[Guide] Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) Multi-box Compendium

[RedSorc]

Setting up and basic controls

For those who find it more helpful, here is a video demonstrating everything that I’m about to discuss in the coming wall of text. I go over the bare-bones set up from start to finish.

<<Video will appear here at some point over the next day or so!>>

So, let us address the biggest issue we need to resolve head on: DDO does not have a follow function. This is the most important fact about DDO ‘boxing and is the reason why the game has largely gone neglected as a multi-boxing game. Frankly, even if you had a follow function, there’s so much platforming and geometry-based stuff in DDO, it’d probably still be a pain to box.

Let me give you the good news: This is the ONLY bad news about DDO. Other than that, it’s pretty much the perfect game to multi-box. There’s near-infinite progression, it’s still regularly updated with new content (there was literally a new expansion a few days ago), you can complete almost all the content with just a 2-box, rotations can be exceptionally simple to manage, there are npc hirelings you can use to pad out the party to make your life simpler…

…if only it had a follow command.

As such, almost the whole game is trying to figure out how to move a pair of characters around the world with the least amount of frustration. I have a solution: I call it “dual-wielding” multi-boxing, and it works just as well on a number of other games (most notably Guild Wars 2).

First of all: you are pretty much going to need an MMO gaming mouse and ISBoxer. I would recommend the Logitech G600 as it’s the only MMO mouse I’ve ever purchased that has lasted longer than about a year, but any MMO mouse with 12 or so buttons on the side will do. Its absolutely possible to do this without ISBoxer, but it makes your life so much simpler;ISboxer is probably the happiest money I’ve ever spent.

Here’s the basic plan: We are going to run one character using our left hand and the keyboard, and we’re going to run the other character using our right hand and the mouse. We use WASD (or ESDF) movement keys to have character #1 move around, and we use the side buttons on the MMO mouse plus right-click steering to move character #2 around. It takes a certain amount of practice to get comfortable with this, but you can happily move both characters around independently after a little while.

Hence “dual-wielding”: I’m playing one copy of the game with each hand, dual-wield characters against the enemies.

Critical to this is keeping half an eye on each character at the same time. To facilitate this, I prefer a vertical split-screen set up instead of using one monitor per character, as would seem the natural approach. As mentioned before, if you’ve never done anything like this in the past it might take a short while to get comfortable with flicking your eyes back and forth between the screens and using your peripheral vision, but the process of improving at this skill is kind of its own reward. When I play well with a dual-wield set-up, I feel like I’m scratching a similar sort of pleasure centre to the one I’m scratching when I begin to develop fluency playing an RTS game.

If you’re unfamiliar with ISBoxer and don’t know how to stitch this all together, I would direct you to the video above, as it’s probably more efficient to just see me do it that it would be to follow a text guide with a thousand pictures.

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Let me now mention a bunch of other hotkeys that you will want to get set up early on as a part of your DDO multi-box.

“Rotations”

So, “rotations” aren’t really a thing for DDO, and we’re going to do our best to avoid them if we can (see the characters section). However, there are some buttons to press, particularly for spellcasters, and we are going to want to unify as much of that into one button as we can.

First of all, you are going to want to make sure “autoattack” is enabled for every character. Even spellcasters lose nothing from throwing out the odd tickle with quarterstaff between spellcast cooldowns. If you go through your feats in you character sheet, under “Basic Feats” there is an autoattack feat. Drop it on your hotbar and give it a keybind: you want it always toggled on. Sadly, there are lots of things that turn it off. The big two are dying, and using the search ability, so you definitely want it keybound so you can retrigger it when necessary. For some builds (for example, Mechanic Rogue), this is literally the entire rotation sorted.

Otherwise, you are generally going to be simply mashing a bunch of buttons. Outside of monks and some epic destinies, DDO generally doesn’t care about what order to do things, we just want to use the strongest available ability. This works well with an ISBoxer keybind that rapidly mashes “1-2-3-4-5-…” or whatever very quickly. I call such a keybind a “heartbeat”, and I use similar keybinds in pretty much every game I’ve ever multi-boxed in order to simplify my controls. I generally bind this to mousewheel up so that I just need to roll the mousewheel when I want the bad guys to hurt. If the AoE rotation is different for whatever reason, that can be bound to mousewheel down in similar fashion.

Targeting

Without macros, getting targeting right is not as simple as in some other games, but you can quite easily set up something that works, particularly if you use the “heartbeat” approach. There are two ways forward: nearest target and an assist setup.

In the case of nearest target, its really simple: There is a “target nearest enemy” keybind available in DDO’s keybind menu. Set it to something, then stick it in the heartbeat. Done: the characters will then always target the nearest enemy when you are attacking, which is almost always the correct choice for melee characters and a perfectly fine choice for 90% of encounters for ranged characters. Simple and it works.

If you need a little more finesse, you can set up an assist system. There IS an assist target hotkey available in DDO somewhere in the depths. Simply set up a multistep keybind that targets your other character (this will be F2 by default, unless you’ve done something weird), then presses your assist target keybind in step two. You can throw this into the heartbeat and have it only trigger for “Window: All w/o current” and you now have an assist system.

If you’re good with ISBoxer, this is the tip of the iceberg and you can do more cool stuff, but the above two setups will suffice for 99.9% of the game.


Jump

You want to have two jump buttons, one for each character. Jumping is a big deal in DDO: there’s lots of platforming sections, and jumping is actually a skill that characters can be good or bad at. It’s an actual “thing”. As such, I highly recommend your jump buttons are some of your most easily accessible. I use space for the keyboard character, and one of the front corner buttons on the side of the MMO mouse (e.g. button G9 on the G600).

Make sure you set the hotkey to “Hold any Keystroke Actions while Hotkey is held”. It’s not a big deal for the actual jumping, but the jump button is also used to move upwards while swimming, so you’ll want to be able to use it to control your ascent.