Success and failure

I crushed the timed CoS and got my first Drake. It was perhaps the best moment for me since the 45-min Baron run back in the day. I actually shouted out in happiness... alone in my apartment. I only have one 300 skill rider in my boxing group so the spoils went to him. It's bitter sweet, I think I can get more, clearly, but they will essentially cost me 5k gold for each drop at this point on.

I solo joined a Naxx pug for the first time and jesus, it was brutal. We dropped like 2 bosses in the spider wing before people just left. It was a great reminder of how bad pugs can be but I still want to start raiding a bit more.

Just for fun, 2 other guildies and I went in to OS and did pretty damn well. We dropped the first two drakes and wiped on the last one that becomes immune before one guildie had to go to bed. But, my guys are not nearly even close to geared. Hit rating is a problem in these raids. I need a lot more of it across the board. Even so, it really gave me hope that with a bit of upgrading and some knowledge, 10-man content will be possible to at least explore.

The Stage of History

I did some ridiculous shit today. I don't know where I started or where I finished. I was ostensibly working through most of it and just doing it here and there... But in the end, I dropped Ony again (I guess the reset was this morning?), flattened Attumen, Raptor, and Tiger bosses (no mounts), killed the Panther boss (hoping for a quick 18 slot bag), and then... cleared Molten Core.

I didn't really mean to. I just wanted to check it out. But then it was so good, the memories of seeing 40 bodies lying dead in these old areas I haven't been back to.

Only moment of trouble was Majordomo. I didn't really realize what was going on at first and lost 4 of the team to teleporting (on to the pit or something? I'm still not sure what happened) before just settling down with my DK and death strike for healing, and a few minutes later, I was opening the chest.

Later, I took a shot at timed CoS (the daily) and got to the the last pause before the drake fight (where Arthas tells you to rest). I think there's only 2-3 more pulls from there and I was not nearly max'ed out. I wasn't flasked, fully buffed, well-fed, all that shit. I was slow in some areas. But, I didn't wipe or lose anyone for that matter, which is the first time that's happened. I basically need to remember to blow my tanking cooldowns on some of those bigger trash pulls in the first half. The bosses don't really bother me at all but sometimes, between aggro and losing focus, I can let things get out of control on those early pulls.

So, time to take fight club up a notch or shut it down forever. I took all my kids, individually, and checked there DPS on the target dummies. It broke down like this from highest to lowest obviously:

Ele Shaman - 3.5k

Frost Mage - 2.3k

Surv Hunter - 2.1k

Demo Lock - 1.8k

Mutilate Rogue - 1.8k

S Priest - 1.7k

Boomkin - .8k

The gears range but they're all getting there. So, I don't really understand what the fuck is the difference. Well, it's 2-3 things. Gear differences, rotations are less efficient here and there, specs are better and worse, glyphs are more and less easy to utilize with 1-button. But, let's put it straight out there: Shaman kick ass for boxing. Kick. Teh. Ass. My ele shaman has been leading the pack from day one and I promise you, it has nothing to do with me and my borderline retardation. I don't know if I'd prefer 3 more shaman or if I sort of like the challenge of getting my other classes more efficient and devastating. According to the dual-boxing forums, people running all sorts of class comps have massive DPS success in the end, so I know it's just me. And the tinkering IS the game for me. So, I guess you could say I'm happy.

Onyxia vs Doomwalker

I tried to "farm" my easy heroics because I'm kind of fiending for a few pieces of badge gear. I rolled through Gundrak and DTK with zero wipes, finally! In fact, I finished DTK with the Eck debuff still on my crew (nothing that impressive since it's an hour buff and I kill Eck right before the last boss). Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good about the team. I did AN and wiped once on the final guy but knocked him down on the next try. Went to Nexus and plowed through the place until Keristrasza... I downed her yesterday but today it was not to be.

I tried everything I could think of... different totems, different lock pets, different gear, different cool downs saved for the enrage timer. I attempted her probably 9-10 times but in the end, I just gave in for the day. I even had her at 1500 hps. It's funny... playing with even a single other person, we would have killed her. but things fall apart in multiboxing and it's not pretty. I read a priest solo'd her by dot'ing and running around the instance (she's slow as shit).

Then I went to CoS and blew that. Then I tried doing Naxx 10 with my brother (so 6 of us) and the second mob stumped us (the gargoyle that heals fully at 30%). We were going to switch around to up our dps and we would have dropped it but he had to split. Then I went and killed Onyxia for fun (my first time). Man, I wish I'd been farming this bitch for months now... 18 slot bags alone are worth like the 10 minutes of killing it took. Then I went to kill Doomwalker because I heard he drops 500g. He also drops bombs. I got him to 10% but didn't know about the enrage timer (fucking game mechanic... the only thing it enrages is me) and he blew my crew up as well.

I'm done for a bit. Just wanted to try some fun things. Might go in to MC or BWL and see how those go. I've never seen Karazhan either. It's funny, years ago I installed a private server version of WoW on one of my hard drives. I went in and gave myself all sorts of shit and went through BWL and MC, just checking things out (BWL was the top instance at that point). Now, with this crew, I sort of feel like I'm back there again.

Why is this game so nice with it?

