Tanks, tanks and more tanks!

[kalrok2]

Hey guys

I've got 2 80s, a Druid and a Warrior, and after playing WOW for 2 years I've realised I enjoy tanking the most. However I've gotten sick of raiding as it's just too much drama and admin and starts feeling like work after a while. Both my chars are kitted out with gear from heroics and Nax 10 man for all specs and I don’t really feel like doing badges for emblems for slight upgrades.

To keep me playing WOW I’ve decided to level another tank, a DK currently at 64. However I’m now thinking I want to go the whole hog and level a paladin as well so I have a tank of each class once the expansion comes out and then I can decide on which tank(s) I want to focus on in the expansion.


After reading these forums for a while now I'm seriously considering creating a multiboxing team to level with my paladin. Reason being I’ve heard RAF is really good for levelling 1-60 and then from 60-80 I can just run dungeons by myself as I think this is the best way to grind XP, especially as there are no travel times now. Once the team gets to 80 I can then just do heroics with my Pala and DK to farm gold and emblems until they’re kitted out.



After reading the forums I have come up with the following options:

• Option 1 : Create 4 shammies to level with my paladin to level 60 with RAF. Alternate my DK / pala with the 4 shammies to get them from 60-80. At 80 use the 4 shammies to grind gear for all my tanks at level 80.
  
  • Pro 1 : Easiest way to manage a 5 box team
  • Con 1: Will have to use each tank separately, so will take longer to gear them all out.
  • Con 2: After thinking about it, if I do this might as well just keep all my tanks on 1 account and then grind PUG heroics like normal so no point multiboxing a team just to kit out my 4 tanks
  • Con 3 : When the expansion hits I would have to level all 4 tanks
    
• Option 2 : Use my paladin as a tank (seems like it's the easiest one for multi boxing based on what I’ve read), use my warrior for dps (fury I guess?) and DK as dps (no clue on DKs which spec is best for multiboxing dps?) , use my druid as healer / dps (whichever is easiest for multiboxing), create a 5th character as dps / healer (depending what my druid and whatever class is easiest to complement this team for multiboxing)
  
  • Pro 1 : Quickest way to gear up all my tanks as they’re all in the same group.
  • Pro 2 : When the expansion comes, I can level up all 4 chars I want with 1 group myself
  • Con 1 : Harder to 5 box due to different classes

QUESTION 1: Is option 2 a viable setup for multiboxing and if so what is the best group composition?




Next question I have is about hardware. The specs of my laptop are:

• Dell XPS 1640
• Intel Duo CPU T9400 2.53GHz
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670
• 4 GB Ram
• 128 GM SSD harddrive
• Windows 7 64 bit

I’ve experimented by creating 4 trial accounts and setting the graphics low and it seemed to cope pretty well so I’m thinking it should cope with 5. However that was in a starter zone and I’m wondering if heroics would be a different story?




If required I could use my old Desktop:

• Intel 4 3.2 Ghz
• 2 GB RAM
• ATI Radeon X850 256 Megs Rams
• Windows XP

Just for info I will be upgrading my desktop within the next year or 2 and that will definitely be able to handle 5 boxing.


Question 2 : Would my laptop be able to handle 5 WOW copies at low detail at once or would I have to split up the WOW copies across the 2 computers?

That's about it for now, look forward to your feedback!

[Moorea]

if you set things on low you can run 5 wow on your laptop - it will be bad in dalaran because of memory though but at least until you get to northrend it'll be fine

If you have a druid and warrior tank and want the other 2 tanks and you also want to maintain 5 accounts for a while I would make a RAF group with
Pally tank, Throwaway dps something, healer, dps, dps
replace the throwaway by a DK at 60 (you can raf dual DK and get 2 DKs to 61 in a couple of hours)

As your group will be melee heavy anyway, you could start with 5 pallies (1 prot 4 ret) and later swap 1 for the dk as above

When some toons get to 59.9 make sure to grant 1 level to get them to 60.9 - you can use the levels from the DKs too for that


I think it mostly depend whether you want to actually multibox or just get toons faster - but you can start 1-60 multiboxing and see if you get the bug

[kalrok2]

Hmm to answer your question I would rather get toons / gear them up faster rather than multibox full time.

Actually thinking about it, I think maybe my best bet is to dual box 2 tanks at a time. This would save me double the time by using 2 toons at once and it would not be as much effort as running a full team.

Currently I have 2 WOW accounts (used RAF to level up some alts with keyclone):

Account 1:
Lvl 80 Druid / Horde
Lvl 65 DK / Horde

Account 2:
Lvl 80 Warrior / Alliance

I guess the best bet would be to do RAF with Account 1 to get an Alliance Paladin and then Transfer either the Druid or DK to account 2. If I did this I would then have:

Team 1 : DK Tank with a Druid (I guess boomkin as ranged DPS is easier to manage?)
Team 2 : Paladin Tank and Fury Warrior

Question 1 : If I wanted to make 2 teams to do 5 man content is this the optimal class combo and spec combo for the 4 classes I want to play using dualboxing? Or should I consider doing the new Faction change thing to get the best combos?

Question 2 : As a dual boxer, assuming I wanted to tank and DPS with my other char in the group, do you think I would encounter problems doing Random Heroics, either technically running the setup or people complaining that I'm a dualboxer?

Thanks

[offive]

I do think the pally is the easiest to tank with, I have all the tanks but a feral drood (mine is 72 and leveling with a pack of hunters). The classic pally shammy combo does offer a lot of advantages, hence the popularity. Pally tank rotation is really simple, shammy /click sequences are simple as well. You can get massive healing and quite good dps out of the shammys. There are many ways to skin the cat so to speak, it all comes down to your level of interest and creativity.

