PVE multibox play relative to loot and quests

[bigbearjeff]

Hey guys. I have been 2-boxing for a long time the "manual" way. I recently got keyclone and well.. it is pretty amazing, but I do have a few questions. I am not a pvp monster like so many are. I applaud you all,but I am more about PVE content. Having said that, I would like to hear how PVE people deal with getting NPC quests for 5 characters at once and turning them all in at once, and dealing with loot. I personally find looting in a manual 2 box scenario a royal pain in the ass. I usually set loot to FFA and loot it all on the main toon, but... and there always is a but... THere are those lovely collection quests from hell. I would like to hear how you deal with that when 5 boxing etc.

This is a great forum folks. Thanks for all your comments and input so far. I am looking forward to your response.

Bigbearjeff

[Dorffo]

I switched from 2boxing to 5 boxing, mostly PvE oriented as well (PvP to fill in some gear holes while I collect stuff pretty much).

I run with loot on FFA and loot up everything with my main, I have one char that disenchants, another that tailors, another that just has lots of bag space for gray vendor junk etc. When my main guy fills up I pause for a moment and clear out my bags putting stuff on the right storage toons until I should hit town again (or they all fill up whichever is first).

Questing x5::
I avoid most collection quests if they aren't 100% drop rate items or close. The exception to this rule for me is if the collection quest starts or is in the middle of a quest chain that I am interested in completing.
I usually just grab quests with my main toon and share them with the other 4.

Turning in quests::
I don't have a synchronized mouse, so I just click on each screen through the quest complete dialog.

[Kel]

I have my screens set up through keyclone so that I can see all 5 at once (though 4 are really tiny), for quests I pick it up on the main and if it's shareable, just share it to the alts (with an addon or macro to accept it with them), for non-shareables I click on the npc in each toons window.

Collection quests I loot the item from each alts window (clicking again, which can be tricky with all my alts stood on the mob), starting with the 'bottom' alt and working my way around to my main. This means my main can always see the quest items, so I don't have to check each alt for each mob I kill to see if it can loot anything.

Tunring in is point and click again (first with my main so I can check the rewards, they are too small to see on my alts so I just memorise which reward is where and click on the appropriate one - either for equipment or best vendor price). I didn't find it terribly time consuming, but did have a couple of issues when my alts had run out of bag space.

[Ken]

I avoid collection quests too, unless I know for sure that the droprate is high or unless I only do the quest with 1 character.
The latter happens when I do an instance with 3 of my characters + 2 from a friend and the xp bars go out of sync. I like to have them more or less in sync, because then your chars gain skills at the same time.

[KvdM]

I use keyclone's picture-in-picture switching for doing collection quests. Do the quest on your main character until it has all the items it needs, then pip switch the next alt to the main window and continue the quest with that character. This way you don't have to bother with the smaller alt windows.

[Mak]

I have my screens set up through keyclone so that I can see all 5 at once (though 4 are really tiny), for quests I pick it up on the main and if it's shareable, just share it to the alts (with an addon or macro to accept it with them), for non-shareables I click on the npc in each toons window.

Collection quests I loot the item from each alts window (clicking again, which can be tricky with all my alts stood on the mob), starting with the 'bottom' alt and working my way around to my main. This means my main can always see the quest items, so I don't have to check each alt for each mob I kill to see if it can loot anything.

Tunring in is point and click again (first with my main so I can check the rewards, they are too small to see on my alts so I just memorise which reward is where and click on the appropriate one - either for equipment or best vendor price). I didn't find it terribly time consuming, but did have a couple of issues when my alts had run out of bag space.

Well said. I do the exact same thing. I normally do avoid collection quests but I'm running 4 draenei with my NE priest and on all my draenei so far in the game, I've gotten the Saber mount. So...I have to do ALL the Darnassus rep quests and I never realized how many hours I would spend in Teldrassil. So, unless there's a reason to do the collection quest, I'd skip it and go run a dungeon (when you're at that level).

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I'm setup with Octopus mouse-click sharing, so it's just a matter of clicking each dialog once (sometimes twice if the chat text is slightly different based on name length causing lines to wrap differently). Ditto for NPCs like flight masters. Looting with alts for quest items is just 5 clicks in teh same spot. Not a big deal, really. I don't have to switch mice or do any wizardry with input to get it to work. Only exceptions are that some dialogs present several possible versions of the text causing buttons to be slightly offset vertically. For selecting quest loot, I just click the one I want and then manually mouse over and select the one I want to change for a particular alt if needed. It's really very seamless and talking about it in text doesn't really do it justice. Octopus having the mouse-click replication and KVM-style mouse-over-to-other-desktop feature (like synergy/multiplicity) is just too damned convenient.

[Deltis]

My setup 2 PC's one runs my main and the second runs my 3 alts. Using keyclone and a virtual KM software from KaVoom allows for me to use one mouse for both systems. For pickup quests I just run the mouse off the left edge of my main monitor to my second monitor click the mob move the mouse to the right of the second monitor back to the main monitor and off I go.