jeff's blog

For those who don't know, I got back into wow with a friend, who while I'm multiboxing, I've been doing so with a +1. My friend brad is my tank on his Paladin and with our accounts linked it makes playing a lot of run with RAF all around.

We've been leveling together which can prove problematic when schedules don't align, so along comes my side team, 3 mages.

I spent a good amount of time coming up with this targeting method and it has worked wonders for me in both questing and instance running with my multibox team.

I call it sticky targeting.

Got my team of 3 to level 20 last night, finishing up my time in Ghostlands. I've decided to try and document the various DPS macros I've constructed at some important level benchmarks.

So in my exitement in finding out blizzard was vanilla wow accounts for only $5 I purchased my remaining 3 accounts.

Stupid me forgot to do it so that I had RAF bonus on all of them so now I'm stuck deciding if I should purchase 3 more. I'm probably going to go that route.

Another dumb thing is that my 2 current accounts are under different battlenet accounts. When I signed them up I didn't know much about the new battlenet account system so I ended up making 2 accounts rather than placing both wow accounts under a single battlenet account. I'm hoping to get them merged but I'm not sure if blizzard will comply.

Well, I've re-joined the multiboxing community as of yesterday.

My previous 5 man group was a huge success but I had to drop out of the game for a while and sold all 5 of my accounts. A move I've regretted.

I'm starting up my new group on the PVE server Sen'jin.. I'm playing with a friend, doing RAF and leveling using the guide for Tourguide created by the DB community. Currently my team is just a 2 man team, but I plan on expanding it to the full 5 man mixed group in the next month.

So here are my impressions on locks.

I've been running 2 groups. A dual boxing lock group and a lock in a mixed group.

First off, lets talk about a pure lock group. My locks are mid 30's at the moment, and I've leveled them pure Affliction. I think affliction is a very doable spec for multi-boxing locks. I'm using 2 separate macro's for my DPS macros. A cast sequence to dot up the target, and one to spam Drain Life. I've kept life tap on a separate key. Tried integrating it into my cast sequences but found that it needed a little bit more intelligent handling than the automation of a spam macro.

more after the break

Haven't done high level boxing on any class yet, but I'd like to lay some quick impressions on my experience with priests so far. Also, I'm using my priest solely for DPS so in terms of healer potential, you'll either have to wait or look else ware.

more after the break.

Currently, with the setup I'm running, I'm using a paladin as my brain character. I just wanted to jot down some quick impressions and macro's i'm using.

Macros

Judge Macro
#show Judgement
/cast Judgement
/cast Seal of Righteousness

Righteous Defense
#show Righteous Defense
/cast [target=targettarget, exists, help][] Righteous Defense

Redemption (rez macro)
MACRO 16777219 "Rez" INV_Misc_QuestionMark
#show Redemption
/cast [target=toon1, dead, help][target=toon2, dead, help][target=toon3, dead, help][target=toon4, dead, help][] Redemption

Details after the break

After writing down many of my thoughts on using focus for target management, I found this post on the Dual-boxing.com forums. It's a writeup on the idea of trying to pull away from heavy focus usage in multiboxing.

I'm largely in favor of this concept since it is a major simplification of the whole process. However, in it's current form, it relies heavily on the target of your main being the primary DPS target. I have some small problems with this because since I plan on tanking with my main, I want the freedom to switch targets freely without causing my DPS to shift from their current target.

I spent some time yesterday writing up a [inline_upload|file=1|title=flow chart] to better explain my focus setup. However, looking back over it now, I see that a lot of my targeting can be accomplished the same way via targeting macros rather than relying on the focus unit. This of course frees up the focus unit for alternative uses like a 2nd DPS target, Crowd Control, etc.

Looks like I've got some things to think about.

From what I can tell, multiboxing is going to require some serious organization and a really well structured setup. A large portion of this comes from the software side, but there is a hardware component to that your standard keyboard likely won't be able to fulfill.

The setup I'm planning involves a pretty standard setup of adding a second keyboard. Lets first look at some of the things I want my hardware setup to accomplish.

Goals

• Scalablility
• Customizable keys
• Clear key organization
• limit need for modifier keys
• Ergonomic