Posts filed under 'Multiboxing'
Yes it’s finally here. Faction transfer is now available if you are lucky enough to play on US realms. Unfortunately I’m in the EU so I’ll have to wait (hopefully not too long) before I can use the transfer facility.
I’m glad that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it. My initial thought was that I would transfer my alliance druid to the horde side so I have a tank available for my multiboxing shaman team. Then I thought I would need to transfer my shaman as well so I could do 5 shaman’s in BG’s.
Then i had second thoughts. Firstly, my guild is on the alliance side, and I’ve no contacts on the horde side to speak of. It would be better to have all my 80’s on the same faction. Pooling the money from dailies, and having access to professiosn. This way I’ll also still be able to socialise with my guild.
I’ll multibox heavily - but I’m quite happy to drop a couple of characters to allow room for some guildies, if they need run throughs.
So - hurry up blizzard, release faction transfer in the EU now please.
September 3rd, 2009
I’d like to revisit the rather wonderful “Interact with target” feature Blizzard introduced a while back, and how it impacts (in an incredibly) positive way) on us multiboxers.
I decided that it really was about time that I got it set up. I’ve known about it’s existence for quite a while but never quite got round to using it.
Firstly here is what you need to do.
Create 1 macro that assists your main character.
I use focus so i can switch lead characters on the fly so my assist macro consists of
/assist focus
(If you don’t switch main you can always put /assist mainplayername)
Put that macro on to your bar and make sure you bind a key to it.
Next you need to go in to your keybindings. In the section deailing with targetting you will find an Interact with Target option. Bind an unusued key to this (and remember it).
The final step is to go to the mouse options and turn on “click to move” on your slave characters. This is vital.
So how do you use this? Firstly select a target with your main. This can be an NPC, such as a quest giver, windrider master etc, or it can be a mob or enemy player.
Now hit the key for your assist macro. You will see that all your slaves now have the target selected. Now hit your ”interact with target” key. A number of things will happen. If you are close to the target your characters will turn to face it (how cool is that - I use this when pesky melee are in amongst my characters). If it is friendly your characters will now open the window as if you right clicked on that character. If it is a mob your characters will start to autoattack it. (This is great for melee group multiboxers).
Now if you are far away from the target, your characters will turn to face it and run towards the point where that target was when you hit your interact with target button. In the case of enemy/mobs if it moves away your slaves will just go to the spot it was at- but you can always keep hitting interact with target to keep them on it.
This works for large distances.
The main reason I set this up was for fear recovery, but it’s made my life a lot easier picking quests up, handing them in, looting mobs on my slaves, taking flightpoints.
I should really go over fear recovery. If my grounding totems aren’t out or don’t pulse in time my team can go running off in random different directions, ending up facing all over the place. Before I would have to take my main and run round trying to gather them up. Now I can select a target on my main (say an enemy player or an alterac valley ram) and hit the interact with target key. All my guys are going to head for the same spot (so long as they haven’t got caught up on terrain, objects in between). When they all get closer I can hit my follow key to pull them back together, and if need be go and pick up one straggler instead of a few.
So if you haven’t got interact with target set up do so now. You wont regret it.
August 28th, 2009
As a solo player I’ve always tended to ignore the pet when going up against hunters and warlocks (BM pets and Felguards are a little harder to ignore).
As a multiboxer I love enemy pets.
A typical encounter with a warlock or hunter is that they send the pet in and try and harass/kill you from outside your range. (I’ve played both singly and this was pretty much my tactic).
When I’m multiboxing I’ll target the pet if the warlock/hunter are out of range, and if there aren’t any other significant threats near by.
This looks like i’m a noob to the pet owner (I certainly loved it when folks did that on my lock or hunter).
Sometimes I kill the pet, which isn’t too bad a thing - but in a lot more of the encounters I start hitting the pet and the warlock or hunter see their pet is going down fast and recall it. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
I wait till the pet is close enough to the hunter but still within my range, then I whack a chain lightining on it and watch as it jumps straight through to the warlock or hunter (and sometimes leaping from there to other alliance).
3 chain lightnings still hurt after the 1st hop - it’s not enough to kill them, but it softens them up significantly and puts them under pressure.
Even better than that it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Just one of the many reasons I love my shaman multibox crew.
(on a side note, my 3 shamans are fast approaching 71, so hopefully tonight I’ll be able to join them up with my 72 shaman and start fighting in the 71-80 bracket. It’ll be tougher, I’ll die a lot more. But i think there will be few high levels that will feel the pain 
)
August 27th, 2009
After a long break, spending a lot of time doing raids and heroics with my guild I decided to take a break from the social side of WoW.