Quick hits I wanted to mention:

• I only have one shaman in my crew (I know... what a fucking oversight) so for totems, as with the cup that holds the blood of Christ, I have to choose.. and choose wisely. In each totem slot I can drop either an offensive or defensive buff basically. I'm dropping Stoneskin (the DK buff Horn of Winter takes the place of Strength of Earth, something I only just found out... because I'm a fuckin noob), Totem of Wrath (you really have to... even in the blizzard-happy fight with Novos, you can't give up that buff on four casters for a little frost resistance), Cleansing Totem, and Nature Resistance Totem. Now, the first two don't really have better choices. The last two are questionable, right? I could have mana/health regen and Wrath of Air down instead. But having the Cleansing Totem down all the time has been invaluable. The number of fucking mobs that spit weird goo in my face is insane and I don't have time to micro-manage every fight. Always having this down and not needing to know before hand whether I'm entering into a plague bukkake has saved me a couple of wipes per instance run. The thing is, keeping your tank up is all that matters as long as he/she's got aggro. If that's true, everything else can basically be fixed. So I'm giving up a bit of DPS but my survivability has ratcheted up.
• I made a purge/tranq shot macro. It's just a /stopcasting macro that's bound to one key. There are a lot of mobs that enrage in these Heroics. I know that most of you are steamrolling through all of these and there's no point to using cc or tranq shots. But I want to develop good habits for Icecrown so I can make pulls as easy as possible. When I see someone enrage, I start a heal on myself and then purge/tranq the mob and the fights suddenly become trivial.
• Bloodlust is sofa king amazing. It's almost like coffee to me. No matter what obstacle I face in life, all I need is a little coffee. I could accidentally pull Yogg with my shaman and if I bloodlust, I'll suddenly feel like "you know what? I think I got a shot here!"
• This brings me to my next point. My macro for "freaking out" (that's actually what I call it) basically /use's trinkets and longer buff cooldowns like rapid fire, icy veins, whatever. Use this every fight. I can't believe how short some of these amazing cooldowns are. 2 minutes for Power Infusion? Really? Although I have really long cooldowns like bloodlust on a separate button for boss fights. You want some things to always be ready.
• Make sure your team has a disenchanter. Don't be like me.
• When I started, my focus was simplicity. As I've introduced more complex play (utilizing more of each classes' specialities), my game has improved. Don't shy away from stepping your game up a bit. If you're failing, add CC, stop AoE tanking, decurse, drink elixirs, get enchanted and gemmed better. Basically, don't give up, do what it takes, and think and you should crush anything... anything that doesn't require you to move each individual toon too much, that is.
• These last two bits are about my DK Tank. First, Army of Dead is fucking hilarious. This crew of morons that remind me of the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (who does a tribute to the weasels in WFRR? I fucking love this world) pops out all around you. Sometimes you summon one in such a way that it aggros the boss you're about to pull (I know: only I'm this dumb). They taunt like Ocho-Cinco and for some weird reason, they'll have a boss surrounded and then the whole group will run like 20 yards away WITH the boss. Sometimes this takes the boss out of my DPS range. Sometimes the boss has an enrage timer. Sometimes I wipe. But there are a few times where it's great to have that many extra hit points taking random beatings for you. I still like to use it whenever I can.. if only for the hilarity.
• My current DK build is pretty good. I've tried maybe 15 builds and all have been fine, to be honest. But there are a few things I took this time that I doubt any serious tank takes. First, lowering my deathgrip cooldown helps a lot. As I said already, as long as the tank is alive with aggro, life is good. Anything that let's me fix a fight spiraling out of control I like. This really does save my ass and when wipes are costing my group 100g a wipe (15-20g per guy, of course), I'm over it. I'm over wiping. In WoW, at least. Anyway, third, I love Master of Ghouls. Having the ghoul out perpetually is key for me because of the number of times I 'oh shit!' sacrifice it for the health. I could just try to bring him out a minute before I need to sacrifice him but the way I play, that's just not predictable and I'm too scatter-brained. I constantly play my shadow priest without shadowform after a wipe. I need all the help I can get.

Hello, Mcfly

One thing I don't do enough of is Think. Too often, I hit a boss, give it the old college try, if I drop him/her/it, great! If not, I go to wowhead and read what others have green-lit as the best technique. Then I do that. If that fails, I bag it.

I once read an article about how Japanese gamers love a fucking hard game. Love a challenge. And American gamers basically never want to be challenged. They want to succeed but the effort they put in doesn't really affect how much they enjoy the success. I'm an American, unfortunately. I realized that I don't really mind a cake-walk at all. And this "wowhead, show me the way" mentality is really crippling me.

My point is, I've been farming Gundrak, DTK, and CoS the last few days for badges and to gear up my new crew a bit. They are, I find, the easiest instances, although I skip 2 bosses in DTK, which is sort of stupid. Anyway, I'm fighting Eck the Nimble Little Mynx and this thing really fucks my crew up. The problem is basically the same every time: when it drops aggro and pounces on someone else, it can get positioned behind my team and I don't realize it immediately. Then either no one is DPSing or it vomits on my crew and things go bad from there. This fight is a total DPS race (not a hard one, I'll grant you) because Eck has an enrage timer, so any time spent with your thumb up your digital wazoo is .. undesirable. I've been trying the wowhead technique of positioning my team on one side of the doorway and the tank on the other side, with it in between, a little Eck sandwich that should be easily tauntable off my crew and should stop it from springing all over the place. But the little fucker kept wiping me. Something would go wrong, my taunts wouldn't take, he'd facial my team, the enrage timer went off.. whatever.

So I repositioned myself a bit to adapt and whooped that trick. Here's a shot of my team. The key was that any where Eck went, everyone was always able to DPS and it was just easier for me to control him. I need to think more and step up more and stop relying on people to hand feed me this shit.

