Captn's Log

Patch 4.0.1 Paladin Tanking

2010-10-16T12:01:00.007+01:00

While I didn't like what I read about the paladin changes up front on MMO-Champion, I find that I am actually quite happy with the implementation. There were a bunch of things to note before I got from 'WTF?!' to 'Aaaah, cool!'. I'll list those below:

Hassle-free Blessings!
With Blessing of Wisdom folded into Blessing of Might and Blessing of Sanctuary's effect being talent based, this leaves two paladin blessings: Kings and Might. The kicker is that both are applied on everyone in your party/raid. That means a tankadin does Kings by default. A second paladin does Might. End of story. Combining that with minor glyphs reducing mana cost for Seal of Truth and Kings, we can be buffed up and running without drinking multiple times now! YAY!

AoE tanking changes!
So, they weakened Hammer of Righteousness (unless you have more than ten mobs around you) and put consecration on a longer cooldown. WTF?! Well, that's not so bad. Since they also buffed Holy Wrath and put it on a 15s cooldown. Between the shorter Hammer cooldown and Holy Wrath we are fine. We can throw in a consecration every half minute as well. Glyph for both Consecration and Holy Wrath and it feels like we have more AoE power than before. The AoE stun of Holy Wrath, applied to Undead, Demons, Dragonkin and Elementals is incredibly power- and useful.

Holy Power?!
Holy power is a nuisance, but we can live with those combo points easily. Crusader's Strike and Hammer of the Righteous generate one holy power each. The proper tanking use for Holy Power is to accrue 3/3 Holy Power and then use Shield of the Righteous.
Don't waste Holy Power! Using SoR with less than 3/3 is a waste, generating more Holy Power while at 3/3 is a waste as well. That means avoiding accidental use of Shield of the Righteous and ensuring use at 3/3.
To avoid using Shield of the Righteous too early, I moved it away from my spam/rotation buttons (1-5).

To ensure that I don't waste holy power generation, I installed Power Aura's Classic and set it up to show Holy Power clearly. I am amazed that Blizzard gave us a notice for Avenger's Shield but not for the critical Holy Power. But hey.
I put Shield of the Righteous and Avenger's Shield on Mouse Wheel Up and Down respectively, making one finger responsible for reacting to AS procs and full holy power.

This WoW-Forum post shows the proper Power Aura setup. See summary below:

Install Power Aura Classic
Type /powa to enter the configuration menu, press the button "import" and copy inside this code(repeat for each code)
Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8471; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; buffname:holy power; bufftype:10; texture:65; alpha:0.95; threshold:1; PowerType:9; aurastextfont:18; size:2.44; torsion:1.1; y:20
Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.851; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:66; alpha:0.95; threshold:2; PowerType:9; size:2.3; y:22
Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8824; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:67; alpha:0.95; sound:23; threshold:3; PowerType:9; size:2.5; torsion:1.1; y:20

I've chosen the following talent and glyph setup and am quite happy with it:
http://wowtal.com/#k=-wcHRfv.a5o.paladin.-BYW5A

Cue Card: Noob Paladin Tank

2010-03-28T15:38:00.053+01:00

I get 'how to' questions from people who start playing a paladin tank on a regular basis. Here are some of the re-occurring points:

Your Buffs

Use Blessing of Sanctuary!
Kings may sound attractive, but Sanctuary is essential for mana returns. As of Patch 3.3, Sanctuary gives 10% Strength and Stamina, 3% less damage taken and 2% mana gained on block, parry and dodge. Compared to Kings, we loose 10% agility for 3% less damage and loads of mana. BoS is superior. If you can have two blessings, get Blessing of Might. If you can have three, get Kings as well.
Note: BoS is available from level 30 onwards. Use Kings before that.

