New to multiboxing

[Hoho]

Hi all!

I've been playing wow for a bit less than four months. I have my main, L70 SP with very decent gear, L31 lock and L28 druid alts. I played around with multiboxing yesterday and it was quite fun. Well, actually I'm using just a single PC but it worked decently for me. I got three locks to level 9 quite fast and it was a lot of fun even when I spent half the time writing macros or regrouping after something went wrong. Today I thought about trying something more fun/challenging that would be interesting and viable in the endgame too (instances) and thought about using 5 chars at once.

My current HW isn't the greatest: Core2Duo@2.8GHz, 3G RAM, 7800GT running 64bit Linux and use dual 1280x1024 monitors. It worked quite nicely for three clients even without turning graphics details down (~25fps in orgri on main @1280x1024, alts at around 640x400, 35+ outside the city). I think that driving 5 instances of WoW should be doable on that machine with some graphics tweaking, I'll know for sure later tonight but if anyone has previous experience with similar config feel free to share it. I'm currently using keyclone through wine but it has some graphical anomalies so I can't configure it at all. If anyone knows of a decent working Linux alternative I'd like to hear about it. Actually I'd like to hear any tips you can give to someone who is running all the stuff under Linux

I've read most of the stickies and thought quite a bit about it and decided that my group will be pala tank, priest healer, mage for aoe/cc/free consumables(it would cost quite a bit to buy it for entire group) and two demo locks as DPS/aoe/SS and felguards as offtanks/dps or destro for some simple shadowbolt spam. I'm sure it'll be a hell to manage all those different characters but once I master it should be lots of fun. If you think some other group setup would be better/more fun feel free to share your opinion.

I think I'll be using my pala alt for tank for the group, create a new priest and reuse two of the locks I made yesterday for the group. Once I get all the alts high enough for the first instances their levelling shouldn't take too much time considering my tank is much higher level for them. I'm not sure yet if I'll use the pala to powerlevel priest to reach the same level as locks or not, I might do it though so the level difference wouldn't be that big. Or perhaps you think starting a whole new pala would be better to get better idea of the group mechanics as I could level them all at once and would be forced to use each class to their max to survive?

[Rhod]

I box a pally/druid/warlock and I can say that having that many different classes is a challenge albeit a blast to play. As I play, I notice that I'm rewriting macros as situations change and trying new things to make it easier and to lessen the amount of buttons I'm pushing. If you fine tune your macro's and keybindings to how you want to play I think you'll do just fine. I boxed Kara for the first time last week and it was definitely a challenge. My druid tanked Midnight while my Pally healed. My lock didn't join in until one of our members had to log for the night. Moroes was tough and the only ones standing at the end was my pally, a shaman, and our MT. Madien was a different story. I wrote some macro's that will be mandatory for me for that fight.
Such as
/target Owachi
/castsequence reset=30 Blessing of Sacrifice

and I will have to hoykey my Decursive add-on to my Mangle/Shred macro to clense the debuff she puts out. Just some examples of as the situtation changes, you'll have to adapt your groups macro's to fit the situation. Have fun and Good Luck.

"The IT Monkey" on these boards plays a set up like that. You may want to ask him some tips for that group make up.

[Hoho]

I tried it out last night and it worked quite decently. When turning all the graphics down and disabling some addons on the alts I had about 1G memory left free. When all four were following the main FPS on the main was around 20 in Orgri and 40+ in RFC.

I spent most of the time levelling my priest and mage to be at the same level as my locks (9) so I didn't have much time to try RFC too much. Also as my pala tank was at level 16 it was quite difficult to get too far (not enough healing, not enough DPS). After boosting them to level 11/12 on my things got much better and I was able to take down the 3-mob packs without too much problems. I'll be rewriting a whole lot of macros and figuring out more efficient keybindings so I could manage the the group better. Currently my main problem is that it is difficult to heal others, I have two keys binded for the priest to heal the tank, I'll have to think of something better for the future.

Also I might just boost the four lowlevels up to same level as tank to get them to work better together. At the moment they are loosing a lot of xp because of the level difference and keeping the tank alive and take mobs down fast enough is not exactly simple thing to do.

[Rhod]

Sounds like your having a blast. An Add-on I use is Healbot. It's an addon that displays yours groups health bars in a small window and lets you "click" heal your group members. For example, I have Flash heal tied to my left mouse button, Renew is tied to the middle mouse button (my scroll wheel), and the biggest heal I have is tied to the right mouse button. The other thing I do is write macro's for for medium and big heals and bind them to my "F" keys for instances where moving my mouse off the screen would be a little too impractical. For example F1 is Heal and F2 is Greater Heal, both of these Target my Tank. Just giving you another idea to see if it helps.

[Hoho]

Sounds like your having a blast

I like it a lot so far, though I haven't cleared a single instance yet, at least not without my booster

It's an addon that displays yours groups health bars in a small window and lets you "click" heal your group members

Well, currently my main is the tank so I kind of doubt that kind of clickhealing works. Or would it? I've never used that healbot addon before.

My first idea was to reserve five buttons, one for each of my characters. Depending on modifier keys I use they'll target one char and apply appropriate heal. E.g no modifier->small heal, shift->medium, ctrl->big, alt->hot. Has anyone done something like that before?

Another alternative I thouht was I should investigate if I can set my main focus by mouseover and then healer would simply target main focus and heal that. Latency could be a bit of a problem, especially when something goes bad and I need to react fast.

One thing is sure, I'll need to get a mouse with >3 buttons and some extra keys to help me out if I want to continue doing one-man instances