One last thing, if any of you have watched Hachoo's fantastic multiboxing heroic videos, I have to say that sometimes I find the strategy revolves around "my shaman crew are fucking awesome." And that is a valid strategy. But, no one really needs help when they're geared. They need help when they're in shitty 78 blues and just starting out and need a strategic edge. That being said, I completely love his strategy 90% of the time.

A few other points of interest today:

• I moved my mage and lock to other accounts. My A-team is now a DK tank, Hunter/lock, ele shaman, mage, priest. They are bringing in the emblems as fast as I can spend them and I'm having a much easier time with every piece I get. The DPS has broken in to the 2.5k to 3.3k range overall, which just makes a monstrous difference.
• I was not healing correctly with my priest. I now have a macro sequence that throws up shield, renew, and PoM. Starting every fight with this combo on my MT and redoing it during battle has probably doubled my success rate. It's stupid how little of my priest I was using before and probably still am. I had no idea how much PoM would help AoE healing in general. Probably because I'm a moron.
• It is insane how much better you can play a character solo vs boxing. I was DPSing w/ my DK on a target dummy and put up, I'm not exaggerating, 1.5k more DPS actually playing vs my macro. Now, my macro probably sucks balls, I haven't worked on it in ages and it's not what I use for tanking. But still. That's ridiculous.
• I know I've bitched before about Hunters but I'm throwing one more thing in. When Eck, or any other boss, charges my team, my hunter is the only one who can't carry on doing what he does best. I remember vaguely that they lessened the range needed for using bows/etc. but still.. a mob can be right up in the grills of my casters and they don't care.. they keep on blasting. But my hunter starts swinging his polearm. Weak. Maybe I should macro a disengage button... is that the one that makes him jump like 20 yards backward?

Here's a CoS kill shot, just because I remembered to take one.

Too many strands in the old duder's head

I have 9 80s on one side, across 5 accounts, and I'm having a hard time settling on what the fuck to do with them. And I have to settle. At 80, these guys are only as good as their gear and I have to stick to a few of them and gear them out or they'll never succeed at anything. Here is a short list of my options as I see them:

• Spread them out across 9 accounts (i.e. get 4 more) and start to raid 10-man content. This was always the goal but here are a few reasons I might not do this yet. Unless I'm actually ready to raid, it's a waste of $60 a month (assuming the purchase of the game and expansions will happen at some point in the future). And I don't think I'm ready to raid. I'm just not good enough. I can't survive basic heroics like UK. It's all my healing. Once I figure out how to tighten that up, I will be fine.
• Leave my MT and my main healer on 2 separate accounts and move everyone else to the other 3. One of the toughest things about bringing up this new crew is having an ungeared healer and tank. If I take them out of the equation and always use geared guys in those slots, the dps can rotate in and out and get geared fairly easily. The drawback is that only the 3 dps will be getting that vertical improvement of stepping into heroics and ToC where every piece is a huge upgrade. On the plus side, with the new badge system I will be able to hopefully OP my MT/healer, even if none of the drops are relevant to them.
• Make one team of 5 and stick with it. Move 1 or 2 toons around to make the ideal 5-man, don't worry about the other 20 guys, don't worry about 10-man stuff, just try to OP one perfect 5-man team. Who would this be? My DK tank, priest healer, ele shaman, and 2 more ranged. I have a balance druid, mage, lock, and hunter. Am I missing anyone? Don't think so but I am tired. The hunter is nice b/c so much gear drops that really only he'll be able to use. The lock can DE and the mage has all the portals/food/etc. The druid would be nice because, again, he could take so many different drops for specs and off-specs and in the end, druids are fun as hell to play. It'd be nice to have a geared druid for solo'ing.
• Shut fight club down and move my favorite toons to my main account. Go back to pug'ing and just building up single guys at a time. I miss pug'ing. I miss the focus you can put in to one toon. I love making 1k gold for 5 toons doing about 30min of dailies though. Toss up!

I suppose what I should really do is put all the dps on the 3 accounts, start with my "ideal" team, and rotate in other guys for fun or when the old guard get too geared and aren't benefiting any more. At the end of that process, I would have a seriously geared crew to move across other accounts for raiding should I still want to.

I'm sorry, I know this is dreadfully boring shit but I need to see it all on paper to decide wtf to do. Right now I feel like I'm spread too thin in WoW. I even logged in with the C-team because I'd kill to just have 4 shaman right now. And the C-team has 2 at 65, plus another at 51 that could join them with a bit of leveling. I need to focus.

Alright, game time. What will I do... moving toons around costs money and I don't feel like doing that until I really need to. Right now, one account only has melee 80s which makes it tough to have an ideal team since neither are my MT. I need to move 1 ranged guy to that account. The others will be my MT, priest, boomkin/shaman, hunter, .... I got it. I need to move my mage to my hunter's account and my lock to my pally/rogue account. Done and done.

The final team will look like this, by account:

DK tank

Priest healer

DPS 1 - Hunter/Mage

DPS 2 - Boomkin/Shaman

DPS 3 - Rogue/Lock

I have already set my pally up to be my PVP toon so that works out fine if he never gets in the rotation. Although I could move him to my DK's account and set him up as MT... FUCK, what is wrong with me? Lesson learned, though. Keep accounts separate by their "role". Keeping an MT account is easier than having MT, DPS, and Healz on each, imo.

Blizzcon

I watched Blizzcon with my friend on DirectTV this time. I've been there in the past and I certainly would have loved to swing by one of the days, but the telecast was a pretty fantastic way to enjoy it, pause it, get some food, go see District 9, come back and watch it, etc.