Use Seal of Vengeance!
Seal of Vengeance is the proven superior seal to Righteousness and Command. It puts a stacking DoT up on anything you hit, and grants you 33% weapon damage as bonus as soon as your target has a full stack of 5. Also, when you use Hammer of the Righteous which hits 3 (or 4 with the glyph) targets, each of those gets the DoT.
The Glyph of Seal of Vengeance grants you 10 expertise. Expertise, not expertise rating. It takes you 26 expertise to be soft-capped and reduce a bosses chance to dodge or parry your hits by 5.6% each. 10 Expertise covers a lot of that without using item budget on gear and gives you a great advantage.
Note: SoV is available from level 64 onwards. Use Righteousness before that.

Use Divine Plea!
Divine Plea is used by holy and retribution paladins as a mana potion every minute. For protection paladins, it is used as a damage reduction and continuous mana gain. For that, you have to put two talent points into Guarded by the Light in the protection tree. Guarded by the Light reduces spell damage taken by 6% and refreshes Divine Plea each time you hit something. Add the 1 minute cooldown on divine plea, and you can have it active all the time while fighting. The Glyph of Divine Plea further makes Divine Plea attractive with a flat 3% reduction of all damage taken while Plea is active. So - get the talent, get the glph, use the Divine Plea before you pull.
Note: Divine Plea is learned at level 71. You'll have to wait if you are below that level.

Use Righteous Fury!
This increase the threat generated by your spells by 80%. If something is running off unexpectedly to squash a damage dealer or healer, most likely you forgot to re-activate your Righteous Fury. It should always be active while you are tanking, unless you have an encounter specific reason why you don't want this bonus threat.
Note: Learned at level 16.

Threat Abilities/Rotation

The best threat a paladin can deliver results from a 9/6/9 rotation. This refers to using your five primary threat moves in an alternating sequence between short and long cooldowns. Short is six seconds, long is eight or nine seconds. Let's look at those abilities:

Hammer of the Righteous
This hits three (with glyph four) targets in front of you. This is extremely handy when picking up groups of mobs. A hit with this ability counts as a direct hit for Seal of Vengeance and will apply the SoV damage over time debuff to the target.
Cooldown: 6 seconds. Learned at level 60. 51 point protection talent.

Shield of the Righteous
Hits only one target, but hits it hard. Boring and straightforward compared to Hammer of the Righteous.
Cooldown: 6 seconds. Learned at level 75.

Holy Shield
Holy shield does two things. It increase your chance to block an attack by 30%, which considering the chance to be missed, to parry, to dodge and the normal chance to block will result in no straight hits anymore. Since we are no longer dealing with crushing blows from bosses, this is less important today, but still a useful damage mitigation factor. It also deals damage to anyone who's attack you block.
Cooldown: 8 seconds. Learned at level 40, 31 point protection talent.

Judgement of Wisdom (or of Light)
This places a debuff on your target. Mana (or health) gain on hitting the target as well as the additional talented debuff from Judgements of the Just, which reduces the target's melee attack speed by 20%. This is easily missed, but is a significant factor in damage reduction for tanks. All tank classes have an equivalent move, not using it means you are taking more damage than you should. I prefer Judgement of Wisdom for the mana returns, as do most mana-based raiders. Judgement of Light is less useful with the trickle of healing it provides not quite up to countering raid damage effects.
Cooldown 10 seconds. Can be reduced to 8 seconds with 2/2 Improved Judgements talent points. Should be reduced to 9 seconds with 1/2 Improved Judgement. The additional point doesn't provide a gain in threat since there is a short time gap in the 9/6/9 rotation anyway. Learned at level 12.

Consecration

Places the quite visible paladin field on the ground. Any hostile mob in the field will take damage from it. This is useful, but can be problematic if some mobs are not supposed to be hit. It also requires a bit of foresight to avoid damage losses from having put down the field in the wrong place. So choose your tanking position first, pull with that and trigger happy dps and mind and put down the consecration field accordingly.
Cooldown 8 seconds. There is a glyph that makes it last 10 seconds, but this actually creates problems in the 9/6/9 rotation timing and is a bad glyph to use. Learned at level 20.

