Posts filed under 'Multiboxing'
I am so glad i chose to ressurect my original multiboxing team.
I’d never done a full instance with them, I’d run them through the starting section of the ramparts beforeparking them prior to patch 2.3
So it was back to Hellfire ramparts for the team. The group composition is a 1 paladin prot tank, 3 elemental shaman and a resto shaman. For most outland instances it would be easily possible to run 4 elemental shaman and have them all heal when needed, but as one of my shaman was 71 I didn’t want him doing any dps. I wanted to try and get as authentic a run through as possible, without putting the instance in to easy mode. (my previous runs pre-parking had the then 70 shaman dpsing and it did make a difference).
I did a number of runs over the weekend, and had great success. It really allowed me to get a feel for multiboxing instances, learning my team, learning how much healing my paladin would require and tweaking my setup.
I decided to have my resto shaman just heal the tank and I would only use lesser healing wave - as I said earlier I wanted to limit the impact of having a 70 in there.
I tweaked the healing setup later by adding a macro to earth shield the tank.
At the start I was a bit panicky. I was non stop spamming healing on the tank, would sometimes forget to dps at the same time and struggled to reaquire aggro if the tank got knocked back.
After a few runs though I found I could get away with only putting a heal on the tank occassionaly during large trash pulls (although I had to heal harder through the rain of fire the casters in there do).
A few green upgrade items meant that one shaman that had some enhacnement gear in some slots got spell power and intellect items and was no longer needing to drink all the time.
On all runs I easily managed to one shot the first and second boss. However the third boss is a nightmare. It’s one of the harder bosses, and very hard for it’s level.
There is a “trick” multiboxers used to use that meant you could avoid fighting the rider and dps the dragon while it flew around but I wanted to do this fight as intended.
I had a decent number of wipes - a server shutdown didn’t help on one run.
However on my final run last night I successfully downed the boss. A great sense of achievement and I’ve learnt a lot. I guess it’s time to head on over to the Blood furnace.
April 20th, 2009
Finally, my poor little priest has hit 70, and I instantly respecced him to Holy so that my melee team has a dedicated healer.
So my team is now ready to set foot in Northrend instances, and the process of learning how to get them working together as one big unit will begin.
Will having 3 80’s in the group make it easy mode, or will my poor little priest be swamped trying to keep the tanks 30-35k health topped up. I don’t know but i’m looking forward to trying it out.
I’m just not sure when I’m going to get a chance to try it out though. My guild’s heroic and Naxx runs mean I have very little time to actually multibox now (and I wouldn’t have it anyother way).
April 14th, 2009
So, my first melee team isn’t quite ready yet and here I am talking about creating a second melee team. (and after I said I wasn’t going to change my mind again).
In all honesty, I haven’t really changed my mind (really, truly, cross my heart hope to die), at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
So how did this second team come to be? I was thinking about my first melee team, it came about by reviewing what characters I had and goes against common advice - it’s a mixed class team and all melee dps. Most of the characters are of high level and I will be starting them in Northrend instances. In the back of my mind I don’t feel like a proper boxer, because this team wouldn’t be doing instances at the right level (till much much later). Would this make it easy mode, would I not have earned my boxing stripes? At the end of the day I’m the only one judging myself and it sort of felt like a cop out.
I could have resurrected my dormant horde 1 pally / 4 Shammy team but I am now as diehard an alliance player as I used to be horde.
So I sat there figuring that there wasn’t much I could do.
Then it occurred to me - Death Knights are the answer. I’ll have to create them on a different server but I’ll have an outlands viable team the second they are out of the starting area.
If i transfer a level 60 druid across and respec to Resto I’ve got a viable healer.
At the same time I’ve got a hankering to try this all on a PVP server. I’ve tended to stick to carebear servers, but as this is a secondary team I’m thinking I’ll try my hand on a PVP or RP-PVP server.
I’ll be a free honour kill x 5 for a while, but look out when I get my abilities together.
April 3rd, 2009
I decided to level my priest on Friday night - he’s the last vital component in my 5 boxing mixed class melee team and I’m impatient to begin running them together.
I’ve boosted with my druid up to and including blood furnace but had no idea how difficult subsequent instances would prove to be.
So I decided to give the coilfang reservoir instances a try.
First stop was the underbog and it went pretty well. No real issues and only a priest death due to AOE poison from one of the bosses. I hadn’t set up a macro for the priest to heal himself, otherwise I’m sure that death could have been avoided.
The priest did heal the druid, but it was more a case of using it because it was there and to get used to doing it rather than providing anything vital. Xp wasn’t that great either, but my priest was 65 and with rested was under 900 xp per elite killed.