After the Con, I bought the Diablo Battlechest and started playing Diablo 1 again. My friend and I are going to blast through 1, 2, and LOD real quick, just so we can even follow the fucking questions that were asked at the dev panel. Also, I realized I need to get my shit straight with WoW's lore. I'm sick of just not being in the loop with these freaky dragons and elementals and the history of the world. I actually got stuck in Warcraft 3 (might have been in frozen throne) but I need to go back and L2P. I'm sick of not being excited when Metzen mentions some obscure badass that everyone else gets jazzed about.

Speaking of which, if you had taken a shot of vodka every time a Blizzard employee said the phrase "geeked out", you would be dead.

But my favorite quote of the Con came from my friend while he was waiting at the airport to head home. There were apparently quite a few attendees in the terminal with him. "This one guy went by and the earth shook as if Stiches were near." I miss Stiches murdering noobs in Darkshore.

I took the old guard and the hunter from the B-team through ToC today. It was a pain but I got 3 epics to put on (at a bit of a cost in repairs). I should have regular ToC on farm but I don't. It's my healing. I use a priest healer and I just can't take care of my shit when things get rough. Also, on a side note, I sort of hate ToC. I'm going to take the crews through some heroics and just go back to get the badges.

The Update

The B-team hit 80!! Aaaaaand I immediately stepped in to ToC. Aaaaannnd I immediately got exploded. Just a few moments in the rogue's poison cloud and my druid fell over and didn't get up. I ported to Og and dropped maybe 500g on tanking-out my MT a bit. I went back in with my brother as the healer and dropped the champions twice. But that whore Paletress wiped us until I was too bored and frustrated to try again.

So, I'm busy making sets of gear for everyone to at least get them in the ballpark of 80 instances. I leveled them entirely in AV, so they have no gear and no money. Just honor. I checked all their DPS on the dummies in Og and they were not as bad as I would have thought. The range was 1200-1600. The hunter was the weak link.

Some random thoughts:

Pallys are fucking fun as hell in pvp. I would let my entire team die and just play my pally and easily hold down towers, graveyards, whatever... Amazing pvp toons. He's def specc'd, by the way, with a few of the resilience plate 78 pieces on.

Druids have to pay maybe 5x as much as anyone else to get their talents and skills. I sent everyone off with around 300g to get their level 80 spells (it'd been a while since I'd gone back to a trainer) and the druid might have ended up needing 1k more. It was just amazing.

Hunters having to pay for ammo (these saronite arrows are going for 15-20g a thousand on the Kilrogg Horde AH) seems a little like bullshit to me. I know, it's probably old hat for hunters, but why does one class have to pay a few gold a battle just to be in the same range (I think on the low side, actually) as all the other DPS classes? Slightly bizarre to me.

What the fuck is up with epic level gear repair bills? It goes from like 20g for 80 blues to 60+ for a handful of epics in there. Really? Raiders are the ones who need to be forced to do dailies and farm mats to pay for their repairs when they already have all the pots, enchants, foods, scrolls, what have you, that drain their weekly funds? I get the whole 'take gold out of the system' aspect to WoW, but this seems like misplaced overkill to me.

Are pallys hard as hell to heal as tanks? A pally that out-geared my main DK was impossible to keep up with chain healing in heroic ToC. He wasn't def capped but he was at 533 with 27k health. I just don't get why he was so much harder to heal than my guy though he had generally better gear.

If you're a hunter and you're leveling in AV, your pet won't level with you. At all, as far as I can tell.

I have an 80 of every class. I'm not an expert on any of them but from a casual standpoint, there is absolutely no balance to them. Between what they cost, how hard they are to get similar results, their utility, how hard it is to gear them... There is no equality.

Trial of Champions, SM in 1 min, xp in bgs, holy shit, batman

The ToC 5 man dungeon:

I switched all my follow macros to the form:

/focus MAIN

/follow focus

and now following works in vehicle (and mounted) combat. Thanks to the Dual-Boxing forums for that, of course. Assist button remained the same (just /assist main) and I moved all of my keys and bindings off the main toolbar so that I didn't have any weird bindings show up when the mounted bar swapped in. I haven't been able to kill the last champion or so in the mounted portion of ToC but I'm also 4-boxing it and think with this post, I should be fine. I was already doing something similar but this really makes sense.

I brought in my brother and collected maybe 5 epics already for the team? All ilvl 200, so heroic stuff (on normal mode) but still, I love the color purple and I love new gear. The nice thing about getting epics of any level is that I don't hesitate to gem and enchant the fuck out of them. So the net benefit to the group is much greater than just the piece itself.

SM in 1 min:

Diwa over at DB posted a 1 pull 1-min SM clear that I love. I've done SM a few times to boost the teams up (my horde main has 57 Mograine kills according to the armory, 86 on my alliance main) but always in 3 pulls and in probably 7 min. I know, I know, amateur night, but still, since you can't do it more than 5 times an hour, I didn't really care. But this is just lovely and I want to save it here.

XP in BGs:

Again, scouring the DB forums, AV is giving people 130k xp per win? Holy shit. I don't know what I'm getting now, to be honest. I've been questing hard and in familiar areas (just blasted through dragonblight again) so it's probably a pretty decent rate. And I get gold, items, rep, and variety. But AV won't have drop quests, travel time, and matches can go fairly quickly. Do I get the rep for killing people? For turn ins? I need to find out more.

Update: Well, I read up a bit on the official forums and it looks like the xp is from victories and dropping mobs like Belinda (you whore). I'm going to give it a whirl but 4-boxing AV a few weekends ago sucked balls. The lag, the split-group, the fact that I was probably one of the reasons we lost... And I'm horde. We always lose. To be honest, if the 71-80 bracket is the same way, consistently losing every match, I may just use this for my alliance team on AV weekends.