LFD and queue tanks

2010-01-16T16:56:00.000+01:00

The Looking For Dungeon tool is awesome. It highlights that there are more than three dps for each healer and tank and that there are fewer tanks than healers. Queue times for dps are measured in minutes, while tanks don't have any waiting time. As a consequence, there are many non-tanks exploring the option of off-spec tanking.

Anyone new to a role will face certain difficulties getting to know the ropes. Some are more obvious, others are quite obfuscated. I'll make an effort this weekend to provide some tips that should eliminate the most common mistakes and answer the most common questions.

[Emblem of Frost] and [Emblem of Triumph] Shopping List

2009-12-21T18:02:00.002+01:00

Badges have been reset. I updated my badge shopping overview with the new stuff.

Badge-Type	Heroism	Valor	Conquest	Triumph	Triumph	Frost	Frost
Slot	ilvl 200	ilvl 213	ilvl 226	ilvl 232	ilvl 245	ilvl 251	ilvl 264

Head	crafted	n/a	58 T8.25	50 T9.10	75	95 T10.10	n/a
Shoulders	n/a	60 T7.25	n/a	30 T9.10	45	60 T10.10	n/a
Chest	80	n/a	58 T8.25	50 T9.10	crafted	95 T10.10	95
Legs	n/a	75 T7.25	39	50 T9.10	n/a	95 T10.10	crafted
Gloves	60	n/a	28	30 T9.10	n/a	60 T10.10	60

Belt	n/a	n/a	28/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	60
Bracers	n/a	60	n/a	n/a	crafted	n/a	n/a
Boots	crafted	40	crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	crafted

Back	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	50
Neck	25	n/a	19	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Ring(s)	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	35	n/a	n/a
Trinket(s)	40	n/a	n/a	n/a	50	n/a	60
Gun/Whatever	15	25	19	n/a	25	n/a	30

Weapon	50/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
off-hand/Shield	25/35	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

Which Gems should I use as a tank?

2009-11-20T08:15:00.001+01:00

I'll try to be short and precise here, but let me say something clearly first: equipping a tank is always about a balance of stats. It is never about all this or all that. For specific encounters one may swap a bunch of pieces or even prepare a full kit maxed out for one aspect, but for your bread and butter tanking, you do want a good balance.

I'll list the gems by socket colour and include the non-epic choice for budget gemming.

Please note:

You don't _have_ to match socket color, you'll only loose the socket bonus. However, the socket bonus can be qutie nice. You should definitely get each +sta socket bonus.
Don't forget to get an [Eternal Belt Buckle] for that extra gem slot.

Blue Sockets are the easiest to fill. All tanks need stamina to build up their effective health.
[Solid Majestic Zircon] (30 sta) or [Solid Sky Sapphire] (24 sta).

Red Sockets are our second choice. Dodge (or Parry) plus Stamina improves Avoidance and Effective health at the same time without wasting any budget. Druid's benefit more from straight agility and can not parry, so avoid the Regal and Defender's cuts if your tank on all fours.
[Regal Dreadstone] (10 dodge+15 sta) or [Regal Twilight Opal] (8 dodge+8 sta).
[Defender's Dreadstone] (10 parry+15 sta) or [Defender's Twilight Opal] (8 parry + 12 sta).
[Shifting Dreadstone] (10 agi+15 sta) is the druid's choice.
[Delicate Cardinal Ruby] (20 agi) is a good alternative, especially for shared cat/bear gear pieces.

Yellow Sockets are a bit of a bother. Tanks usually do not need to gem for hit, expertise or crit, so we need to find a good use for those.
[Enduring Eye of Zul] (10 def+15 sta). Great for all plate tanks.
[Stalwart Monarch Topaz] As the plate tank budget alternative.
[Nightmare Tear] +10 all stats or [Enchanted Tear] +6 all stats are the bear's first choice for yellow sockets. I'll still need to see what to take next if needed.

Meta Gems are very easy:
[Austere Earthsiege Diamond] (32 sta + 2% armor) is the smart choice for effective health.
[Eternal Earthsiege Diamond] (21 def + 5% SBV) is a great choice for shield tanks running heroics or T7 content, or of course for use in a block set.

