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Paly and 4x Shaman
Ongoing blog here about my exploits and frustrations 5-boxing. The plan is to level up by exclusivly running 5-man dungeons and their associated quests.
Don't ask me who is who, but I now have 5 accounts. I think the BE paly is Excrucio. He's the only one actually in the guild at the moment - I don't see much reason in having all the slaves join (the text on their screen is too small to read anyway.) The rest of my cew is made of up of 4 Tauren Shamen. Shaman seem to work very well multiboxing. Just like frost mages, they can do respectivle DPS by just spamming 1 button (lightning bolt), and they can also heal as needed even when spec'd for elemental. (i.e. 4 shaman tossing out healing stream totems and the occasional lesser healing wave on the tank is good enough for heroics.) As soon as we get Tauren Paly's I'll have to pay to switch out the BE - need that 100% beef team. :)
excrucio : to torment, torture, cause great pain.
excipio : (excepi exceptum ) to take out, except / take, capture.
executio : to seize, recover.
expilatio : plundering, taking booty.
exustio : burning up, conflagration.
The UI's are set up and I think I have the first rounds of macro's done. Time to start questing!
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Levels 1-15
So far so good. But I have hit a few snags along the way.
TLDR version: I have my 5-boxing team up to level 15-17.
I quested my new paly solo through the first part of the BE starting area. That got him up to level 5, then I had his partner account summon him over to the Tauren starting zone. From there I did the few non-collection quests and leveled them all up to level 11. Those first levels go so very quickly with 3x experience from mobs and questing. Even ignoring all the collection quests I found myself out leveling quests by the time I turned them in. I'd pick up something when it was orange - go kill the mobs for the quest, but it would be green by the time I turned it in.
Once I hit 11 I thought I'd take the blimp from TB to Org and start with RFC. In hind sight, that was definitely too early. I made it about 2 trash pulls into the instance before I hit a brick wall. Those worms/snakes dropped easy enough, but then I hit the rock elementals and the multi-mob pulls. I guess the elementals are immune to lightning bolt - that's 4/5th of my DPS. That and having a bunch of level 11's against a level 15 elite was just too much (although the level 14's dropped easy which was weird). After wiping a few times and running back in I decided to move on to plan B. I dropped on of the Shaman and brought in Magechick to run the other 4 through. That went much better, just running through and AOEing everything. Everyone gained about 1 level with every pass though. And they got some nice gear upgrades as well. But it still wasn't without it's headaches. Occasionally one of my slaves would get 1 shotted by something before I noticed it. At level 11 my party didn't have any one that could res yet - so I'd have to park the party while that 1 unlucky fellow ran back in and caught up.
At this point I still had 3 trial accounts that I was running with. One of the restrictions on trial accounts is that they cannot trade with anyone. This is a big problem with multiboxing because you generally don't ever loot with your slaves. So none of my slaves had any gold, and I didn't have any way to get them some. So even after I cleared RFC once and everyone was up to level 12 I still couldn't buy my res. So I reset it and ran it again, making sure to loot at least a few pieces with the slaves so they could sell some stuff to buy their res spell. Of course I still lost a person once or twice the 2nd time too and had to make the long run back from the spirit res point. But we made it through and had everyone up to level 12 or 13 and we had enough money to go out and buy reserrect for one or two people, but not enough for everyone. This was bugging me, so I decided to actually buy my 3 slave accounts. Everything seemed to working good, so why not. I already had 2 more CD keys on hand. I could have sworn that I had 3 keys on hand, but I guess not. So on my 3rd slave I paid the full $20 to activate the account on-line. (The other keys were bought off ebay for like $6 each).
At this point I thought I was good to go - so I ran everyone through it twice more with Magechick and for the first time I didn't have to run anyone all the back from the spirit res point. I did notice that 2 of my accounts were lagging in levels quite a bit. I should have figured this out after the first run when some were at level 12 and others were at 13, but I figured it was just because some of them were missing out on exp when they died mid run. I later figured out that I messed up the refer-a-friend (RAF) bonus linking. I already had 2 accounts, call them #1 and #2. I needed to get 3 more and I wanted everyone to get the 300% RAF bonus exp, so I had account #1 refer 2 new accounts (#3 and #4) and I had account #2 refer 1 new account (#5). This was working fine when all 5 of us were there together. But when I dropped the lowbie on account #1 to bring in Magechick, that meant that acccount #3 and #4 weren't getting the RAF bonus anymore. What I should have done was have account #1 refer to account #3, and then had #3 refer #4. That way when #1 wasn't on-line, #3 and #4 would still be linked together and getting triple exp. I feel pretty stupid because this was the whole reason I didn't activate all 3 slave accounts right off the bat - to make sure I had the RAF thing working the way I wanted it to. *sigh* It's not that I would have minded dropping one of the trial accounts and making a new one to catch up - but I do mind paying $20 to activate an account only to drop it an hour later. No, it's not the end of the world. But I do have to make a decision to drop an account and pay for a 6th one, or just not be eligable to boost my lowbies with Magechick anymore. I was planning on leveling them all on their own, so maybe it's not a big loss, but annoying nonetheless. I decided to drop Magechick and go back to running the instance correctly.