After the very successful underbog run I moved on to Slave pens.
I made a macro so the healer would heal himself and went through the slave pens with no incidents at all. Still not great XP but a nice change of pace from running around all over the place questing.
Two instances down, and I figured a nice Steam vaults run was in order.
This was a step up in difficulty and I was very happy that I was boosting a healing class that could top my health up.
It was still, relatively straight forward, but I am embarrased to say that I actually died on the end boss. I decided that when the boss went to heal himself from a water tank I would switch to cat for the dps boost and then switch back to bear. Unfortunately I was slow to switch back to bear - had no rage for frenzied regen, and had ignored my placement and was out of range of the priests heals. A basic,basic error, and I probably could have recovered from it but failed to react. Still I had lots of time to reflect on this after the painfully long run back in to the instance.
The second time was easy. I stayed in bear, only had one of the water tanks heal the boss as I did enough dps on the others and took him down steadily. I didnt require healing from the priest much and all in I enjoyed the run.
I did have my priest die on the robot boss in there - and I’d like to get my priest through that alive next time.
XP with rested was about 1300 per elite kill and it’s not a huge instance either so I suspect I’ll be in there for some time. I got some nice gear for 68-70 for the priest, but not too bothered about that as Northrend will replace all that).
All in the 3 instance runs netted about 3/4 of a level (including the quest hand in for finding the various druids in two instances).
I think If I’ll run steam vaults a few more times, get the priest to 67 and then head through to nagrand for the ring of blood arena event. (It’s such a huge chunk of XP and easily done with the druid).
At 68 I’ll head on over to northrend and questing there will get me to 70 very quickly - and then the work of getting my mixed melee fivesome macroed up to work together effectively.
I’m in two minds at the moment whether I should spec the priest to holy at 70 (He’s shadow at the moment). Probably a good move, but would impact me badly on levelling outside of instances.
Really looking forward to it now.
March 30th, 2009
I’ve been planning out macros for my team trying to imagine situations I might encounter and how to react to those specific scenarios. I soon realised that this would actually result in a team with limited reactions to situations.
For example, I originally planned on having the bears growl/challenging roar macroed up with the various other class abilities to drop aggro.
This was to ensure the bear got aggro. However i then imagined a scenario where the bear might want to growl off the healer - but in the situation it was resisted or on cooldown I would want all of my dps to do their best to taunt aggro off the healer. (of course the healer would definitely fade too).
I came to the conclusion that I want to be able to quickly and easily access a core set of abilities for each of the three roles.
In the long run I’m hoping this will result in a more fluid team able to cope with difficult and unpredictable situations. (pretty much how my solo runs with guildies are).
So here is my list:
1. Tanking
Controlled pulling.
Aggro maintenance.
healer protection - taunts, growls, charges, high aggro attacks.
dps protection. - Taunts, growls, high aggro attacks
Movement - Kiting, staying in Line of sight of the healer.
2. DPS
Targetting - the DPS need to be targetted on the correct mob.
Healer protection (post pull crowd control, stuns , taunts etc).
Aggro control - Staying below tanks threat, using threat reducing abilities to lose aggro.
Damage
Movement - Moving out of AOE, poison/acid puddles
Correct use of AOE.
Pre pull Crowd control. Reapplication of Crowd control if available.
3. Healing
Keeping tank alive
Aggro control - using threat reducing abilities e.g Fade if possible.
Single Target healing (other than tank)
AOE healing
Movement - Moving out of AOE, staying within range of tank, keeping LoS.
CC potentially.
For the purposes of simplicity I’m going to consider all 3 of my dps as one character. They will all fire off the same type of ability at the same time.
I’m also considering them expendable. They will try to save the healer, but will perform no action to save themselves. That is the job of either the
healer or the tank (or both).
Hopefully I’ll talk more of specifics when I get to macroing this up.
March 25th, 2009
You’ll be glad to hear I’ve not decided to change my final team composition yet again.
I thought I would just post a quick update to how things are progressing.
I’m taking a rather odd route building this team. Rather than working them up through the levels together I’ve been soloing. This isn’t due to some master plan - although I was tempted to suggest that I was soloing each of the members of the team to get a better idea of what their core abilities are making it easier to gel them all together at the end.
The simple truth is, that I’m enjoying soloing at the moment. I’m very active in the guild i’m in and my guildies are altaholics too so we tend to swap 80’s in and out depending on who we want to gear up.
Anyway down to the progress report.