Of course the list above won't make it into the next expansion, but I hope it will be of some use until then.

What should I spent my badges on?

2009-11-19T18:34:00.007+01:00

As this matrix below shows, you can get a 2xT8.25+2xT9.10 set without ever setting foot into a raid. Considering that not all equipment slots have an equal amount of item budget and that the item budget for head and chest is high, I'd recommend the following shopping list:

[Emblem of Conquest] (you can get about 50 per day)

58x T8.25 head token
58x T8.25 chest token
39x non-set legs
28x belt
19 neck
anything else

[Emblem of Triumph] (You can get 53 per week: Daily heroic 2/day, ToC10+25 30/week, VoA10+25 4/week, Ony10+25 5/week)

30x T9.10 shoulders
30x T9.10 gloves
anything else

Tips:

Shift-click the lower level badge and type the number you want to downgrade.
Triumph badges can be downgraded next to the vault in the Dalaran Sewer Inn.

See also:

Badge-Type	Heroism	Valor	Conquest	Triumph	Triumph
Slot	ilvl 200	ilvl 213	ilvl 226	ilvl 232	ilvl 245

Head	crafted	n/a	58 (T8.25)	50 (T9.10)	75
Shoulders	n/a	60 (T7.25)	n/a	30 (T9.10)	45
Chest	80	n/a	58 (T8.25)	50 (T9.10)	crafted
Legs	n/a	75 (T7.25)	39	50 (T9.10)	n/a
Gloves	60	n/a	28	30 (T9.10)	n/a

Belt	n/a	n/a	28/crafted	n/a	n/a
Bracers	n/a	60	n/a	n/a	crafted
Boots	crafted	40	crafted	n/a	n/a

Back	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	n/a
Neck	25	n/a	19	n/a	n/a
Ring(s)	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	35
Trinket(s)	40	n/a	n/a	n/a	50
Relic/Idol/ Sigil/Libram/etc	15	25	19	n/a	25

Weapon	50/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
off-hand/Shield	25/35	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

/inspect

2009-11-19T17:00:00.006+01:00

Quite frequently I see someone ask for an Enchanter, Blacksmith or Jewelcrafter and am happy to help them out. As a tank, I am of course qutie partial to help out other tanks. Several times now I have had a look at a tank's gear, gems, enchants, talents via /inspect (and at their glyphs via the Armory) and asked them if they'd like a bit of advice. Since I play all four tank classes, I have pretty good visibility on what there is to know. =]

The overall response has been quite positive, and I am sure to have pointed a number of tanks into the right direction. I do note however that what I do actually tell each of these tanks happens to be virtually the same each time. For that reason I'll go and write down some of these things here. I'll make a deliberate effort to not write 'the mother of all guides' because there are lots of places already with those. I'll focus on a particular aspect and go for it.

As a first topic, I'll take this very generic one: What should I spent my badges on?

[The Culling of Time]

2009-11-16T10:01:00.002+01:00

I've been trying for a while now to do the Culling of Stratholme heroic as a timed, multiboxing. My last post already described what changes I made, but neglected to mention one that may not be obvious - I stopped looting any trash a while ago. Yes, there may be good stuff in there, but I don't want to waste the time. It may be a reflex and may not seem to take any time, but it does. The real difference however was using the druid's swipe to counter the zombie-daze threat to /follow and doing the PvE changes as detailed before. This morning I managed to get to the end of the gauntlet with 4 minutes remaining on the timer.

My short dash to the sides street with the timed mob was interrupted by some frantic untangling of my shamans from some of the flavour scenery, but the I got what I wanted to archive - CoS heroic timed while multiboxing! That puts me at one of four drakes for the PvE shaman group. I'll try my luck again to complete the set.

Heroics take 2

2009-11-13T20:15:00.002+01:00

In the last few days I have used my fresh bear tank rather than my imba-geared tankadin together with four shamans in heroics. To my absolute surprise, this works better, even though there is a serious difference in gear.

