Thinking of 25 boxing WoW - Not sure about a lot of things

[Lokked]

If it hasn't been said, I need to explain some game mechanics which might dent your initial solution for PBAoEing mass mobs:

In EQ, the XP was given to the group which did the majority of the damage. If Group A did 51% damage and Group B did 49%, Group A would be rewarded all the experience and loot rights. Likewise, if Group A did 49% damage, and a single non-grouped char (EI a high level) did 51% damage, the single char would be awarded all the XP and loot rights. This was the birth of the KSing QQs (one group would steal a kill from another group that pulled a rare by outdamaging them).

In WoW, the first person or group that deals damage in any form to a mob (hit, spell, damage shield) has "Tapped" the mob, and will receive loot rights no matter what. For the group to receive all XP from the kill, they must outdamage other groups/chars by 50% of the mobs health. If they do not to at least 50% damage, they receive a portion of the XP scaling downward from 100% - 0% based on what portion of 50% of the mobs health they took away.

I bring this to your attention for the following reasons:
Your rested group, which is meant to get the XP, will have to pull and tap each mob.
No mage early on can survive pulling more then a few mobs at a time. You heal the mage, and all the mobs go after your priest/healer.
Mobs only chase chars a certain distance before agro resets to nothing and they "Leash" back to where they were agroed, or where they spawned. This would prevent you from amassing any significant size of pull.
Masses of world mobs is much smaller then that of EQ. I remember AoEing some outdoor Iksar fortress in some lvl 30-40 zone with a lake which had about 100 mobs inside, all bunched together relatively tightly, and being able to pull almost the whole thing with my bard. Nothing like those areas in WoW.

I'm not saying it is doable, but I really believe that you will have far more success doing the following to level your teams:
Create a single Paladin and level it up to 70 OR Create a 5-man group of Paladin, 3 mages, priest (because you want to end up with 24 mages + priest) and...
Get the Paladin + group to 70 asap.
Lvl Mining and Jewelcrafting on the Paladin.
Create Figurine of the Collosus, for use with the Paladin.
Buy or make gear for Paladin for tanking purposes.
Use the Paladin to AE your next 4 mage group through instances, using the many Paladin Boosting guides out there.
When each of these mage groups reaches 60, consider trying out the Paladin + 4 mage or Priest + 4 mage to see what works better for you in instances. Grind out instances to reach 70.
Repeat this for each of your sets of mages.

You may want to try to PBAoE the whole group to 70, but this depends on what your goal in this endeavor is: Leveling 25 chars at once, or playing end-game with 25 chars. Personally, I would skip all the crap in between, as with 25 chars you will be missing a vast majority of the content as is, and beyong content, there isn't much else between 1 and 70.

At least leveling the first group I mentioned you would get to see all pre-70 instance content (or whichever you choose to see, you have the ability to see it all), and, in my opinion, end up reaching 70 with all 24 mages faster then if you were to PBAoE them the whole way.

Good luck to you.

[Jezebel]

i have not ecountered any of the problems you mention while 10boxing (lol arcane resist?) boxing is about picking a setup and sticking with it until you know it inside-out. the only issue i can see is having to level 5 separate groups, 5 at a time. one priest 4 mages will grind extremely fast, but will be limited in elite instances. its perfectly possible (and just as fast) to buy decent greens/blues from AH and AoE grind non-elites all the way to 70. at which point you start queueing for your PvP epics.

as for "getting destroyed by smaller teams".. it takes at least twice my numbers OR a skilled, equal-number premade to drop my 10man setup in PvP. i frequently entertain myself by wiping 25 man raids prepping outside instances/at portal stones. you are right about 5+ boxing high end raiding.. but.. PvE..? who cares. PvE is a temporary inconvenience that must be endured in order to kill allies.

your 25 man mob would be the #1 target on any server you roll on, and would get chased down by a ton of people. mb'ing in WoW is not as easy as it is in EQ (they have removed a lot of the stuff that allows bottish type actions) and just 3-5 well played characters could easily take down a mob of 25 controlled by 1 person. For example, if you have 25 mages just a few hunters on you with high arcane resist pets, your pbAOE wouldn't hit them, pets would be heavily immune (esp bestial wrath) and chew you up, and with a lot of strafing they'd be out of forward line of sight making you very frustrated when trying to do direct damage spells (just positioning 5 correctly is hard, 25 would be insane).

try 5 man first and grow from there, 25 man doesn't really buy you much since most of the raiding is heavily scripted and requires very precise gameplay thats hard to multibox heavily, and in PVP you will get destroyed a lot by much smaller teams.

[Drizzit]

Create Figurine of the Collosus

I am pretty sure that this is a drop... and not a very common drop

[Toned]

Create Figurine of the Collosus

I am pretty sure that this is a drop... and not a very common drop

It drops in shattered halls and I shard one almost every time I run it on heroic.

[zanthor]

Other thing is fear. It kills a 5 boxer, trying to get the toons back, it will be a lot harder for a 25 boxer... so you at least need 5 sham just for the tremor totems.

Show me a fear that hits more than 5 targets.

25 locks... dot, dot, dot... 125 debuffs... no one would survive that.

[Stabface]

There is currently a cap on the number of buffs and debuffs a target can have (40 of each as I recall). So it's not possible to stack 125 DoTs on a single target.
This will of course require a change in either the way things stack or the things that are stackable in WotLK, since people are already frequently hitting the debuff limit and in rare occasions the buff limit as well.

[Drizzit]

Show me a fear that hits more than 5 targets.

True I forgot about the limit.

[Jezebel]

25 (or 24) of anything is a mistake, imo. circle of healing truly is godly in large numbers (5+ priests). the minor sacrifice in AoE DPS is made up by the fact that nothing except serious, numerous focus fire on single mages will kill them.

if it were my setup, i would be looking at 15 mages, 5 shamans, 5 priests. one shaman, one priest per group. i would also spec the shamans for resto. run in alltogether with shields/earthshield precast, drop totems and stack your healers ontop of them somewhere reasonably safe, but within line of sight of your mages, then put your low rank chainheal/circle of healing on "toggle" with your G15 and forget about them. (except to press your hotkeys for changing the group focus of the heals) while you run around with your mages on /follow and kill everything in sight.

think of the 10 healers as a moveable unlimited HP turret.

[Dorffo]

Just a random FWIW comment:

you can train mobs all over the world/zone without them leashing (losing aggro) with some creative healing... with my mage/priest duo i used to run around spaming rank1 heal over time while the mage aggro'd stuff and as long as the heal was ticking mobs wouldn't leash, not sure if thats changed in the last month or two.

I do the same thing with my Pali / sham group - setup shams in random positions around my pull area so that they are in heal range and just cast rank1 heals on the pali as he rounds up mobs -- you can round up a lot of mobs this way

[Havelcek]

edit...dupe post