
I'd spec deep Discipline, with some points in Holy.
Penance is an amazing heal.

For the three DPS, I'd go 2x Shaman and 1x Mage.

Spec the mage, arcane.
With something like:
/stopmacro [channeling]
/castsequence Arcane Blast, AB, AB, Arcane Missiles.
/cast Icy Veins
/cast Presence of Mind
/cast Focus Magic
/use 13
/use 14

Two shammies, should just about cover all of the totem combinations.
Three would be better, but two will work well.



For the heals, if you're not using Repeater Regions (IS Boxer), look into assist macro's.

#show Heal
/assist Paladin
/cast [help] Heal; [help, target=targettarget] Heal

Basically, you can heal a friendly, by having the pally target it.
And if the pally is targeting a hostile, the second condition targets the target of the mob.
Who is generally a friendly.

You'll probably want a few dedicated heal keys, in addition to the assist.
And a keybind for an AoE heal too.



For the dps, look at click castsequences.
It is in the wiki.
There are only a few classes where a click sequence is not ideal.. like arcane mages.
For just about everyone else, click is a dps boost.

Put the click dps on the same keybind as the pally's 96969 macro, so both get spammed.
You might have each of these on two keybinds.
So you can have a priest dps macro on one of the two, but not the other.
So the priest can dps easy stuff, or not dps (heal instead) on harder stuff.



Check out the addon Jamba.
Essential for boxing.

[Tyval]

Thanks for the tips.

I'll swap out a mage for shaman today, he will only be a lvl behind once I gift him 60, so won't be hard to catch up at all. And doing the totem quests at 60 will be pretty speedy as well heh.

Currently I'm using keyclone, not sure if it matters much vs ISBoxer (which I know nothing about).

I'm sure I don't have the ideal setup, but I do something like this..

I use a gamepad and have 9,10,11, and shift-9, shift-10 shift 11 bound to the various heals of my priest but currently they are macro'd for the focus target, so if I understood your macro, if I adjust it, It would still normally heal the pali, but if the pali targets a friendly it will heal them. Will try that today.

Oh , excuse the macro noobishness, but would the macro you gave for healing heal the pali when the pali had nothing targeted?

I'll read up on jamba (have seen it mentioned quite a bit on the forums, no idea what it does hehe)

Also will start reading up on the click macro stuff. If I understand correctly it is stringing together a group of macros...

Great idea on the 2 key binds for dps one sans healer. I did swap him to discipline before I went out. BUt for the most part he could bubble, and if he took dmg usually only the first tic of Penance was needed.

Got some good practice in, Did ramparts and blood furnace. Nice way to ease into things, tank a bit higher level than needed, and healer much higher, Priest bailed me out of a few mistakes, and could keep the group up with holy nova. Normally if I did something stupid or made a mistake it was in keeping the group up, tank was of course fine.

I plan to do each instance on the way up for practice (and a bit of gear) so my skill will hopefully go up as my healing becomes less uber for the instance heh.

Thanks again for your tips and pointers.

T

[Ualaa]

Keyclone vs IS Boxer.

KC = $20 per license, one license per computer, lifetime duration.
ISB = $36 per year, good for up to five computers at once, subscription.



As far as key replication goes, they're both excellent programs.



With KC, any key pressed is broadcast to all other clients.
Except that you can blacklist certain keys to not broadcast to anyone.
And have a pause button.
KC can use Hotstrings, where a key pressed in one window is broadcast as a different key in the other windows.



With ISB, you have both keymaps and repeater.
Repeater, sends everything you type to all clients (unless a keymap conflicts).
Repeater is a lot like the default KC broadcasting.

ISB also has something called Keymaps.
Keymaps are extremely configurable, and are possibly the strongest feature of ISB.
They have a hotkey to activate.
Can be as many steps long as you like (a step is an action which occurs on a press of the hotkey).
With one step, it always does the same thing.
With two steps, it will do one thing first, and another thing on the second sequential press.
You can build a round-robin, by sending a keybind to each wow client, one at a time, on each step.

More then one thing can happen on each Step.
For example, you can have all the slaves/alts assist the active toon.
And then cast a buff.

You can really configure the target of a Keymap.
Choices are a given Slot (basically an account), by team name, by action group (configurable group), by character name, the current window only, other windows without the current window, or all windows.

Keymaps allow you to be extremely flexible on what your keybinds do.

The wizard gets you a bunch of FTL DPS keymaps.
Basically, press 1 through =, and the slaves will do the same.
But they'll assist you first.
Automatic FTL is a very nice feature of IS Boxer.



KC has mouse broadcasting, but its not a strong feature of the program.

IS Boxer has very strong mouse broadcasting.
You can enable it via Repeater.
But you can build it into a Keymap, for example press a key (which hits Hurricane and Blizzard on two toons).
The Keymap turns on "send next click" for toons with ground target AoE spells.
You move the mouse in your current/active window, and it moves on each client too.
Click where you want the AoE, but the click only occurs on the AoE casters screens.
And that turns off broadcasting.





The Pally macro would not default to target the pally.
However, you could add another conditional to it, if you wanted that behavior.
Add:
[target=Pally'sName] as another condition, prior to the Heal spell outside of the last bracket.
Would need a semi-colon after the [2nd Bracket Condition] in that case.