Having the ability to hit everything around you with swipe on the move makes things like Culling of Stratholme much safer. Nothing is more annoying than missing one shaman being hit by a zombie and then drop out of /follow range due to being stunned. Spamming swipe does away with that problem.

The paladin works fine, but requires more attention than the druid. Having three buttons for boss tanking (mangle+maul, fairy fire and lacerate) and one button for aoe-trash tanking (swipe+maul) allows me to focus a bit more on what I am doing with the shamans. As a result their damage output improved to around 2k each. Not that much, granted, but enough to get solidly into the comfort zone in a heroic.

Today I missed doing CoS timed as narrow as it gets, less than a minute too slow. I had to drink a lot to keep the shaman's mana up. Taking a hint from this, I bought dual-spec for the last three and gave them a PvE dps spec rather than the vanilla PvP setup. Next to that, I set up a different gear set for PvE. Currently that changes just a couple of pieces: rings, one trinket, neck and the odd item here or there.

However - the difference in setup is clearly noticeable. I'll go and save up some badges now to get some more PvE gear and see how it goes.

The Headless Horseman Redux

2009-10-18T11:42:00.007+01:00

Last year, I made a serious effort to get the horseman's mount. When Hallow's End was done, I had spent well over hundred tries by myself and a number with guild mates trying to get the mount. No Joy.

This year, I was determined to not waste any chances. I parked my level 80 boxing chars, the shamans and also the unused druids at the Scarlet Monastery. I bought my old level 70 cloth boxing team there to have summons. I was prepared to level my hunter's a bit further to 75 today if that had meant that they could summon.

But, all that setup was a waste of time.

Taking four of my shamans and my tankadin into the graveyard wing, I set my cap for the first daily farming session. But... the first shaman's summon already gave me what I wanted! =]

I used the other three summons and got a spellpower ring each time, as well as this year's horseman's blade. Then I took off to Dalaran. I found that when you mount up in the city proper, you are locked to landmount mode, but if you mount up on the landing pad or on the Violet Parlour's balcony, the mount goes into flying mode. Outside no-fly zones, the mount swaps modes as you land or take off.

One difference between a normal land mount and the horseman's mount is that it doesn't stay vertical like normal mounts. Instead it will take a 90 degree angle relative to the ground, which can look a bit silly depending on where you stop.

Excuse me now while I dance around the room celebrating. Time to cook!

Ehm, Lol?

2009-10-02T22:25:00.002+01:00

[02/10/2009]
23:21 [Shabruno]: get a life >.> that mount + [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? bullshit
23:21 [Takano]: jealous? =]
23:21 [Shabruno]: Just a lil
23:21 [Shabruno]: But still, [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] is no life luck 'O.o
23:22 [Takano]: actually, I have that from level 60 raiding
23:22 [Shabruno]: Sure, and my name is napoleon
23:22 [Shabruno]: what ever, cya (:
23:22 [Shabruno]: gonna play on a not noob sever (:

And the guild news link from back in the day. I recustomized the char when that became available, but hey. =]

Some people...

Game Performance

2009-08-16T22:01:00.005+01:00

For a good while now I was not really satisfied with the performance of WoW on my gaming computer. I have now made a few small changes that have significantly improved the performance of WoW on my machine to my great delight! I made three changes, two are setup and one is hardware.

First off, hardware. I spent 145 Euro on an OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB. What? It is a Solid State Drive, in a nutshell flash memory - like the card you put into your digital camera - working like a hard drive. The key selling point for those things is that unlike normal hard disks, they have no seek time. A normal hard disk needs to rotate the disk(s) and move the read/write head to the right place to access certain data. That can be very bad, if scattered, small amounts of data need to be read. Unfortunately, that happens very often in WoW where we all notice machine lag - in cities, where every players visible gear pieces need to be loaded.