After trying a bit of battleground levelling on my alliance shadow priest I decided it was time to resurrect my shaman and try them out.
I picked them up at 66. They were pretty much penniless and so i had to do a few quests to get the gold together to get them their epic land mounts. The second I had them I started battlegrounding on them. What a blast!!!!
It took a while to get used to playing, and my setup was far from perfect. Healing wise I just had the shaman cast chain heal on themselves - very inefficient and too long a cast time. Despite that I had okay survivability and was able to play a very active role in the battlegrounds. Level 70 melee were pretty much able to rip me apart but that was if they got to me I learnt to hate bladestorm
I did a mix of battlegrounds and questing to level. Generally queue times were quite good and i got a fair amount of games. The problem comes when you lose AV hard. No tower caps, belinda kills etc really reduces the XP you gain in there - but I wasn’t too concerned with that as regardless of win or loss I was having immense fun in there.
As the levels passed by, things improved. My survivability increased. I learnt strategies to cope with the tougher classes. Melee still hurt hard, but I was hitting harder in return.
Then I hit 68 and got my lovely fire elementals. Very situational but great to pop. I remember I was guarding a bunker. It had just under a minute till it was destroyed and from my vantage point opposite the flag I was able to look out and see multiple alliance heading for me. So I popped my 3 fire elementals.
One of the alliance got through to me - but he was badly crisped and one volley of lightning bolt had him drop at my feet. The others were easily despatched, and the midst of it all the bunker was destroyed.
The other wonderful thing about 68 was I could now pop over to northrend and start gearing up my gear.
So last night I dinged 70, got blood lust, and I’m still having a blast in Alterac valley.
I’ve setup my healing macros so I can heal individual shaman so my survivability is much better.
Once I get these guys to 71 I’ll join them up with my level 72 shaman (and potentially a 71 warlock) and start in the 71-80 bracket.
I’m expecting a great amount of pain initially, but there will still be fun to be had.
Many months ago (pre Wotlk) I saw a video of a 5 shaman group defending galvanar in alterac valley. He single handedly wiped the alliance.
Last night - I only had 3, but it was a smaller group of alliance, and they would have been able to down galv. But I got in there and wiped them.
My team is living up to expectations and once faction transfer becomes available I will be able to field a 5 shaman team. I can’t wait.
August 25th, 2009
I made a post quite some time ago about how to pick the classes you multibox with. A short summary would have been - pick casters when possible, the only melee you should have in your team should be the tank. Shamans got a massive vote just for their utility, self heal, ressing capabilities, but it was almost a case of any caster would do.
Melee was still possible, but required a lot of dancing round on the tank and putting your team back on follow to get the positioning right for all your melee to be hitting the target.
However Patch 3.1 changed all that. Amongst the changes was the “Interact with Target” keybind. This allows you to assign a key on your following characters that would allow you to interact with the taret they have selected. It made looting easier.
The real beauty of this change was that if you enabled click to move on your slaves they would run into range of the target and interact with it. In the case of mobs this resulted in them running over to the mob and hitting it. Even better - if your slave character was turned away from that mob it would turn around and run towards it. A nifty solution for when a mob was mixed in with your group and some of them were facing away from it.
This opened up all sorts of possibilities for class combinations.
General advice still stands - The less different classes you have the easier it is to multibox. So I’ve seen 5 ret pally teams, 5 deathknight teams, but if you want to have a mixed team, go for it.
If you are doing PVE go for a tank, healer and 3 dps. Tank wise you’d be fine with a Pally, DK or Druid - my personal preference is the Paladin - very simple to tank with 1 macro. Healing a priest, druid or resto shaman are ideal. They all bring different benefits. A paladin healer isn’t ideal for when your team take AOE damage (and there is a lot of AOE damage in Northrend instances) and may be a bit too intensive to heal with - but if you really want one go for it.
For DPS pick three characters you like. Go for 3 melee or 3 ranged/casters, but other than the difficulty of macroing everything up there’s nothing to stop you picking a combination - and just having interact with target and click to move enabled on the melee characters.
Also try to remember that you can mix your team up even further with Dual talent specs. I run my shaman as enhancement but can swap him to a healer. I run my druid as cat but again, can swap him to healer (I did toy with the idea of changing him to moonkin instead).
So the good news is - You can have any team you want. The bad news is you now have more choice than ever before.
May 15th, 2009
I had a bit of extra time on my hands yesterday and decided I would go back for a bit of multiboxing fun on my 4 shaman 1 pally team.
The paladin and 3 of the shaman are 65 with the resto shaman being a 71.
I chose Mana tombs as the instance to go to. I’ve never run it much on any character, and it was the right level.