Jamba is extremely nice.

You have "masters" and "slaves".
And can change who is the master on the fly.

The slaves will mimic a lot of the masters behavior.
Such as selecting quests, npc dialogue, choosing to make the inn your home, etc.
They will take the same flightpath as the master, if the window is open on all toons.

You'll want "CTM" click to move, enabled on the slaves.
Your main will target something.
You'll press the key for the slaves to assist the main.
You'll press your keybind for "IWT" interact with target.
The slaves will move to the target if they're too far away.
If they were close (or when they get close), the window will open.
The master will also have the window open, on the IWT key press.

At which point, just about anything the master does with the npc, the slaves will do too.



You can give tags to toons.
My priest has the tag [priest], while my druid has the tag [druid].
When an npc sells a reagent, every toon with the tag [priest] buys the appropriate candle, until they have 80 of them (I choose the reagent type and 80 as the number).
Similarly those with the tag [druid] buy whatever.
The mage buys stuff too.
Just need to open the window of someone who sells the reagent.

Similarly, all my toons auto sell grey quality items, just by opening a vendor window.



Jamba is very nice, doing tons of stuff for us.

[Tyval]

Thanks for the great overview on ISB and jamba. I've been dreading questing due to all the dialog stuff, but sounds like that will solve those issues nicely. Think I'll stick with keyclone now as I have it and seems to do what I need at this point and time.

in regards to the healing macro, So what i'm wanting is exactly what you laid out, with the addition that the heal will go off on the focus target if the other conditions aren't met.
so if I change it to

#show Heal
/assist Paladin
/cast [help] Heal; [help, target=targettarget] [target=Pally'sName]; Heal;

Would this work?

Also if I changed pallysname to focus would it then default to whatever the current focus is?

Note: I promise to read more on macros before I ask more noobish questions, but thanks much for your help.
I need to find a nice description of macros as a programming language (syntax, keywords , then I'm sure it will all make sense as another programming language).

[Ualaa]

If you are using Focus, as your assist, the syntax will be:


#show SpellName
/assist [target=focus]
/cast [help] Spell; [help, target=targettarget] Spell; [target=Focus] Spell

[Tyval]

Thanks!

For now I feel more comfortable using the focus target method,

Only thing I noticed when testing is if the tank had a target and I healed, then he cleared target, and healed it would base off last target if still valid, so I added a /cleartarget at start of macro, and that seemed to do the trick.

not sure if the last case will be that useful but if nothing else it has forced me to learn more on macros (started reading the wiki)

You have been a huge help, I got my second shaman to 60 and the totem quests done, so off to try an instance!

T

[Ualaa]

Pretty much... if you do things really quickly after a target switch or focus switch, it gets the old target.
You need to wait roughly double your latency, for things to update.
More then that, if Wintergrasp is in session on the server.

If you have 300ms of latency, and switch targets.
It is 300ms before the server knows you have switched.
And another 300ms, before it lets the other toon know.
Or thereabouts.

[Tyval]

Update:

Went through Ramparts and Furnace, with my new modified team. Seem to go much smoother, dps of the casters seemed to go up noticeably by changing the cast macros into a cast with target=focus target (before I had another key I would hit to get everyone to assist the tank. (sometimes would miss it on hectic fights).

Heal macro's worked great , though I really don't heal too much yet. I was having some power issues on the pali now and then, I was pondering swapping to 2 hander, but unsure if the extra healing would make up for the lack of mana on a block/parry. I figure it will fix itself though when I move to more level appropriate content so will probably ignore for now, and once I get divine plea I assume will be a non issue. Could also start pulling multiple groups.

Team is almost lvl 62 (tank 66 and priest 80).

I'm on to the underbog next set of instances. Will probably do some quests and get the instance quests and then head in.

Next things to hookup: need macros for removing poison /curse etc. Though maybe totems will do some of that.

Also need to macro the pali sequence, currently I've only got judgement on the spam dps macro and hit the other attacks manually. I guess no reason not to set it up (even if I'm missing the last attack still.)

The most important thing though, I'm having a blast!

T

[Tyval]

Time for more questions:

I ran through slave Pens and Underbog.

Slave pen was easy, though I wasn't prepared for the fellow with the totems , and didn't remove then fast enough so had a very long fight and was mostly out of power at the end.

Underbog though I had some issues keep my mage/shaman alive.

From this came a couple questions.

1) Do folks mostly just keep everyone together for most fights and heal through the dmg? I had some issues trying to move folks out of the way and keep them in range for heals. Right now I could probably heal through stuff pretty easily with an 80 healer but dont' want to develop bad habits.

2) Positioning, it seems I might need some macros for position my dps folks, spreading them out etc.. Do folks do this often with multibosing? I just auto follow, drop totems , strafe to break auto follow and move my tank a bit away.

3) should I get some macros for healing non tank/healer? I could add another condition for if target is friendly for tank, but figure I'm doing something wrong if I have to untarget the mob during a fight with tank. Should I have the shaman set up for aoe healing to take care of dmg to mage/shaman /shaman?

4) detrimentals. Do I need to worry about curing party of these type of things at higher lvls? if so I should probably start learning now.

The two instances didn't net much exp so going to do quests in underbug till 64 I figure then move on to forest.

Thanks as always for tips /pointers/slaps

T