1598 Rating, 5 arena points left

after spending 1875 points on [Brutal Gladiator's Mail Leggings], that is! =]

I was tempted to play a few more games to get the rating past 1600 to buy the [Brutal Gladiator's Mail Armor] instead. However, since Sunday I have been sick as a wet kitten. Too sick to play WoW seriously. The only thing keeping me sane is 'The West Wing'.

40k

During the weekend, I pushed the honor farming hard. For Belgium, the last weekend was a three day weekend. I pulled over 10k honor each day by chain queuing for AV. In doing so I met Spud, a shammy fiveboxer in my battlegroup, twice. We defended Balinda together in one game, something that I usually do not do. Quite fun to imagine these non-plussed faces on the other side when seeing 36 totems and 9 shaman!

The reason why I was trying hard to reach 40k honor was to finally buy a pvp trinket. Until now I scraped by with staggered tremor totems and just endured the fear or whatnot when I was hit on the run. That however, could clearly not last. I did not want to waste honor on the 5 minute cooldown trinket or the cheap 2 minute one, but instead wanted to go directly for [Medallion of the Alliance]. Which is 40k. Ouch! I got it just in time to before the Sunday evening raid. =]

While I was busy hoarding the honor, I had a little setback. Hitting sufficient rating last week, I bought [Guardian's Mail Bracers] for 11794 Honor. The Warsong marks are for me the hardest one to get, as I can't really seem to enjoy that battleground. A guildmate joined me for some late WSGs and made the 2nd half of the marks really more pleasurable to get. Thanks buddy!

That leaves two upgrades to buy for honor: S4 ring and S4 boots. I am still a bit short on rating for both, but that will come. Until then, the S2 versions will do fine.

New Platform!

When I started Multi-boxing, I did not want to spent any money on hardware. I did not know how long I would have fun with it. Now a few things have changed. Firstly, the prices for hardware have gone down. Secondly, a bunch of elaborate Multi-boxing software solutions were created after I started boxing. Last and most importantly however - I know that I have fun with boxing and expect to continue doing so in the foreseeable future.

My original platform for boxing were five Sony VAIO computers. My home PC, notebook, previous notebook and two more notebooks that I set up for this project. While three of the notebooks were borderline WoW-capable, they did the job. Together with two pieces of software, a proprietary software multiplexer written by Micah of the dual-boxing.com forums and Multiplicity by Stardock this allowed me to box.

At least for PvE, this was fine. In the past months however, my boxing focus has shifted to my shaman team and PvP. While in PvE, a dead tank usually means a wipe which does not really matter since you are by yourself, the situation in PvP is totally different. A battleground or arena game does not allow you to do a graveyard run while everyone waits for your pleasure, to the contrary - time is ticking.

For a while now I have been tinkering with my new PC and wasted a lot of time due to a problem between ATI/AMD's 4800 graphics chipset and Intel's P45 mainboard chipset. The problem is not resolved yet, but I can now at least run one graphics card without having system stability problems.

The new hardware platform for my multiboxing and WoW in general is made up as follows: Intel Quadcore Q6700, MSI P45 Ultimate, 8GB, 2x ATI Radeon 4850. My old primary, now auxiliary, PC is much weaker: Intel P-D820, 2GB, nVidia GeForce 6600. As you can see, it has been a while since I upgraded! =]

To make the two PCs integrate as a single desktop, I still use Multiplicity. To allow me to broadcast keystrokes to all WoW windows, resize and position them and also to swap them on the fly I use Keyclone.

The major improvement for me is now one of convenience as well as combat effectiveness. It is possible to configure Keyclone to start all WoW sessions and uses WoW's config.wtf to adjust screen resolution and pre-fill the account names. That is very handy, making the whole thing much smoother to start up.

The real key difference however is that I was previously unable to make any char that I wanted leader of the pack in my setup while keeping the ability to move that char individually and broadcast commands to the other characters at the same time. That is something that I can do now. Keyclone's picture in picture function swaps the primary WoW window with one of the secondary windows on the press of a hotkey. Using the same hotkey in game to change the /focus for all characters allows me to change the leader of the pack on the fly, even while running without loosing more than a step or two.

I can't wait for the weekend this week. The good thing is: I don't really have to, since Belgium has a public holiday this Friday. =]

Step by step

Slowly but surely my team's kit and my play improves. As gear goes , I currently stand at 10199 Hitpoints, 373 Resilience, 11694 Armor unbuffed. 874 bonus damage (+55 from [Totem of the Void]), 32.8% crit with talents.

After last week, the 60 badges for [Cloak of Subjugated Power] were sorted. With this week's farming, 20 more badges are in stock on each shaman. I am saving Honor points for [Medallion of the Alliance]. 40k honor takes a bit of time, but I think it is worth it.

In the arena, I am currently focusing on learning from my opponents, my arena buddies and of course from my own mistakes. I played over 50 games so far this week, sitting at 1565 rating at the moment.