A couple of pulls in and I found that my lesser healing wave spam on the Paladin tank wasn’t going to be enough. So I changed the macro to do riptide, lesser healing wave, healing wave, riptide, lesser healing wave, healing wave. Combined with the earth shield this worked a treat.
One flaw in my setup - I hadn’t specced cleanse spirit on my resto paladin. This cleanses a disease, poison and a curse. This would have been useful, as I found a shaman or two would die after I’d finished off a group of mobs. I noticed that they had a curse on them (I think). I did get by just by hitting chain heal on the shammys, but I need to macro this so that they chain heal each other instead of themselves.
I managed to get through the whole instance with no wipes. Completed a few quests, then did the final escort quest. It got a bit messy on the escort quest as I hit a mob that feared, hadn’t got my tremor totems down and so had a couple facing the wrong way. Then a couple of the shamans died, and I thought I might actually die. I tapped my follow, got the remainder of my team on target and killed him. I then had to drink up, and res the two dead shamans. (I was worried the escort would go on without me, but that didn’t happen). So I successfully completed the escort quest as well.
The 3 shaman all dinged 66 right at the end or at hand in. The paladin moved to over half way to 66.
I did learn something else on this run. I was pulling the group, and was going through my tanking sequence on the pally. I started dpsing after the first couple of hits, but before the first consecrate kicked in. This resulted in ranged spell casters hitting my shaman instead of the paladin. I found it much better to wait till the consecrate hit then start dps. That worked a treat and I had less problems after that.
It did take a while to clear the whole thing, and I may consider killing to the first boss only and reset in the future, but I’ll definitely run this again.
May 13th, 2009
After playing my horde paladin (65 currently) I’ve been forced to reconsider my decision to have my druid tank for my team.
I chose the bear tank, primarily because trying to DPS as a feral cat seemed to require watching too much at the same time. This meant I would have to spec my pally as retribution.
One i decided the paladin would make the better tank it was now a case of figuring out a way to get decent feral cat dps whilst multiboxing.
1. The problem.
Feral cat dps relies on a priority of abilties. Add combo point watching to that and it would take much needed concentration from my situational awareness.
2. The solution.
I found out about an addon called Mik’s combat scrolling text. I can modify certain of the triggers in this add on to watch for ability procs on members of my party, not just my main character. So with this in mind I’ve decided on the following.
i) Set up a trigger in MSBT that lets me know when the cat has 5 combo points. I will have one macro that will trigger either ferocious bite, or rip based on which key modifier is pressed.
2. I will set up a trigger for Berserking and the tiger’s fury ability coming off of cooldown. Depending on how much time remains in the fight i can decide if i want to trigger these abilities or not.
3. Set up a trigger for Savage roar dropping off. Savage roar is a huge dps increase, so it’s vital to keep this up at all times. Normally a 2 combo point savage roar will outlast trash mobs, but on a boss fight will need refreshing.
4. I’ll get the mangle glyph for my cat. Solo play I might want to be behind the target but with the positional problems of multiboxing I’ll have a dps macro consisting of mangle, with the odd rake put in there to keep bleed effects going.
I think the pally is easier to play as a tank than the druid (certainly whilst multiboxing) and this will free up quite a chunk of concentration to watch for MSBT proc reports.
I’ll probably turn of 90% of the notifications from MSBT so that I only get druid procs, and the shamans 5 stack of maelstrom weapon.
I think this should result in acceptable dps levels on the cat without compromising the team.
I’ve heard of other addons (such as parrot) that may allow you to assign audible cues as well. I’ll try with MSBT for now though.
April 27th, 2009
I took my paladin and 4 shaman into Slave pens on friday night.
I’ve heard this can be quite difficult to multibox for non Paladin and shaman team but it was quite easy for my group composition.
The trickiest boss was actually the first. Mennu the betrayer. It was an endurance fight, it just seemed to go on forever. One of my shaman died early on, and i just kept hitting and hitting the boss and he wouldn’t die.
This boss drops totems at various stages of the fight. A stoneskin, a healing stream and a fire nova. I think my key issue was that i didn’t have a macro to target the two totems that needed to be taken out (healing and stoneskin). I was targetting them manually on my paladin. Eventually the boss died (although I nearly fell asleep with boredom before he did )
Other than that this instance was pretty easy, I think the shamans self heal and poison cleansing totems made the last boss trivial.
April 27th, 2009
I’ve noticed from my weblogs that there seems to be a fair amount of interest in keeping your alts facing the target whilst multiboxing and realised that I haven’t put too much information on here to answer that question.
This post should remedy that.