So at this point I had a level 15 paly on account #2, a level 15 shaman on account #5, two level 13 shaman on accounts #3 and #4, and a level 11 shaman on account #1. I was able to gift two levels from acount #3 or #4 in order to get account #1 up to level 13 as well. I then passed around some gold and visited the AH and trainer. Because I paid on-line to activate account #5 instead of entering a CD-key, account #5 didn't get the trial restrictions lifted right away. There's even a note when you do it on-line that it may take up to 72 hours to lift the trial accounts (probably because they want time to validate that the credit card transaction went through). So account #5 is still lagging in gold, so he's behind in training and equipment still.
After spending entirely too long at the AH and trainers I went back in to RFC. Much better this time. I started at level 13-15 and finished at level 15-17. Everyone got 2 levels from clearing it on their own. The bosses were pretty easy, but I still had some problems on the multi-mob trash pulls. It seemed like the shaman and paly put out about even threat. If I pulled with the paly it worked fine. But if I had to pull at range the shaman would get ahead on threat and the paly couldn't get it back. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to use richeous defence yet. I'd also have problems if someone started targeting the shaman - I'd tab through the targets with the paly trying to figure it out. But if we all had 0 threat against a mob, but he decided to target a shaman instead of the paly I couldn't figure out who it was. I figured it was easier to just let that one paly die and then res them after the fight and move on. I think I had an honest wipe one time through RFC that time when I messed up a pull and grabbed like 10 mobs at once.
After that I went back to the AH and trainer again. Score - I now have an honest-to-betsy taunt for the paly. I was getting tired, but I went back in to test it out. I thought it was pretty good going at 13-15, but 15-17 and starting each pull with a ranged taunt was SOOOOOooooo much better. I was rolling along when I noticed that I wasn't getting flame shock stacks from my shaman consistantly. I realized that I had forgotten to macro the command, I just put it action bar directly from the spellbook. For MBers everything has to be macro'd - i.e. /cast [target=focustarget] lightning bolt. Without that if you just tab thought your targets they won't all be casting against the same mob. So I reset my macro's and it was totally rocking. I think my next big jump in capability will be at 20 when my paly learns consecrate. Hopefully that will all but cancel out my need to taunt except for the pull.
I'll probably clear RFC one more time. I didn't get the quests from TB or UC before clearing it - so those rewards should help too. That should get everyone into the 17-19 range. If I can find lots of wool on the AH - I may be able to level up with that and skip the RFC run, but I probably won't get enough wool until I get to SFK. From there I'll see what I can find for quests for WC and then I'll go clear that before jumping into SFK. (Don't think I'll bother with the deadmines or stockades).
If anyone else is looking for a group for one of those instances, let me know. I'll probably hit all 3 sometime this week.
-JAK
Righteous Defense
if (target=friendly) then
taunt up to 3 mobs off target
elsif (target=hostile && targettarget=friendly) then
taunt up to 3 mobs off target-of-target
else
fail
endif
So, target your shaman, pop Righteous Defense, and 3 mobs should turn to you.
Yes, but
It doesn't actually generate threat does it? It just bumps you up to the threat of whoever was on top on the threat chart.
You have to actually figure out who pulled threat, target them, then change targets back to your regular target. If the second after you do your taunt, the mob you just taunted everyone off of does something (i.e. heals your tank) - then you're back behind on threat again. I can see it working with concecrate if you have some ability to continue to generate threat against multiple mobs then it will work to catch you up on threat if you fell behind somehow. But without consecrate you can taunt them off for a second, but you don't have any way to hold threat on multiple targets without waiting 2 seconds (or whatever your swing speed is) to attack a mob, then switch targets and auto-attack something else.
It's nice, but getting righteous defence without consecrate seems like putting the cart before the horse.