Ideally, I would do the easiest quests in an area (wanted posters, arena chains, etc), do an instance here and there, and do a few AVs to keep me out of having to grind out so many drop quests. We'll see today how it goes.

Last but not least, you'd totally hit this, right?

The Wall

I burn out so quickly in WoW. I may be back at that wall again. My one team is at 80 and, as is the case for everyone, a whole new grind presents itself ahead of me. Why is it a grind and not just the fun of playing the game? Well, it is. But I've seen all the dungeons now. I've been to all the areas. No, not Naxx yet, but I'm trying, I'm trying. I don't feel like leveling up any of the lower teams today (or this last week, for that matter) either.

But, I don't think it's a long term slump. I'm looking at these ill spots to move to in the RL, and have become mildly obsessed with work again (in a good way, i.e. by choice), but when you're multiboxing, I think you might be quicker to pull the plug on 5 accounts where you might leave 1 account active for months after you've moved on to other entertainments.

I took up inscription and jewelcrafting on my MT, am 3 days from getting team 80 their epic weapons from the argent tournament, and got my first arena points last week. Oh, that might have had something to do with it... arena was a real quick in the balls. And the teeth. And the wallet. A lot of kicks landed. My teammate and I charged out and SPAGHETT!... we were spooked.

Pics and actual content to come. I'm going to post my current boxing-friendly daily quest route for icewind next. Hope you're having a blast.

The C-team RISES!

ooooooh snap! I brought out the c-team today. I guess I'm just an alt-junky. Yesterday, I gave some love to the 80s and finished off a good chunk of Icecrown. I haven't touched the b-team for a few days. I just don't feel like doing the beginning of Northrend again so soon. And this game is all about having fun so I don't sweat it: I just wander off and do whatever strikes me as entertaining at the time.

So, I got the c-team (DK tank, Resto Shaman, Ele Shaman, Frost Mage, and BM Hunter) together. Their armor was entirely red which reminded me that I'd quit playing them because they'd failed so completely and miserably against Nazan (I think). But I fixed them, started questing, and quickly discovered that, like all my teams, this one is fucking good. By the end of the day, they ranged between 62-64, cleared Slave Pens, and were rolling through Underbog before I realized I was about to burn my ragu (which is such a sick recipe.. like an epic drop of a fucking ragu recipe).

I was looking over my 10-man team. I want to get the c-team up to 70 so I can really take a perfect team to 80 (I'm not sure the b-team is perfect.. I might sub out a mage for a shaman or a hunter for a balance druid). After that, I'd guess in a few weeks, I will have 8-10 80s and will really have to put my money where my mouth is. Should I just keep a nimble team of 5 and group up with a pug for 10-man content or should I bite the bullet, get 5 more accounts, and see where this demon lies?

I think we all know how this is going to end.

A Quick To-Do List

More as my own personal collection of vids I want to get back to, while the servers are down, I'm going to post a few reminders...

Argent Tournament Boxing

Wow... I could teach my cat to open her own cans of food with more success than I had trying to get five toons to shield-break and charge a motionless target. In fact, to illustrate my initial attempts to box the jousting quests, here's a quick anecdote:

For the first-level jousting quests, you have to go around whacking away at a bunch of motionless wooden dummies, five days in a row. One of the tasks involves shield breaking and then charging a target which, as it so happens, is situated along the cliff face of Icecrown. I'm used to my mount coming to a slow trot after blasting through these. Hilariously enough, when I sent all five of my toons rocketing toward said cliff-hanging target, one decided it was all too much and just kept on trucking right over the edge. I have no idea why he didn't stop. Sometimes I feel the same way.

Anyway, it was a bit of a mess, all in all. I couldn't share targets via any assist macros, so I had to manually choose the same target on each little screen. I remapped the keys so they were all the same and tried to line everyone up on top of each other like a clown car and steer manually, with some success. I don't know. If anyone has a link or suggestions as to how the fuck I can up my mounted game, I'd appreciate it. I'm going to do some research while the servers are down tomorrow and see if I can get this locked down. I'll post any tips I find of course.

Jousting in the new 5-man (PTR)

Here's a vid of the instanced-jousting we're going to have to do in the next patch. I'm going to wander over to the Argent Tournament (which I pretty solidly hate) and see how hard it is to box the quests. I've tried before and it wasn't pretty but I didn't feel the need to improve.

Opening the Dark Portal for old time's sake

I've been questing in Howling Fjord but I hit that multiboxer-wall where I only had drop quests and was getting a little burnt out. So, just for kicks, I decided to wander back to CoT and do BM. The experience wasn't great, of course. I was hoping it would be but I only did 4% of a level I think. But it was good practice with my new keys and fun as hell. Of course, I'm probably overgeared for it, with a few northrend greens already, and I wasn't on heroic (no rep yet), so I really have no excuse if I can't do this place.

But it did take me back... I love visiting old instance. They always remind me of other people. When my guild of 4 started doing lvl 70 instances back in early BC days, we always had to pick up a 5th. We befriended these two guys, bosaloco and gargoth, and one of them always rolled with us. They were pros, real nice, and just easy going. According to the armory, neither has leveled those particular toons past 70 so I guess they quit like all of us do at some point. But waltzing in to BM just now reminded me of some good fuckin times with the guildies and those two. Hope you guys are doing well.

Macro changes and tomfoolery

I've been working off and on today on my setup. I realized that I initially designed my work-flow to be as simple as possible. During a fight, everyone does the rotation they should generally be doing when I press F, for example. But there are some amazing situational spells that I never use at all. As my team levels higher and higher, dinging 70 yesterday, these spells become more potent and the cost of ignoring them more limiting.