When setting up a fight it’s generally quite easy to get all your team facing the same way. You tend to follow the tank, drop the group off of follow and pull the mobs iwth your tank. However things can sometimes get messy and there are many situations where you may find your team facing a different direction from and you need to get them back on target quickly.
Lets say that my tank gets knocked back through my team so they are now facing the wrong way.
The two approaches I might take, are - run my paladin back through my team so he’s back in front of them, or if there is a bit of room between my alts and the tank I’ll tap my follow key they will turn to follow the tank, and I quickly tap the key I use to break follow (in my case I use my back arrow key to do this).
Another situation I mainly got when I was out questing was when a mob attacked and my team stopped right on top of the tank. Essentially the shaman are unable to cast as the mob was technically behind them, despite the tank being more or less in front of them.
Tapping your follow key wouldn’t help in this case.
I mentioned earlier that my break follow is my back arrow key. I chose that key specifically for the above situation. (all my other arrow keys are on my do not pass list).
I turn my tank to face my alts and press my down arrow key. The net effect is that the tank and my shaman back away from each other and the mob is now nicely positioned to be blasted into oblivion. This works regardless of if the mob is beating on the tank or one of my shaman.
These simple techniques are all I’ve had to use for a caster team.
Melee teams are a different matter, given that you want them to be in melee range and can’t tap follow as they are right on top of the tank. I haven’t done too much with my melee team but have resorted to running my tank forward a few paces (providing he has aggro) and then tapping follow to bring my team back in.
However, Patch 3.1 introduced some nice functionality that might just help with this. I’ve yet to play with this feature but the basics are.
1. In your key bindings there is a new option to bind a key for interact with unit. (something like that). You would set this on all your characters.
2. Enable click to move in your mouse options within wow (this is important).
3. You target the mob with your tank and would click interact with target. This causes the alts to run the alts towards the target if they are out of range. (turning if needed). In this case Interact with target means beat it to a pulp .
Like I say I haven’t actually tried this final method but will do in the near future.
April 24th, 2009
I decided to dedicate a night to my multibox team last night, no raiding, no dailies, no heroics, just good old fashioned burning crusade fun.
After downing the last boss in ramparts it was time to move on from Ramparts and go to Blood furnace instead. It’s quite a fun instance,relatively short and I had a couple of quests to complete in there which required me to collect 10 vials of blood from the orcs (on 4 of my characters).
The second quest was to explore the furnace completely, which just required me to get to the end boss.
The first run was slow, as I had to loot separately on all my characters. (the last patch added an interact with target keybind and if I had set this up this would be easier). The trash can be a handful at times but my team coped with them wonderfully.
I got to the first boss (The Maker) and was able to take him down first try. He got a mind control off on one of my characters but it wasn’t an issue.
Lucky me - he dropped the Diamond Core Sledgemace. A wonderful spell caster mace, and a nice upgrade for one of my Shaman.
The second boss was the one I was dreading (Broggok). You clear the room of trash, then flip a switch. This opens a locked gate and 4 or 5 orcs come running at you. You kill them, then another cell opens and another 4 or 5 come out, then another gate opens and finally a 4th (so 4 waves of orcs)
At this point the gate holding the boss back opens and this ugly floating head demon comes at you.
When I’ve played this solo before there were issues with mana, but my team breezed through.
I had one wobbly moment where I wasn’t quick enough to pick up a group of orcs and they got in amongst my casters but it didn’t cause any significant problems (shaman can take a few hits with their shields and chain armour). The second boss died very quickly, and I remembered to wait for his poison cloud to disappear from his corpse before looting. (I’ve killed characters before doing this).
I worked through the trash again and got to the last boss (Keli’dan the breaker). He’s a caster boss, with a bunch of spell casters round him. You kill them first then he comes at you. He’s not difficult, apart from one point where he goes immune and does this blast wave that does significant damage.
I got my alt’s positioning slightly wrong, and two of my shaman died, but I still took him down. Blood furnace was complete and it wasa piece of cake.
I decided to start farming the instance, no longer doing full clears, but just running up to the first boss and running out to reset. I wanted the diamond core sledgemace for my shaman dps’ers .
I ran the boss a few times. Got one Sledgemace drop, and a libram of the saints departed for my pally. My pally dinged 63 in there and is now 63 and a half, and 3 of my shaman dinged 64. (my 71 shaman healer wasn’t getting any XP).
I’m thinking I’ll get them to 66 in instances then start Nagrand. Do all the nesingwary quest chains, ring of blood, and elite kills and perhaps instance a little to get to 68, then it’ll be Northrend for super quick levelling to 70 and fun in Northrend instances.
But I’m getting ahead of myself - first I’ll run Bloodfurnace to get that last mace, then do underbog and slave pens.
April 21st, 2009
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