-MageChick
umm
- Righteous Defense forces the mob(s) to fixate on you for 3 seconds
- The "taunt" effect sets your paladin's threat on the mob equal to the threat of the shaman you pulled off of
- The shaman cannot re-pull aggro unless it exceeds 110% of your paladin's threat in melee range, or 130% at ranged range
You should have no problem holding and maintaining threat on anything you come across at that level, assuming you run with Retribution Aura up. Also, Righteous Fury (which I think is a lvl 16 prot skill?)
Until you have either Cap'n America Shield or Hammer of the Righteous, you're going to need to tab-target through the throng of critters and smack 'em all pretty evenly, otherwise eventually your healer is going to pull the "ignored" ones off of you. Consecration won't help (as much) since you don't have an overwhelming amount of SP or AP yet.
Might be different now but...
Long ago early BC I ran a Prot Tank with a set group. We leveled together, etc, and did dungeons, and I was the Pallytank. Kinda like multi]boxing but with 4 other actual guys. It was brutally hard to hold aggro at that level. Even after getting certain skills. It wasn't until the mid 20's that it got a little easier to actually tank things. I remember when we ran RFC that I was almost pointless as far as 'tank' goes.
I think I just resigned
I think I just resigned myself to that fact that some shamen are going to die. It's easy enough to just DPS the mobs down as fast as possible. There's 5 of me, and generally a smaller number of them. I'm also focus fired, so things die after only 2 or 3 rounds of attacks. With everyone in the group being able to res anyone else - just let 1 or 2 die if that's what it takes and clean up the mess after the fact. It's not like the repair bill is that high :)
Fortunatly you don't stay at those levels for long. Early on you don't have too many problems where even a clothie can't get beat on by some random elite for a few seconds either. Shaman can be pretty tough - at this point they'd probably be as good as "tank" as my paly. Now that I have my level 16 abilities I think it will go a lot better.
-MageChick
Actually....
pre- level 25 or so, back in Vanilla, Shaman could tank pretty much as well as anyone. I remember running SFK on my rogue with a shaman tank, and it worked pretty well.
How to tank prior to level 16?
All the level 16 abilities are essential to tanking IMO. I'm not real sure how you're supposed to tank before that. At level 15 and below you don't have any abilities that provide more threat beyond the damage that you deal. None of the DPS/Healers have any abilty to reduce their threat yet either. So for level 15 and below it's pretty much a race to see who can do more DPS. I sure wan't winning that race very consistantly. But even when the problem isn't that you're loosing the DPS race against 1 mob - the problem is all the mobs running around with 0 threat.
Ret aura (level 16) is your first ability that hits more than 1 target and generates threat against them. Prior to that you start every pull with 0 threat against all but the main target and stay there until you specifically target it. That makes for a lot of mobs running loose. Without Hand of Reckoning you don't have any ranged ability to pull either. So if you need to pull at range, then you have to rely on pulling with another char and trying to catch up in threat later. I suppose I should have started the pull with a single char and then macro'd Righteous Defense to that char. That should have at least taunted 3 of the mobs to me.
Between Retribution Aura, Righteous Fury and Hand of Reckoning it's pretty easy to hold threat now. But I now understand why those first low level RFC runs can be so tough.
Maybe those early levels would be easier for a non-multiboxer. I have all my shamen following at /follow range (5 yards?). I also have all my abilities macro'd evenly against all the char's. So image a 4-mob pull at range. The paly has no ranged abilty at all yet, so one of the shaman has to make the pull. He casts lightning bolt against some mob and generates threat equal to the damage he did. Once that mob comes into range the paly can judge it and begin auto attacking. That should pull aggro after just 1 or maybe 2 hits. But all the other mobs came running as well. I think they would still all be at 0 threat to anyone, but they've been pulled so they seem to randomly aggro the first person they see (remember we're all standing in 1 big pile). If I'm supposed to tab-target between them all to get threat on all of them - that'll take at least 8 seconds. But before I even get a chance to tab through them all - I'm running low on health so I tell all the shaman to heal me (they are all maco'd together), generating threat against every mob. :( Even if they were all taunted to me with righteos defense, they didn't necessarily have any threat against them - I was just on top of the aggro table. But as soon as everyone heals that goes out to the pack like AOE damage. Even it it only generages 1 point of threat that's more than 110% (or 130%) greater thatn 0 (pretending we can divide by 0). Trying to rely on white damage from my auto attack to beat out the shaman casting lightning bolts is a rough deal. If I ever start over - no tanking prior to level 16.
-JAK
Yeah.. don't do that
You're experiencing the same problem a traditional tank faces when his friends don't wait for aggro before dropping the Wrath of God on everything in sight....