So I've gone and redesigned things. I'm using keyclone and I've never been sure about passing alt modifiers through it, or ctrl ones, for that matter. I generally use separate keys for everything. I think I've figured out at least a bit of why the modifiers have given me problems so far though. If I use shift-w as sheep on my mage and shift-w is unbound on all my other toons, I didn't realize that they will all use W and step forward... So I'm still pretty spread out but I now have access to sheep, fear, judgement, stuns, counterspell, lay on hands and a few other utility spells. Once I memorize them, it should give me a lot more flexibility to handle big pulls and survive cluster fucks.

Flipping like a coin toss

Today was a bit of a let down again. Maybe I'm pushing these guys too hard. I love how I think of them as sort of pets or plants that I'm cultivating... Anyway, I swapped my pally to tank and druid to healer and quested a bit. My pally's sword skill was around 200 so he was air-balling all over the place. My druid dropped 100g on greens and glyphs and was a modest healer. I swapped all my macros around, got the dps assisting the pally, got the druid on follow, all that house keeping that takes a minute. After all was said and done, I had some sloppy resemblance of my former team.

My brother came online and I asked him to tank UK for me. I dumped my pally, made my macros flexible enough to control the group from the druid as healer, and walked in with his 71 DK. Mana was a huge problem. When you walked in to BC, every single quest item in Hellfire was essentially an MC upgrade. The same can't be said for the beginning of Northrend. The stuff is good, of course, and the ilevel is a definite improvement, but a ton of the early caster stuff is spirit, stamina, and spell power. My boys ran out of mana real quick and I switched back to some of my BC dungeon blues to try to fix the problem. But really, it was the loss of the pally and BoW that was killing me, I think. Anyway, I either ran out of mana, couldn't heal my brother well enough, or couldn't keep the group up. We dropped the first boss but the second two guys basically two-shotted my druid healer and ended the fit each time. I was discouraged, to say the least. They were still 68s but whatever. I know my old guildies and I would have rolled through that.

And something just didn't feel right. My druid is a big fucking tauren druid. A monster. I even named him theboss. Like a boss, god damn it! He can't stand in the back throwing stupid hots all over the place and doing fruity things called Lifebloom and playing with seeds. So, just as quickly, I swapped everything back the way it was, for another 100g for each, and I feel better already.

Which leaves me with my original problems. I think I'm going to solve the group healing struggle by placing macros for flash of light on the keypad 1-5, for each toon individually. That might speed things up just enough for me, eliminating the party-click and assist-heal macro that I currently use. Maybe it won't be an upgrade but I'm fucking trying it. I gotta try something. I gotta make it happen.

As for picking up group aggro with my big bear butt... well, my bro's main is a raid-level druid tank and he has no problem with it. So, I just need to L2P in a serious way. It's all about rage management for me. I'll figure it out. I need to be a little more patient.

Lastly, my original vanilla main is an alliance warrior. I haven't played alliance side with anyone else in almost 3 years. We went horde together and never went back. Should I bring my boy over to the dark side when I have the chance with faction-swapping? He will cease to be my guy... the guy that starred in such horrible short films as the Padfoot and Condi series... the guy that was honored in the WotLK trailer (and no, that's not a joke, and Condi and I are still tickled pink about it)... the guy that kept pulling aggro off the main tank in my first MC run because I didn't understand why the MT wouldn't want to share damage...

If I bring him over to the horde he'll just be another alt. I don't think I can do it.

I might be a quitter

The b-team made it to Northrend today and, after doing a few of the earliest quests, I thought, screw it, let's get in to Utgarde Keep and see what this is all about. Well, a few wipes later and I threw in the towel and swapped my druid and pally.

They honestly have kind of sick gear for their levels. I'd gemmed, enchanted, and glyphed them out, and they were doing some impressive stuff (2-man'ing a boss when the rest of the team died early). But, I've run a pally tank before and it's easier than apple pie. And a tree can probably heal just fine. It won't fix my aoe-healing issues necessarily, but who cares. When a bunch of fucking skeletons spawn, they'll run over a big yellow circle of holiness and stick to me like a stalker. There are a lot of macros to re-write or create (since you don't really have many for the toon you play), and I'm sure the first time I test-drive this lemon it won't be pretty. But, in the long run, the team will achieve more effortlessly, I hope.

Sethekk Halls Run - B team

I ran Durnholde Hold and Sethekk Halls with the 66 crew. Here's the webstats report for the Sethekk Run. I actually couldn't drop the last guy. It's easy to reset that fight by just running down the hallway a bit, and having a druid tank means that it was trivial to try the fight multiple times but I just couldn't drop him. Here were my biggest problems:

• My pally fucking sucks at group healing. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. I have him glyphed for Holy Light but that doesn't cut it nearly enough when some boss arcane explodes for 5k. I'm not sure what to do but I'll have to look into it. Priests are amazing healers for boxing and, so far, my favorite. Shammys are clearly competent as hundreds of boxers run with resto shammys without a problem. Druids have the HOTs which make them great for healing on the go, when your group has to keep moving. My pally's mana efficiency is amazing and, as a single target healer, he gets the job done. But group healing has been the death of me many times now.
• I couldn't get out of the way of the explosion fast enough. The closest I got, I had the entire group with me but I spent so much time trying to heal everyone through the Arcane volley thing he casts that I didn't keep the tank topped off enough. If I left the group somewhere, the time it took me to get to them, get them on follow, and get around a pillar was just too much and I'd lose at least 2 of them. I tried to use aspect of the pack right after the boss blinked to me but that didn't work either. I tried again and again. Now, he is a lvl 69 boss and I was 66-67 at the time, but it was mostly my inability to move precisely.