I swapped my elemental shaman to enhancement at 76. After an initial period where I really wasn’t liking it (his dps dropped to about 700-800 dps soloing) I figured out how to play him (okay I just went to elitistjerks and read up on playing as enhancement). I can honestly say that I now love being an enhancement shaman.
A few days ago the shammy hit 80 and I decided to at least try a bit of melee multiboxing with my druid.
This was make or break time. If i couldn’t cope meleeing with 2 there is no way I could handle 4 melee and a healer.
A couple of quick macros later (namely a follow macro) and a dps macro I started out trying some icecrown dailies with the two of them.
Initially there were some positional issues. The druid fairie firing to pull tended to work well, the shaman was generally in range for melee.
It was more when I was running in on a mob. The shaman would get in to range start attacking and melee would break follow. The mob would move a little and the shaman was no longer in range for melee - so all he was doing was earthshocking.
The solution wasn’t too difficult. Just wait a little bit for the druid to swipe a couple of times and the mobs stopped moving and then tap follow to bring the shaman in to range, then start dpsing again.
This will be exactly what I’ll be doing in instances. I need to wait for the druid to gain initial aggro anyway, so this will work out perfectly.
I need to work on handling certain procs on my slaves. e.g I need a way for 5 charges of maelstrom weapon on the shaman to be reported to the druid so that I can throw an instant lightning bolt (or chain lighting). I tried an addon called tell me when, but couldn’t even get it to tell the shaman that maelstrom was up.
I have heard that Mik’s combat text may do this, but haven’t looked into this as yet.
Now there’s a few things i love about enhancement - Feral Spirits. That is just insane. Summon two wolves that come and do some rather nice damage - but also heal you loads too. Shamanistic rage to gain mana back when meleeing and my drinking times remain quite low. Being in close on melee means that I tend to use the aoe of Magma totem more. I’m really looking forward to when the team is fully formed. Magma totem, death and decay and consecration all doing lovely damage while we work on taking the current mob down.
My deathknight is now 74. My retribution paladin is now a 77, so will be the next to join the team.
Unfortunately I’ve had no time to level my 64 priest so that will hold the team back for a while - but I suppose I could always try getting a guildie to heal for a few runs.
All in all this taster of melee multiboxing hasn’t put me off at all, quite the contrary.
March 19th, 2009
So my last post was “this is my final team selection”, and barely a couple of days later here I am posting with my new final team selection.
Talk about sticking to your guns 
I was looking at the team I was trying to put together and realised there was quite a bit of work required to get them to Northrend.
I wanted a team that I could have fun running northrend instances in the shortest possible time.
Looking at my higher level characters I noticed that two of them were melee. Normally I would follow the advice of a tank, 3 casters as dps and a healer, but recent guild runs with a ret pally showed how much damage they can do even in average gear and it got me thinking that I wanted one in my team.
Once I had decided to add one melee I figured why not go for an all melee team.
So my team composition is
Druid Tank (80),
Ret Pally (73),
Death Knight (73),
Enhancement Shaman (76),
Holy Priest (64)
This could prove to be a massive failure, I’ve no doubt it will prove more difficult than a tank and 4 shaman but I will take a certain amount of satisfaction knowing that I am following a slightly more unusual path.
My first priority is to level the priest to 68 and get him through to Northrend. After that I will start doing the lower level Northrend instances.
At that point I’ll start discussing the strengths and weaknesses of my team and melee multiboxing, the problems encountered and the possible solutions.
A long term project for sure - as I spend a lot of time running heroics with guildies - but I’m looking forward to seeing how successful it proves to be.
March 9th, 2009
If there is one downside to multiboxing it is that it gives you so many options.
So many classes, so many specs, and loads of incredible combinations.
Multiboxing (other than for boosting alts) has been very much on the backburner for me, and that’s the way it will stay. I’m in a very small, very friendly guild who all play more than I do, so when I log on they want me to run heroics with them so I don’t get left behind gear wise. (They really are a special bunch of folks).
However I do want to have a multibox team to work on for those rare occassions when no one else is on.
I’ve posted in the past about the team I’m going to roll - oooh 5 deathknights, No 5 druids, No wait 1 pally 4 shaman, but this time is a definite, not going to change team selection.
I will get all these characters to 80 before I try to level any more characters.
So listed below is the team I’m going for (and their current levels).
Tank: Feral Druid (80). Currently my main and tanking heroics.
DPS1: Elemental Shaman (76). A totem for every situation.
DPS2: Frost Mage (61). Portals, Food/drink, intellect buff, crowd control.
DPS3: Moonkin (57). I love druids, what can I say. Mark of the wild. Crowd control. Hit debuff on target. Moonkin aura.
Healer: Priest (64). great healing. lightwells. stamina buff.