Not sure how to remedy that pre-L25 or so given everyone's on autofollow and all attacks & heals are macro-linked. At that level, you've got Judgement on a 10 second timer, and Seal of Righteousness for extra holy damage... not sure what else you have at your disposal (its been a year and a half since I had a newb'adin).
Consecrate... Ret Aura... if you can score a stack of Iron shield spikes, that'd help a bit... Anything you can do to stack reflective damage would help (fire shield, thorns, etc.. no idea if Chamois have something like that)
Instance levels?
So I'm sitting here bored at work - not really wanting to do work. So I hope over to wowhead and check out instance levels. Then I wanted to check out wowwiki for some notes on associated quests. I'm noticing that they both have some pretty different levels listed. Even within the wowwiki pages they sometimes list different levels. What's up with that? Anyone know if one list is more accurate than the other? Both of these lists are pretty different from what I see on cartographer too :( I guess what I would really like know is what level the mobs and bosses are within the instance. (i.e. RFC had level 14-15 mobs and level 16 bosses).
http://www.wowhead.com/?zones=2#0+2+1
http://www.wowwiki.com/Instances_by_level
Here's what I came up with for a side-by side comparison
-JAK
Wowwiki has always been correct for me
I believe that wowwiki lists it like so:
A (B) C (D-E) F
A = Instance-name
B = (abbrieviated name)
C = Minimum level player allowed in the instance
D = Lowest level mob in the instance
E = Hightest level mob in the instance
F = Highest level player allowed into the instance. if this isn't listed it's either unknown or doesn't exist.
It looks like wowhead is a bit messed up. Some of the levels listed are the player-lockout levels and some are the mob levels.
Done with RFC on to WC
TLDR: the quints are through RFC, getting ready for WC. We're all level 18-20.
I gathered all the quests for RFC and gave it one last run last night. Very easy with all the level 16 abilities. Probably helped that I outleveled the dungeon as well. So we made quick work of it all and that brought me from level 15-17 to level 17-19. Once I ran around and turned in all the quests that bumped me to levels 18-20 and gave me some nice gear as well.
The longest part was running around in the cave outside orgimar gathering initiate insignias for the entire team. I'll be I had to clear that cave 10 times to get 5 tokens. I did figure out that for these collection quests it works best to loot with all your slaves first and your main last. When you see something sparkling on your main screen - then loot with the slave. When you look at the small slave screens (with all their gfx setting turned all the way down) it's hard to see what's sparkling and what isn't. If you loot with your main first then you have to rely on picking out the sparkles on your slave screens.
It's nice that the paly got his free mount at 20 and the shaman all leared spirit wolf form at 17 or 18. That bascially gives them a 40% mount to go with the paly's 60% mount. For short distances I don't have any problems breaking follow. Should make the run down to ratchet to pick up quests and the flight point much quicker.
Speaking up runs to ratchet - that's up next (as soon as the server comes back on-line.) Apparently we have some hardware maintence today, which is really a bummer because I'm burning day of vacation sitting around the house waiting on the direct TV guy to show up.
WoWWiki is showing 6 quests/chains that involve WC. One of which involves gather 6 raptor horns in a prelim quest - not something I'm going to bother with doing 5x times. The rewards look pretty lousy anyway. Four of the other five quests seem simple enough and the last one does involve a long quest chain, but it pretty much brings you from TB to ratchet to the dungeon so I'll snag that one as well. It also finishes with your choice of a nice blue for everyone and a ton of exp. I expect that these quests and the dungeon itself (which is much bigger than RFC) will give me 3-5 levels. That'll probably put me prep'ing for SFK at around level 22-24.
-MageChick
oh man
If I were you I'd probably end us skipping every single collection quest in the game. Green Hills of Stranglethorn x5? 50 raptor feathers? No thanks.
I wish I had the resources to multi-box. If I win the lottery you better believe I'll have a group. We can go raiding.
WC done - what next?
Wailing Caverns was actually really easy; long, but easy. I did make the mistake of thinking that the deviate hides and the serpentbloom were "dungeon quests". That's how they're labled on WoWWiki - but no, they were just regular collection quests that can be completed without even setting foot in the instance. But I assumed that since I was clearing the instance anyway I may as well pick up all the stuff. Yeah, won't be doing any 5x 20 piece collection quests again - you could give me a iLevel 296 sword and I'll skip it.
I cam out of there at level 23-24 and dinged 25 when turning in the quests. I think one of the Shamen is still 24.9, but I have a few shaman quests to do to get the fire and water totems. That should get everyone up to 25, although the Paly is about to ding 26.