Finally, I brought in an 80 to kill him real quick. I normally don't do that, but the boss was worth 2 quests for the team and I couldn't just drop that.

On a side note, I'm going to start pvping again soon, arena and bgs, and I found this arena flowchart over on elitist jerks pretty funny.

I'm heavily debating going straight to Northrend at 68 or trying all the BC instances at least once and probably heading out there at 70-71 instead. Having just taken a 4-man team up through Northrend, I know the leveling-spree you go on prior to it comes to a sudden and painful halt. And, honestly, the BC instances are a lot fresher to me at this point than the beginning areas of WotLK.

The teams as they stand now

Here's the armory links for my current teams:

The OGs:

Märiachi - Holy Priest

Prongs - Ele Shaman

Harmonica - Tanking DK

Se - Combat Rogue

The promising newcomers:

Mòrt - Holy Pally

Autopîlot - Demo Lock

Orangejulius - Frost Mage

Chänce - BM Hunter

Thebôss - Tanking Druid

The bad news bears:

Bobaduurr - Tanking Dk

Mcnästy - Arcane Mage

Vuh - Survival Hunter

Cälvin - Resto Shaman

Hòbbs - Ele Shaman

The OGs usually either 4-man instances or run with my only 2 friends who still play, zatanta or coralîne.

The promising new crew is doing solidly. So far, only Nexus-Prince Shaffar in Mana-Tombs wiped them out.. but to be fair, I ran out of patience and soulstones and sort of called it a night. They were 64 when they tackled him and I think if I'd tried a few more times, he would have fallen eventually. Also, this is the only crew that's dropped Nazan on their first attempt at 60. All my other crews have fallen to the flame breath.

Actually, this reminds me of a side-note I meant to mention: if you RAF at warp speed like I did, you end up with a bunch of guys that look like this. That's one of my alliance druids that I RAF'd up. After a while, I didn't even loot bosses... I just dinged and moved on. So, everyone walks out into the outlands in their birthday suits. And it is fucking difficult to drop Nazan buck nekkid. But this crew did it. Respect.

The bad news bears, on the other hand, are like the WNBA of my WoW adventures. They just suck and I constantly wonder why I don't just go back to enjoying the best. They fail where all other's (including my alliance team, which I'll post once I get them into my new alliance-side guild) have succeeded. I want them to pull through but they gotta show me something. First, healing with the shaman isn't going great. Since they moved the threat generated by the rock shield to the healer (which was a bit of a shock for me... last time I healed as a shaman, this was just free, threatless healing at its best), I'm hesitant to use it pre-fight like I used to. I guess I should rotate it into my mid-battle healing. Also, his heals are just slow and small... I tried switching to a spam of lesser heals and riptide but it didn't look like it was going to end well.

Other than that, I don't know why they suck. They're in their best-in-slot starter gear but that's no excuse.. my other teams have been fine.

Anyway, there's the horde roster. The ultimate goal is two-fold: to get a 5 man team that includes the OGs, minus the rogue and plus 2 ranged DPS. And to have 10 total 80s for a potential, possible, maybe 10-man raid team. I won't RAF again, I'll just move the toons around. I know, it's pricey. But time is money, friend.

My Layout

Just a last latenight comment: I took a shot with my layout up just so you could see it if you were interested. I'll list the major UI stuff in the morning. Take care.

A Quick Druid Comment

I've been having a weird issue with aggro running the b-team. If I accidentally pally pull a group, they will rush my mage. No one has done a thing yet and he's not the lowest level on the team. I just can't figure it out.

But I'm having less difficulty tanking with the druid. I just have to let aggro build a little more than with other tanks, which in turn gets me the early rage I need for my swipe-fest. But my god a druid can take a beating like no other. The first boss in the crypts was a bitch because I needed to do so much individual moving of the team when his 'gaze' turned on one of them. But then I just let everyone die except the tank and healer and calmly dropped the boss. What a tank. Just awesome.

He also dropped the upgraded lightforge headpiece for my pally, who is really coming together. I think he's gotten every drop he could, so far.

With the team at 66, so close to 67, I can't decide if I should quest in blade's edge or just do a few more runs.

In unrelated news, I started Breaking Bad and I haven't loved a show this quickly since the wire or arrested development. Actually, sometimes it seems like a combo of those two.

The B-team

The rogue that rolls in my lvl 80 team is more like a pet than a 4th toon. He puts out a little more dps in his current gear/macros than the barov peasant caller. I know it's entirely my fault but I just don't care. He occassionally stuns, occassionally comes up big, mostly takes damage I don't feel like healing or runs off to aggro another group mid-boss battle. So, i'm leveling up some ranged dps to take his place and that 5th slot. Without further ado, the B-team:

These guys are really growing on me. The group make up is a druid tank, pally healer, mage, lock, and hunter. Good gear distribution, decent dps numbers (I'll put up their next wws report for any curious), and some decent flexibility. I could easily switch the pally and druid's roles but that's what my alliance side team is and I wanted something different for these guys. They're 66 right now and just plowed through Auchenai Crypts with probably 4-5 wipes. Every time I enter an instance, I like to go in cold. It's been eons since I've run these BC dungeons and I wasn't tanking, so I really don't know most of the encounters at all, let alone the fact that these fuckers are going to mind control my druid and consequently break all my macros. My cleanse macro is:

/assist [target=thebôss, exists, nodead]

/cast Cleanse

or something like that.. from memory. Anyway, I'm surprised that targeting breaks when I get MC'd. It doesn't have [harm] or any condition like that in it. But I simplified it down for now to just be /target thebôss; /cast Cleanse, and that fixed things temporarily.

