Has anyone tried movement key broadcasting?

[superwombat]

So I was just wondering if anyone has attempted moving all of thier chars at the same time with the same movement keys.

I'm hypothesizing that I _could_ get all chars oriented the same way by following in a straight line then backing the leader into the grp (after cancelling follow of course) but then I'm wondering if I could move the group of 5 as one unit using the same movement keys broadcast to all 5 stations.

Has anyone attempted this? My fear is that there will likely be small inaccuracys in character orientation that would make the group split up over time. I'm not too worried about one of them getting snared etc, because I could always revert to follow-the-leader style maneuvering. I just don't like the thought of 4/5ths of my crew being several seconds behind the leader every time I charge into someplace.

Of course I'm still theorycrafting at this point, since I have yet to buy my rig, but we're moving into the new house on Monday so I finally get to start ordering crap :-)

[ytrehod]

I tried that for a (very short) while and didn't have much luck with it. Part of my problem was I am so used to using the mouse to turn, my characters were always getting 'out of sync'. It was MUCH easier to just have my second character be the follower.

This weekend I'm planning on messing around with my n52 controller configuration to add different movement key bindings to the different shift levels so I can move one or both of my characters at the same time. I'm running a warlock and a hunter, and when my warlock crits and pulls aggro off the pets, I need a better way to move my hunter back to range.

[Xzin]

It is certainly doable but it is not practicable - small errors over time aggregate into large ones and you wind up wildly out of sync. Plus, if one starts heading off in another direction it means you have to reorient perfectly, which takes some time. If it is that much of an issue... you can make it quasi workable with alignment and then moving all of the "followers" at the same time but not sure what the benefit would be and it is very hard in my experience to align them perfectly.

[superwombat]

Part of my problem was I am so used to using the mouse to turn, my characters were always getting 'out of sync'.

My hope was that with Multibox and its mouse broadcasting turned on, mouse turning would also be broadcast, however I agree that it's probably going to be too difficult to be workable.

Second question. For those of you with mages in your multi setups. Do you find that you simply can't use abilitys like Blizzard and Flamestrike since they require a targetting reticule and click? I suppose I could stick to simply using Arc Explode and Blast wave, but when instancing 5-mans against elite mobs, especially in BC where everything has so much more health, it would be great if I could have the extra damage of a 3 or 4 way flamestike for the pulls.

PS. I can't believe the Epic Xzin is posting in my threads.... Your movies are what inspired me to multibox. I feel like Tiger Woods just hopped in to give me tips on how to improve my golf swing.

[Xzin]

Haha thanks man I try to help out where I can - I too was inspired by www.teamwizzy.com back before WoW was released.

I have no problems casting Flamestrike / Blizzard but I generally choose not to in most situations.

To do it - you need 4 wireless mice. Set them to the same frequency so they are all in sync. They obviously need to be the same brand and the same model to ensure it will work.

An aside: the mice actually will drift some due to EM interference and other things that would be quite difficult to avoid (unless you want to build a rather large faraday cage) even then I am not sure you could completely correct for it without some additional hardware. This is with IDENTICAL hardware - with dissimilar systems... good luck on that

It works well enough for a little while and then you just need to resync it by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen. I assume you could figure out a way to program a mod to move the cursor to the EXACT center of your screen but the corner works just as well.

Anyway - sync up the mice and /follow one of your characters. This lines up the view points. Hit your "blizzard" macro and then move the single mouse to where you want to target. Click once and its a snow storm

[Steph]

There is an alternative to the wireless mice.

Multibox does allow mouse broadcasting as well, which is not really something I use or want to have on permanently, for the reason that it will cause havoc, but for a blizzard/rain for fire target click it works.

There are two requirements:
1) make sure that you used home/end to swap all chars to the same camera position, which is of course mandatory for the relative location on the screen to correspond.
2) I am not using Multibox's to let my main mouse move to the other screens since that resulted in disconnections for me, so nothing happens when the mouse cursor hits a screen boundary.

Then proceed as follows:
1) switch on mouse broadcasting
2) move the mouse to the one of the screen corners to have them all at the same relative location.
3) trigger the AoE spell and
4) move your target nuke highlight and click
5) switch off mouse broadcast.

I know, not simple, but doable.