I'm really enoying 60% mounts at level 20. Makes the trek back and forth across the barrens much more tolerable.
Not really sure what I'll do next. I always liked the silverpine forest->hinterlands zones for some reason. I had been planning to head over to SFK, but I think I already outlevel the dungeon, and looking at the loot and quest rewards it just doesn't seem worth it. BFD looks like it has much better loot than SFK, but I think I still outlevel the instance. I may just pick up the quests for RFK and head there next. If WoWWiki is to be belived the mobs there are from 24-26 and the bosses are either 26 or 27. I'll be going at 25-26 and I'll probably ding to 27 before I get to the first boss. With some luck I'll be over level 30 once I turn in all the quests associated with it. Probably head straight for SM after that.
-JAK
4x Totem quests and prep for RFK
Yeah, just doing the 2 quest chains for the water and fire totems took all night.
I kinda liked the fire totem quest - climbing that mountain was cool (even if all of my shaman did fall off the side and die while on /follow). But that water totem quest chain can kiss my ass. I can tolerate a fair amount of back and forth across a zone; even something like the Barrens. But that quest chain takes you through like 4-5 zones on both continents. :(
I grabbed the 3 quests for RFK while I was running all over the place. All the running and stuff got me up to level 27 on everyone. The shamen actually passed my paly, SO I granted him a level and caught right back up. So with the three quests I already have and the 2 more you get inside should easily get me up to 31-32 range. Something to work on this weekend I suppose.
At this rate I better start price shopping for cheap TBC expansion packs. Gonna hit 60 pretty soon.
-JAK
RFK done - SM next
RFK kinda sucked. The mobs were mostly green to me (2-3 levels below me), but I still messed up one too many pulls and died in there once. I had already taken forever trying to figure out the map on my own - didn't want to look it up. So by the time I ran back in I already had respawns to deal with. :(
I'm still catching up on cloth turn-in quests as well. I think I only have 1 more char that needs to turn in wool in TB, and 2 more in UC - that will finally finish all the wool stuff. I did all the silk in TB and Org already - only have UC to go there. I'll finish that this weekend hopefully.
Before my next instance I should probably transfer some more money down and go shopping for everyone again. I haven't done that since level 20 and we're now all level 30-31. I think SM my actually give me a good run for my money if I try to play it straight through. There's only a few quests to pick up for SM (one at TB and 2 in UC - assuming you skip the 6-part chain that starts in thousand needles), so I grabbed the easy ones already. Some quick shopping and cloth turn and I'll be ready to go.
I already forgot who wanted to come to SM. Give me a yell anytime though. I should be able to sit one of the shaman pretty easy. We're heading out of town tomorrow, so I probably won't be on again until Sun evening.
-JAK
wow..
you're really making me want to re-activate my second account, it's so much fun dual-boxing.. it must be crazy being able to level basically through instance runs by your self.
Yep
I really am enjoying it. I had a fairly long discussion with some random person the other day about "why".
I think I enjoy the challenge of multi-boxing, more than I actually enjoy WoW. Being able to control all the aspects of an instance run youself make it pretty different. I spend a lot of time looking at macro's and trying to figure out how to do various parts of the game. For normal runs its pretty simple to figure out how to do something - then you just spend some time practicing it and hoping that everyone else in your group knows what they're doing. When you are soloing it - it's all up to you to figure it out. How do you send a command from 1 charecture to CC a target and not have anyone else break the CC. It's different, so its fun. I enjoy the flexibility of being solo too. If I want to go AFK mid-instance it's not like one of the Shaman can complain. :)
hehe
yah, even with just two chars at once it can be a challenge, but it was so nice to be able to solo group quests because i had a tank/dps and a healer, and just getting everything done a lot faster because you have the extra oomph of the 2nd char.
Graveyard and Libary cleared
Two nice and easy wings. I only leveled up like twice in there though. We're all 33 or 34. Unless I can get like 3 levels in the armory I don't think I'll be ready to run into the cathedral. Maybe make a trip back to RFD?
-MageChick
SM Armory and RFD cleared
Well, I figured out how to make 2 levels out of something as short as the SM: Armory - just run it 3 times :P Even though all the mobs where a level ahead of me, it was an easy clear. But Herod kept kicking my ass with that whirlwind move. In fairness I hadn't done my homework, but every boss up to this point had been tank and spank. So the whirlwind completely caught me by surprise and I didn't get any of the shaman moved out of the way. But at least I was up to level 35.