The shaman will be soloed to 80 as she’s only got 4 levels to go. The moonkin, mage and priest will be triple boxed up through the levels giving me time to work out nice dps macros (and potentially working on setting up their CC abilities) and getting the priests healing abilities sorted.
March 4th, 2009
Post WOTLK I have found boosting with my 80 feral druid to be a joy. My two lowbies that I picked up from level 21 have got to outlands in what seems like super quick time for me.
Whereas before I would boost to 45 then quest the rest of the way, this time round I hit up stratholme from 45 - 58/59.
I hoped that I would be able to boost them through outlands instances at least for the first few levels, and last night I decided to try hellfire ramparts.
I’ve taken it steady, pretty much pulling the mobs in the groups they are in, with no issues. I’m going to get a bit more aggressive with the number of groups I pull from now on though to speed up clearances.
At the moment the lowbies are complete passengers. I did a load of starter quests in outlands just to gear them up a bit and once they are close to 62 I’m going to add my 62 mage to the mix.
I’ll macro up the priest to heal/shield any member of the team and get the mage and shaman to dps.
My initial plan was to just instance my way to 68, but I figure i’ll hit up each new area and do the starter quests for some nice quick XP then head into the instances.
So now I guess it’s a case of looking at instances with bosses that are mainly tank and spank.
At some point I guess I should really fraps these runs.
January 27th, 2009
I promised that I would give feedback on boosting in Stratholme and as I’ve been running that place a heck of a lot recently I’m in a position to give feeback.
Boosting Stratholme with a level 80 druid rocks!
I started out slowly. My druid didn’t have the key to the dead side (and to be honest I didn’t even know where the side entrance was as I’d only been in Strat a few times before).
I did a complete run of the live side and headed on through to the dead side.
If you are multiboxing a team I would highly recommend avoiding the Scarlet compound. It is a pain. Stuns, bubbles, adds and random skeletal groups appearing out of nowhere resulted in my lowbies dying a lot and me needing to res them, and as you know anything killed whilst you are dead yields no XP.
When you are in the undead side keep an eye out for Magistrate Barthilas, I’m sure he’s near one of the gates in to the gauntlet. Kill him and get the key for the side entrance.
After the first run I zoned in to Stratholme from the side entrance, and would kill all of the undead side, and would kill all the undead on the live side. I never set foot in the scarlet compound again.
Some tips for Stratholme.
1. Have someone who can cure disease in your party. One of my lowbies was a shaman so I would just drop a disease cleansing totem whenever I got infected. This disease is a real pain.
2. Watch out for A red yell about there being Living in Stratholme. Basically there are random spawn mobs called Eyes of Naxxramas that appear. They yell out, and if you don’t kill them quickly start spawning pairs of elite gargoyles. My lowbies died a few times to these. Later on I got in to the habit of watching for the yell and killing these characters before the gargoyles spawned.
3. Watch out for Traps. There are a couple of tunnels leading from one area to another. At least two of these have traps. The first spawns a number of shade type characters, which I was able to pick up aggro on and kill with no real problems. The second tunnel (the one that is just next to the scarlet compound) spawns lots of little rats. Difficult to target and I lost my lowbies to them far too many times. I tried keeping the lowbies back, but when the gates slam down the rats aggroed on them anyway and I couldnt get back to them before they died. Later runs I avoided this tunnel and went to the live side from the top tunnel.
Previously the kings of boosting in Stratholme were Paladins. Paladins were designed to kill undead and combined with their ability to heal and cleanse they had the most success.
Since patch 3 druids are fantastic in here too.
I pretty much stay in bear form and fairie fire a mob in a pack to aggro them all. Swipe kills them all off, as one group dies I pull the next. I’ve pulled two packs at a time and had no real problems. I’ve pulled 3 and had to heal up afterwards.
With two lowbies in the group and a level 80 druid my lowbies were getting about 3/4 of a full XP bar each run. That has stayed fairly consistent from 45 to 56.
Looting will slow down your XP gains. So for most of the runs I didn’t loot. I hadn’t even bought my lowbies any bags but realised I was leaving a heck of a lot of gold lying on dead mobs. So, the last few runs I put my main as the master looter, set him to pass on loot and set the loot level to rare (blues).
This way I would see sparkles only on mobs with blues on them and would assign the blue to my lowbies.
I’ve bought some 16 slot bags for both, and when I next boost I’ll set the loot level to greens and vendor or AH them.
I will be doing this in future for any other lowbies I boost and should help to cover the training and mount costs that I’ve been subsidising so far.
January 22nd, 2009
Next Posts
Previous Posts