Gear for a 5 boxing team (and what classes to equip that gear)

[daviddoran]

I was wondering, what's the best way to gear out a 5 boxing setup? I know with PvP all toons will get equal honor credit (is this right? I don't do much PvP currently, as I only one box with a holy pally at the moment and my dps sucks...)

For PvE though, you'd either have to go by quest/reputation rewards, or random drops. The drops could be troublesome if one has multiple of the same class, for instance 2 mages eat up all the cloth +spell damage gear.

To me that makes for a prime reason for PvE 5 boxing for different classes, just so when you get random gear drops from dungeons, you likely have a character that can use it.

I am just theorycrafting, as I only have 2 accounts at the moment, but I had a blast getting a Belf Pally and a Belf Mage to lvl 9 in a few hours, way more fun than solo grinding IMO.

For my team, I'm thinking:

Prot Pally, Balance Druid (moonkin FTW), Resto shaman (or half resto), Mage, and ? For the last spot, I am debating between a second mage, shaman, or druid, or some other DPS, like warlock, hunter, shadow priest, Retadin (lol). Mage would help with pure dps, and an extra sheep doesn't hurt, but with a shaman or duid, I can off heal, off tank, etc. Plus with a second druid, I can respec and switch him to Feral, and switch the pally to holy, if I don't need too much in the way of AoE healing (my main is a holy pally, and healing multiple toons in dungeons with heavy AoE is a PAIN)

Am I on the right track?

[Jaws5]

What i have found that works well is this, what ever toon you need gear for have them go into the instance first. The loot table is set for them. mail , plate, cloth etc.

it works for me

[Zaelar]

The randomness favors having different classes.
If a boss has 5 drops, one for each class you have and they all have a 20% chance of dropping and always drops one, it would take an average of 11.41666~ runs to get the drop for all of your characters.
If you ran the same boss with 5x one of the classes it would take an average of 25 runs to get the drop on all of your characters.
When you include multiple bosses it gets better for different classes.

Try to have classes that work well together without much thought. You can set up a sheep macro prior to fighting easily enough, but doing it mid-fight doesn't work well. Things that are automatic or fire and forget, like buffs, are good, but utility that requires attention, like chain trapping with a hunter, is going to use more attention than it's worth. Have a plan to set all of your dps macros on the same button and mash that button. You could have them all on different buttons and mash them all for more control, but plan around them all being mashed. If you can't properly set someone up on a castsequence macro(or just a /cast if it's one spell), then they are probably not contributing as much as you'd like.

[wowphreak]

one of the thing that can help in gearing yer chars is getting into a profession.
like if yeh had muliple cloth caster getting tailoring would be great some of the higher end patterns are hard to beat.
leather working and blacksmithing, as far as i can tell, dont get nearly as great of stuff as compared to tailoring but
it can help if yer not doing heriocs yet.

another thing that will help is to search wowhead.com thottbot.com or what ever to look for quest that give decent gear.
They both have semi decent search/filtering functions.

[Kyudo]

one of the thing that can help in gearing yer chars is getting into a profession.
like if yeh had muliple cloth caster getting tailoring would be great some of the higher end patterns are hard to beat.
leather working and blacksmithing, as far as i can tell, dont get nearly as great of stuff as compared to tailoring but
it can help if yer not doing heriocs yet.

another thing that will help is to search wowhead.com thottbot.com or what ever to look for quest that give decent gear.
They both have semi decent search/filtering functions.

I'd agree with this, particularly for tailoring. With the amount of instance runs you'll be doing it will be virtually no additional effort to level a couple of tailors to 375. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking or Engineering however, take a lot more effort, and doing them more than once is painful.

[Gadzooks]

one of the thing that can help in gearing yer chars is getting into a profession.
like if yeh had muliple cloth caster getting tailoring would be great some of the higher end patterns are hard to beat.
leather working and blacksmithing, as far as i can tell, dont get nearly as great of stuff as compared to tailoring but
it can help if yer not doing heriocs yet.

another thing that will help is to search wowhead.com thottbot.com or what ever to look for quest that give decent gear.
They both have semi decent search/filtering functions.

I'd agree with this, particularly for tailoring. With the amount of instance runs you'll be doing it will be virtually no additional effort to level a couple of tailors to 375. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking or Engineering however, take a lot more effort, and doing them more than once is painful.

God, yes, tailoring is easy with MBing - my guild bank is stuffed to the brim with cloth, I'm selling off silk at 4g a stack now because I just don't have room for it anymore.

I'm gonna need to buy another slot soon, time for the 70 to get back to work on dailies.

[zarocks]

One reason I chose 5 different classes was so that I could utilize as much gear as possible since I would be grinding instances primarily. Early on so far, most of the good "caster gear" has been Cloth, so I have been equipping my Shaman/Druid with several cloth items. Later on down the road, I assume the gear drops to be more specialized to certain classes/roles.

Regardless of your class makeup, there are always going to be a TON of drops which can't be utilized, but that's when Enchanting comes in.

I remember running Deadmines and having Cruel Barb dropping from VC twice in a row. In the past (multiboxing and soloing) I always wanted a couple of these to dual wield but I had to end up disenchanting one of them. Very painful!

[daviddoran]

I just had a thought. When you do different classes, obviously different races have different starting areas, so for instance if you are alliance, your shamans have to be Draenei, and Belf for horde paladins.

What do you guys do about getting the characters all together? Do you just corpse run to a common starting place? that gets everyone about the same xp/quest wise, so they all ding together. Or do you just lvl them all enough to get out safely? I'm doing a Dwarf Prot Pally (stone form) Gnome Mage, and Dwarf Priest. Dwarfs and Gnomes so I got 3 at the Dun Morogh starting zone. But I also want a druid and a shaman, which means a Nelf and a Draenei. I plan on at least 3 boxing the mage/priest/pally but getting the "band" together is gonna mean some soloing...

Any tips for me just starting?

[accretion]

I personally don't mind getting a little out of sync, but if I want to keep a team together, I'd prolly run the NE and Draenei to Shat and buy a port to IF.

[wowphreak]

I found that keeping em in sync lvl wise at lower lvls is a royal pain. I tend to just do a few quest with the one that lagging behind abit to catch em up.
usually one of those gather quest.