It really bugged me that after a relatively quick clear I already had respawns to deal with. In any case I cleared it all again, probably going a bit faster than the first time. But he kicked my ass again. I think I survived through 1 or 2 of the whirlwinds, but we all died soon enough. This run pretty much got everyone up to 36 - but I think I had 1 stragler at 35 (Herod is 37).
So we ran back in a 3rd time. WTF - is this instance on a 15-min reset timer? I'll seriously bet it took me 20-25 min to clear it the 2nd time, but I had respawns again. Oh well, that let me get everyone up to 36-37 before the boss fight again. Guess what? He kicked my ass again. Not quite so bad this time, but with just the little bit of lag I was terrible about getting everyone out the way quick enough every time. Pretty much every whirlwind I'd loose one of the shaman. Eventually it was just my paly and 1 shaman still alive when he killed the tank (having already blown LoH and my other bubble). I was about to wipe it a 3rd time when he started his whirlwind again. Luckily I got my last shaman out of the way, and he eneded up standing right on top of my stack of various fire totems. He was down to like 500 health at that point, so 1 more flame shock and one last lightning bolt got him. I had about exactly enough mana left to res 1 person, so I brought the tank back and then hit the "drink" macro. Good thing too, because then a bunch of non-elites started streaming into the room. I was real lucky that they all stopped on top of my totem stack as well. One last consecrate finished them all off - but both my paly and shaman were oom and under 200 life to go. *whew* My reward for all that was a nice piece of Scarlet Crusade chest mail. Great - but I couldn't equip it until level 38. Why is a level 37 mob dropping level 38 required gear?
That whole mess got everyone to level 36-37, but I figured I shouldn't press my luck with the cathedral. On to RFD.
Oddly enough both quests for RFD start in UC. So I snagged those, repaired and headed out again. RFD seemed very simple until I came to escort quest inside there. It comes pretty early into the instance, but I still wiped 4-5 times getting it done. Basically at the end of the quest you have to protect this guy while he channels something. In every occasion I'd protect him long enough, but I'd get swamped with adds. The adds just keep spawning constantly - I never had a chance to dring between waves, so by the 4th or 5th wave I'd be oom. After 4-5 waves a boss comes out as well. He pretty much keeps everyone silenced the whole time. By himself he's not bad. With 4 healing stream totems up and judging as often as possible, the tank stayed at 90% the whole time. But with 4-5 extra mobs still floating around beating on everyone while you're all silenced wasn't very good for my durability. On the first attempt I died after like 3-4 waves of trash - didn't even make it too the boss. On the 2nd attempt I came back in and all the mobs were still hovering around where my body would have been. But with constant silence I couldn't even clear the trash to start beating on the boss. *reset* For the 3rd time I did much better on the trash. I started off quick enough where I could get 4-5 seconds to drink in between waves of adds. But toward the end I started to get behind. I still had about a wave and a half alive when the boss came out. After running back for like the 4th time, I got lucky that the boss was far enough away from most of the other trash. When I pulled him only like 1 other add came along. It took quite a while to kill him with the shaman basically watching the fight in spectator mode the whole time. But I stayed topped off on health the whole time, so it went smoothly. After the boss dropped the last remaining 3-4 mobs were easy to kill. Fortunately the place to complete the quest stayed up while I released and ran back. At least that got everyone to level 37-38.
I think I died 1 more time somewhere along the way when I pulled 2 groups of mobs at the same time. I had respawns again, but once you clear 1/2 the instace there's a shortcut to the other half without going back through it all again. The end boss here was a complete joke with 4x grounding totems. I'm not even sure he hit the tank once before he dropped. I completed 2 other quests that were labled as "dungeon quests", but they were actually just outside the instance. Still when I turned everything in, that got me levels 38-39 and some nice gear upgrades. I even found a level 36 purple shield on the AH for like 150g. I was still thinking my blue shield was pretty awsome with like 1500 armor. The greens at that level still have like 800-900 armor. The purple is over 3k! That basically doubled my armor - and I'm in mostly blue level-appropriate gear. :) After a truely lousy day in the dungeons it was nice to score that one. Kinda made up for everything else.
So SM: Cathedral is up next. That should be pretty easy as it's listed as 37-40 and I'm 38-39. I'll probably ding 40 one at least some folks before I even get to the end boss. Hopefully with the quest turn-in I can get everyone to 40 before heading down to Uldaman. If I have a straggler I'll probably go back and grind a few more mobs inside the instace to get everyone up to mail/plate before moving on. Uldaman is another 37-40 instance (although wowhead says 39-47 - here's hoping they're wrong), and you pretty much have to run it twice to complete all the quests. ZF is listed as either a 43-46 or 43-47, So I probably have time to run Uld 2x before I'm ready for ZF.