Will post more later, going to the grove to read in the sun a bit. Take care.

My Setup

Hello, all

Yes, it's the new WoW fad: multiboxing. I happen to decide to try it out because I moved to a time-zone that makes it tough for my friends and I to play together. I've also always played with a very small group of 3-4 players and wanted to see if I could give us the chance to see the 10-man content. A few months later, and I've got 5 accounts, 4 80s, and about 15-20 65s. Here's a quick recap:

I used the RAF option blizzard offers and daisy chained accounts. So, account A invites account B, account B invites account C, etc. There are many benefits for doing things this way.

• First, you can chain summon the whole group to one spot if you get either the first or last toon there. If you had one account invite the other four, you'd only have one summon every hour (i.e. your first account could summon one of the other four and then would be on cooldown, I think... I may be wrong about this so someone can correct me if I am).
• Second, you can chain level-grant. If you can the fifth account to 60, that toon has 30 levels to grant the fourth account that invited it. Those 30 levels count as levels gained, so that toon now has 15 levels it can grant the third account. It cascades down to the point where my first account had so many free 60s, I moved some of them to the fifth (the only account which never benefits from level-granting, obviously).
• Third, every account gets the free mount this way, each get the free month (excluding the last in the chain, of course), and you only have to have any two of the accounts playing together to get the RAF bonus. So, if your main 80 booster is on the first account, you can have two level 30s from accounts D and E with him/her and get the bonus. If you invite all accounts from you first, you always have to have a +/- 5 level toon from the first with the rest to incur the bonus.

After setting the accounts up, I read everything relevant over at dual-boxing.com. Starter guides, macro help, software tools, UI suggestions, group composition, you name it. I'm using keyclone's maximizer feature to run five windows on one 24-inch monitor. Whenever I try to place any of the instances on either of my other two monitors, my framerates tank. I'm sure it's user-error but things work well enough that I haven't tried fixing/improving that yet. Here's a small list of starting pointers that were key for me:

• Use a DK or pally tank. My main is a warrior and I've tanked as a druid and for boxing purposes, consecration and death and decay are irreplaceable for picking up newly spanned adds that have no aggro built on them. Sure, you can swipe, you can thunderclap, but I'm telling you, I have mana or runes on cooldown always, but I don't always have rage (especially early, when I'm just gearing up).
• Keep things simple. I have 3-4 buttons I use every fight and that's it. I have an assist macro so my team takes my target, a DPS macro which is the same key as my tanking macro (my spam button for most of the fight), a healing button, and a freak-out button (everyone blows their cooldowns, trinkets, etc). That's it. Now, two things to point out: first, I'm not very good at this. So, don't take any of this as Gospel. These are just my thoughts and experiences so far. Second, I do have macros and keys for totems, targeted cleansing, CC, group healing, mounting, drinking, following, spreading out, AOE, and panic moments. I also have dance and vanity pet keys. I just add them as I go along. But my main combat is very simple and so far has been effective. Case in point, I have a completely ungeared group of 4, mixed 79s and 80s, and I rolled through the first two bosses of UP normal last night. Not a breath taking achievement, I know, but 4-manning an instance above me seems like I'm not totally underachieving.
• Use the Click-to-Move and Interact with target one-two punch for quest-taking and that sort of thing. Look it up over at dual-boxing. It's fantastic. In brief, just switch on click-to-move on all your toons under settings, bind the interact-with-target key to something (I use F12, and a separate one for my melee classes, but about that some other time) and then walk up to a quest-giver or flightmaster, have everyone assist you and take your target, then press the interact key. Everyone will open up the dialog with said NPC and Jamba will take care of the rest for group accepting and mirroring of your main.
• Use Jamba. See above. It really does kick ass. Also, once you have Jamba, make the big-button macro that this guy suggests. I love it.
• I love keyclone and I have no problem supporting someone a bit who makes a great product like this. It's $20 for life, works great, the guy who runs it has gotten back to me when I pm him very quickly, and there are a ton of tutorials and support guides for it. There are free alternatives (autohotkey, etc) but when I was reading about software solutions for multiboxing, this one seemed the easiest to work with. I have no experience with the others. Honestly, though.. if you're going to multibox, don't cut corners here. It's a mildly expensive hobby but I dropped more on the steak I'm going to grill tonight for dinner than I did on keyclone which I've already used daily for two months.
• Pick the classes you want to play. I use all mixed teams because I fucking love putting new gear on. I love it so much that doing it five times more in an instance run and never wasting any drop really makes me euphoric. Mixed classes are harder though, as each DPS macro becomes less efficient (my lock macro for non-boss fights is just a shadow bolt spam). You can also take four shaman and a DK and still spread out loot quite well. Here's the thing: a DK and four shaman seem ideal for heroics. Mixed classes seem better if you might push on to do 10-man raid stuff because of the overlapping buffs and increased utility you actually need in them. Everyone says ranged is easier than melee for boxing, and that is true of course but I started with a rogue in my group and it really isn't a big deal. I use the click-to-move action mentioned above to get my rogue on my target and voila. So, in short, do what you want and figure it out later.

There's more, and I'll get to it, but for now, I think I might want to go play some. Here's a kill shot from last night's UP run, btw.

Enjoy your day and talk to you soon. Next post I'll put up armory links to my teams.