If you set up your mixed melee and ranged correctly its not too much harder to play than a tank/ranged team. The big additon is hitting interact with target so your melees run and face the right way. I have run mixed melee and casters with my different tanks and really I find it a nice break from the classic tank and ranged team makeup.

When I was leveling my group of DKs I found and stuck with a blood worm and permanent ghoul spec that allowed for decent self healing and dps in blood presence. Tanking spec is pretty much dual wield full frost for howling blast. I boiled my dps DKs down to a single cast sequence rotation based on rune timing and I am happy with the dps level they kick out.

If you want the pally tank fast, a RAF setup is the fastest way to go. If your looking for fast ways to gear toons out then full 5 boxing makes the badges roll in once you get a base level of decent 80 gear. I also think once you start 5 boxing you will get hooked, as most do. Two boxing... tank and healer would be your ideal for pugging, but tank and ranged dps would be the easiest to control. Raiding anything as a multi boxer is easier if you pick all one class and spec. I know you said your not into, but I thought I would throw it out there.

Just like you, I want options when Cataclysm comes out, so that I can play whatever classes get tweaked into popularity or gets me interested. The whole hunter focus thing has me interested so I will have 5 hunters ready to level up to 85.

I only play games on laptops when I am on the road, otherwise I prefer the big honking monitor (or two) and full speaker setup. So I would say sure your laptop might play 5 wows, but why would you want to? If your going to box, it means your gonna spend the money, so spend the money and do it right. You can find lots of computer spec's in the hardware section. The base key things for software boxing are quad core proc, at least 8 gigs of ram, a fast video card if not two, and decent hard drive speed (but it looks like you know about SSDs). Hexa core procs are on the way this year, but no real date set to my knowledge.

I hope my wall of text helps you out!

[Drizzit]

at least 8 gigs of ram

This will only work if have a 64 bit chip and 64 bit version windows. If you use the 32 bit windows the most the computer will see is like 3.5.

If your main goal is to get a dk and pally to lvl 80 then you can try this. Get 2 more accounts and link them together so they get the RAF bonus. Create a pally and a throw away toon. Lvl them to 10. Use their your druid or warrior (whatever can handle a bunch of low lvl elites) and power lvl them SFK 10-20; SM 20-35ish; 35-45 ZF/ST; 45-55 Scholo/Strat; 55-59 ramps. At 59 get to 1 bar before you lvl (you can get closer if you want just don't ding 60). Get the throw away to 60 and grant the 59 to 60, which will be 61 really soon. For you DK you can either run with 1 dk in the story mode and get out then grant lvl to the dk to get to 61 or run 2 dks in story mode. When your DK is out, run outland quests with your pally and dk. Depending on how well geared your tanks are you can also run instance in outland to lvl them, but i think this is slower then questing.

I found that boosting 1-60 is a joke with RAF (about 3 days part time)
I heard that 60-80 is best threw questing.

[Boylston]

Actually thinking about it, I think maybe my best bet is to dual box 2 tanks at a time. This would save me double the time by using 2 toons at once and it would not be as much effort as running a full team.

This is your best bet. If you want to fill out your stable, get an RAF setup for the two characters and then just dual-box them together through quests. If you go the DK+Pally route, you also have the flexibility of speccing the DK as Tank, the Pally as Holy, and just using the dungeon finder tool to grab 3 PUG DPSers if you want.

RAF+Questing+Dual Boxing means that this little pair will level very, very fast, and you can even do collection quests without a huge headache.

Making a 5-character multiboxing team for the purposes of "leveling fast" is not a good idea.

You might also consider some powerleveling with one of your existing tanks on account 1 while account 2+3 (RAFed together) soak up the XP... Then quest from 58 or so onward.

[offive]

This will only work if have a 64 bit chip and 64 bit version windows. If you use the 32 bit windows the most the computer will see is like 3.5.
.

Sorry, my bad, have not been on any 32 bit OS for long time.

[Drizzit]

Sorry, my bad, have not been on any 32 bit OS for long time.

Don't worry about it . I wasn't trying to be harsh or anything. I have a 64 chip but use 32 OS, just because a lot of people at my work, IT, say that 64 has too many problems with it. Trust me i wish that i did have those extra 4.5g of memory. Maybe I will go 64 with windows 7, if they worked out all there bugs.

[kalrok2]

Hey guys

Thanks for all the feedback. I think the best thing for me to do is:

OPTION 1 : Account A (MAIN) --RAF--> Account B --RAF--> Account C

Then use A to boost B and C through the 10-60 dungeons. Once my paladin is at 64 I will dualbox him with my DK via questing and doing random dungeons with rested XP.

However seeing as the WOW battlechest is only £5, and I will be boosting my RAFs anyway (ie the amount of admin would be the same for 2 or 4 accounts), what about this:

OPTION 2 : Account A (MAIN) --RAF--> Account B --RAF--> Account C
Account A (MAIN) --RAF--> Account D --RAF--> Account E

By doing this I would get: 6 Level 60s (4 from boosting 2 from granting levels). In the end I would transfer them back to my main 2 accounts in case I ever decided to try a different class in the future.

I'm guessing that OPTION 2 means the boosting would take twice as long as OPTION 1, seeing as the XP is split 4 ways and not 2. However this is probably worth it if I end up with 6 x 60s rather than 2, what do you think?

[offive]

Hmm XP 64bit was problematic, but VIsta x64 was fine, and Win7 x64 seems to be fine as well... Also enterprise/work "bugs" could range from out of date applications to ancient hardware that would be defined as bugs of the OS. My guess is you have more up to date hardware and software at home than you do at work. Most gamers do. I mean I just ripped an old dumb terminal controller out at a client site just last year... check your work site, if you see thick net and vampire taps in use, it's probably safe to upgrade your home computer to Win7 X64