SM Cathedral
... has lots of Casters. Make judicious use of Line of Sight & stupid mob pathing, or they'll stay at range and snipe your shamen (and aggro more mobs in the progress)
I remember...
the first time I did Herod and then the non-elites came streaming in and my heart jumped, luckily they're really more of a scare than a challenge, but it was definitely a cool experience, esp if you're standing in the middle of the room, and they're all running down the stairs one behind the other. heh
just as an FYI
the non-elites after herod have a small chance to drop Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade
Man this is making me jealous
Are you using 2 machines or 5?
just 1 actually
I had planned to use both my PC's, but haven't bothered with it yet. So far my first PC has enough horsepower for all 5 :)
Box 1 - home built:
28" WUXGA (1920x1200) monitor, currently split into 1/4 for all the slaves
22" WSXGA (1680x1050) monitor, currently full screen for the main
Q6600 (Quad Core 2.4GHz - overclocked to 3.0GHz)
8GB DDR2 RAM (800MHz - oc'd to 1GHz, 4-4-4-12 timing)
8800 GT - 512MB memory - factory oc'd a little bit
500watt PSU
1TB hard drive - 32MB cache, 7200RPM
Win7 64-bit, release candidate (need to update to the RTM when I get time)
The hard drive just has Win7, Office and 6x WoW folders on it (90% empty). I have 1 "normal" WoW install that I use when I'm playing Magechick solo. The other 5 folders are all symlinked together (except /interface and /wtf) - think of symlinking as like a shortcut that only your OS knows is actually a shortcut. When I pull up my windows explorer it shows it as 5 seperate folders, but all of the data files are only written to the hard drive 1 time. So when I load up wow (or hearth, or port or just walk between zones) WoW will send 5 requests to open the file and read the data for the new zone, but then the OS knows that the 5 requests are all for the same file - so it only has to open it 1 time, after that it's cached and all 5 copies of WoW can refer to it with minimal access to the hard drive. This is basically the same as just opening the same WoW folder 5 times, except I can do it with seperate /wtf and /interface directories. This lets me keep custom UI settings different between the seperate accounts.
I'm using keyclone as a program to duplicate keystrokes across the different WoW windows. So when I hit button 1 from window A, windows B, C, D & E also hit button 1. I don't necessarily need to have button 1 do the same thing across all 5 accounts, but it helps if it does something with the same cast time (e.g. the paly does consecrate and all 4 shaman drop a different totem). Keyclone also helps you split up your computer screen(s) into seperate sections - it tells WoW folder 1 to load into window A, and folder 2 to go to window B, etc. Before anyone gets afraid that this may violate the TOS of EULA - it does not. It does not provide any functionality that doesn't already exist in the game. It's been evauluated by a few folks on blizz's staff - no issues. There are several blue posts on the forum confiming that both the keyclone multiboxing software and the actual act of mutli-boxing are fine - along with a lot of people on the forums (especially PvP servers) QQing about it. :)
Box 2 - Gateway POS:
currently no monitor - it's plugged into the main box (although I will buy another 22" when I around to it and the I find some way to have someone/something else taunt off the wife aggro)
E6300 (Dual Core 1.86GHz)
4GB DDR2 RAM (667MHz)
9600 gso (think rebadged 8800gs) - 384MB memory
500watt PSU
500GB hard drive - 16MB cache, 7200RPM
WinXP 32-bit, (need to update to the Win7 64-bit RTM when I get time)
Right now only using my one PC, I think my weakest link is the video card. Several folks on the multi-boxing forums recommend at least 1GB of on-card video memory. The 8800 GT is also a bit behind the times on processing power. Both the 8800 and my 9600 run a single instance of WoW just fine - good FPS (even when raiding) @ 1920x1200 resolution and all the gfx settings set to "ultra" except the shadows turned off - I don't like the look. For multiboxing all the slaves are at 960x600 resolution and have their gfx settings set as low as you can go. They are also limited to 15FPS through a WoW command line instruction. My main is currently also running on the same video card, but at 1680x1050 resultion with all gfx settings on "ultra" (except shadows turned off again). My slaves seem to bounce between 10 and 15 FPS, which is good enough I suppose. But my main does very pretty wildly. One second he'll be getting 50+FPS in some instance and then the next he's in the 10-15 range as well. It hasn't been a real issue yet - but I'm still in the vanilla WoW content. The gfx requirements go up for the TBC content and again for the WoLK content. I suspect once I hit the outlands I may find my one machine is underpowered. So then I'll switch to plan B.
