Level 40-43 - Where to?

After getting my shamans mounted on Elekks, I went immediately to Zul'Farrak to test the water there. It being an outdoor dungeon means being able to pull mounted, yeah baby! Now, there is slight problem with Zul'Farrak, and that is the blasted shaman mobs or more specifically their tendency to instantly replace destroyed totems. This combined with the fact that they are evil hackers that made their totems stack for the whole mob rather than just their group of five is a major headache for my pally. A bunch of these healing totems being up means that all mobs are receiving healing that is close to the reflected damage of my paladin.

While I thought about using my own shamans to counter this with a /target healing totem /castsequence lightning bolt (rank1),,, macro that makes the baby shamans cast in turn, I was so annoyed with the time it took to whittle the mobs down that I decided to go elsewhere.

I did Uldaman with its very xp-lucrative quest chains, but did not really fancy doing this over and over, the xp/h from kills alone is too low.

That elswhere is the Sunken Temple. This does the job in an awesome way. The dragonkin mobs on the top floor are just shy of level 50 and yield up to 400xp per head, non-rested. I do the big circular room in one pull after mopping up the two groups that guard the entrance to it. The turn around time and xp/h rate is quite to my liking this way.

Cheers, Captn.

Level 39 - Saying goodbye to the Cathdral

It is always good to have a short term goal, for me that was level 39 requirement of the blue drops from Mr Morgaine and Mrs Whitemane. It took quite a lot of runs until I had Whitemane's Chapeau, the Triune Amulet, the Inquisitor's Shawl, the Hand of the Righteousness and the Aegis of the Scarlet Commander on all four Shamans. But, on the bright side, the levels literally just flew by. Spending an hour here and two there while not neglecting work, sleep or raids, I made very quick progress. Now however, it is time to say goodbye to the Cathedral, the xp per mob has dropped below 100. It is time to look for greener grazing grounds elsewhere.

Captn.

Back from RL

After a number of weeks with barely enough time to attend my guild's raids, not to mention any solo play or multi-boxing, I am back and the thirsty period is at end!

It took me a while to get everything patched up again and make slight changes to my platform. I have added a 22" screen and another desktop. The 22" is now for my primary character, and one of the 19" screens is for the spare desktop that I now use instead of the fourth notebook.

The bigger change in comfort though is the decision to spent $50 on Multiplicity Pro from Stardock Corp. This product works similar to the free open source Synergy. It allows me now to move my mouse cursor freely over all screens and use just one mouse and one keyboard to type on all of them separately. The big advantage of Multiplicity over Synergy is that it can be used normally with WoW and does not suffer from the head spinning problem on mouse look. $50 may sound like money, but with the Euro/Dollar rate these days it is more like monopoly money. In any case, it was well spent, I am very happy with how smooth and reliable it works. Being able to use it to log into windows and copy pasting between machines is an additional bonus.

In actual multiboxing, I have focussed on pushing my shamans up some levels. At about level 23.5 I let them just sit there. Looking at the pack, I decided to use one 70 and boost four of them rather than play five. That was on Sunday. As of yesterday night, they are level 32 and enjoy chain lightning.

The way I did this was using my protection pally's reflective damage to repeatedly annihilate the Stockades, using 3-5 pulls for the whole place. Then I did Gnomeregan and finally a couple of times the Scarlet Monastery Cathedral yesterday evening after raid time. It is a bit tricky to get it right so that no XP is wasted by mobs dying too far away from the boostees and that also there is no chance that the boostees get killed by wandering mobs, weird aggro behavior or similar nuisances. Once that is sorted, I can only recommend this. While not hurrying, playing with my shamam's macros and my system in general and even looting the tons of corpses that this piles up, I easily averaged a level gained per hour spent. There is loads of room for improvement on that figure.

If I find the time, I will fraps a cathedral run swapping between the paladin and one of the boostees point of view to show how well it works. After killing the first five mobs, one pull sorts everything outside the cathedral walls. The next pull goes straight from the door to the boss and back since I leave my shamans outside. Each mob gives about 120xp, non rested.

Cheers, Captn.