Plan B is to run only the main on the Gatway box - probably hooked to the 28" monitor. That's pretty much the specs of the system I used to raid from with Magechick - it should do fine for at least 1 instance of WoW. Then I'll have all 4 slaves running on my home-built system and the 22" monitor. Hopefully splitting up the duties there will give me a little more horsepower.
Longer term I'd still like to pick up a 3rd monitor, but I need a new desk and some monitor stands to make it work. I'm already feeling pretty crampt with just 2 big monitors on my desk. I'm thinking something like this - http://www.dual-boxing.com/showpost.php?p=219649&postcount=16, except my 28" in the center and either 19" or 22" on the sides (in vertical/portrait mode). When I stand a 19" sideways it is the same height as my 28" which looks nice, but of course the 22" is a nicer monitor. It'll probably depend on which monitor I can find on ebay for cheap first.
Once I have 3 monitors I can play with it a bit more. I'll have to see if it works better to have only the main on the Gateway with the 28" and 4x slaves (split between 2 19" monitors) on my custom PC, or maybe have my custom PC power my main + 2 slaves on the 28" and one 19" and then the gateway box can power the other 2 slaves on their own 19". Or at that point I just buy a 3rd PC :) But I don't see the wife going for that anytime soon. A $75 used monitor on ebay isn't too hard to justify. But much more than that and I'll draw way more wife aggro than my shield can take. I also have a few odd laptops floating around - at least 2 of them have the horsepower to play WoW well (if I keep the gfx setings in the middle) - not sure if that'd help... Hmmm.... While I'm day dreaming of new hardware, I could always need a new video card - maybe a 4850x2? But I'll need a new PSU before I can upgrade my video card. I'm pretty sure I'm maxed out at 500 watts. I probably need some more case cooling too. A new SSD would nice if Santa is listning.
Respawns galore in SM
Yeah, the trash respawns crazy fast in SM. Even on a fast run-through, there's still trash ready to greet you when you head back to the front of the instance.
Sounds like you're having a good time though.
SM done - now at level 40 :)
The Cathedral was actually very easy. Maybe I just remembered how the pulls go in the actual sanctuary, but it was a nice easy one shot. That got a few of my folks to ding 40. Then I went back to UC and turned in the quest - that got all but 1 shaman up to 40. For that last guy he only had less than 1 bar to go so I ran back in, reset the instance and cleared a few more mobs. Time to start shopping for mageweave I guess :(
After that I ran around and got everyone their epic mounts. 100% speed will be so much nicer for making the run down to tanaris and kargarath. I started doing a little more shopping for plate and mail, but figured I didn't want to get too caught up on that yet. I'll hit Uldam next and see what I can get for upgrades there. When I was shopping I noticed that I hadn't trained one of the shaman for some sort of weapon. When I looked around I guess I missed a lot of weapon training. So I spent an hour or two running around and visiting all the weapon trainers. I'll spend some time tonight running around picking up quests for Uldam, but hopefully I'll have time to clear the instance as well. I don't wanna start ZF until level 43 or so, so that should give me time to clear Uldam at least once.
My big change for now is that I'm going to add in a Druid to my mix, taking out one of the shaman. I had previously gift leveled a druid to 40, but I never actually played him. So I had to spend a few hours figuing out how to play a druid. There are some really nice multiboxing druid macro's here http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=23317. But I won't learn eclipse for a while yet, so no worries yet. I'll just be pulling with starfire and spamming wrath for now I guess. So now I have a use for leather as well as mail and plate - I won't pick up my priest until level 55 or so and Magechick won't join the team until 80. But it will be nice to use most of the gear in the game and cut down on sharding stuff.
I think the whole reason for a druid at low levels is the ease in casting HoTs. Until you learn moonkin form, you can heal and dps full time (Priests are the same way - even when spec'd shadow they make good healers until you learn shadowform). I had never noticed that Shaman and paly's are unique in that they can off-heal even when spec'd for something else. Even after I learn moonkin form I may play with the idea of switching back and forth mid-fight (i.e. Hot up the tank while spec'd for balance, swtich to moonkin and dps for a while, then switch out and heal again). End game I plan on ending up with a Paly, Druid, Shaman, Mage and Priest. I was thinking I'd spec the priest Disc or Holy, but maybe I'll spec everyone for DPS and have the druid, shaman and priest all off-heal as needed. I'll have to see how much of a pain it is to change forms back and forth mid-fight.