SSD technologo is nothing new, but used to be quite expensive: 500-600 Euro for an affordable consumer model. There are still SSDs offered in retail for non-server use in this price range, and there are a bunch of things you don't really want to buy that are around 100 Euro. And then there is the OCZ Vertex and it's successor the Vertex Turbo. Unlike some of the budget SSDs - some also made by OCZ - it has a great controller and gives very respectable performance compared to the expensive options.

In lieu of any proper mounting kit for the 2.5" HDD form factor of the SDD I used cable ties to fix the small SDD to the chassis of my gaming rig as you can see in the picture above. When I originally bought the ThermalTake Armor case I was miffed that I had to either take one with a window or wait. Now I am quite happy to look at my little silent but effective new toy when I want. =]

WoW can be copied to and run from nearly any storage device - such as a USB stick or an iPod - I didn't just copy the entire client to the SSD. Instead I copied only the /data directory from the WoW directory to the SSD. That directory holds the by now about 13GB of game data files of WoW and that is where all the reading happens. All the other folders are for addons, settings, screenshots or whatnot, in essence things that change frequently and I left those on the raid hard disks.

Then I used Symlink to instruct Vista to redirect read and write access to the WoW-data directories for both WoW installations on my computer from the hard disk to the SSD. That's it.
Using Symlink is also a good idea when using regular hard disks if one is using move than one WoiW installation - for example for easier setting and/or addon management.

The third change I made was to disable Vista's Superfetch service. Superfetch is supposed to proactively load data from the hard disk to memory before a program actually asks for it. To do that it tries to predict what the running software will request. A nice idea, but not very useful for something kinda intricate like WoW's data files. WoW itself is also loading data proactively. It does load the next zone while you are approaching the zone boundary. I am no expert in either Superfetch or WoW's methods, but clearly disabling Superfetch significantly improved the performance of my system. I can only guess that having the hard disks of my raid array jump left and right to follow the predictions of Superfetch and WoW itself is the reason for this. To disable Superfetch, follow these instructions (enabling works the same way, just backwards).

Before these changes, I would often loose characters on /follow while flying at 280% speed in Northrend. In particular in busy areas or at zone borders. Thinking about the data reading that is going at the time, that makes sense. Today I flew all over Northrend and instead of having a fit I had a smooth flight with only one or two times that I had to renew follow due to phasing.

Likewise, before the changes I was suffering from massive machine lag when hearthing to Dalaran. There are just too many people with too many textures too load, damning me to sitting idle for two minutes or so before I can move smoothly - if at all since people come and go. Now, after waiting only a polite 2 seconds, I could move as if I was alone on the server. I chained up my shamans in a konga line, each following another and rode a couple of times all around Dalaran just after hearthing there and none of the /follow strains broke! Happy joy joy! =]

New status: Arena Fodder

2009-07-22T10:16:00.006+01:00

After having a lot of fun in Alterac Valley and Wintergrasp my shamans now have all the PvP gear that does not require arena rating. I also collected enough emblems to purchase the [Totem of Hex] for all characters.

One thing that I totally missed was the awesomeness that is the [Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem]. Essentially, it allows a shaman to pop a 4k damage shield that lasts 15s with a 30s cooldown. When looking at incoming burst damage on a 20k health bar even with 800+ resilience, this is an immense help.

To celebrate the promotion from 'Hateful Farming Noob' to 'Arena Fodder', I took the girls to the hairdresser and told them to go wild. This monochrome look is the result. =]

My druid Ægis and the hunter group are slowly making their way up the level ladder. The Worgen were morphed from wolf-family to ornamental pets that can pretend to fight, but hey, there are many other pets out there.

Worg pack!

2009-07-07T01:36:00.001+01:00

Hateful Farming Noob

2009-07-03T11:01:00.003+01:00

That's me in the last few days. I am splitting my solo play time between WG/AV on my five shamans to collect a starter set of ilvl 200/213 pvp epics and leveling my druid Ægis and the four hunters.

I do surprisingly ok in level 80 PVP, even though the level 70 resilience doesn't really cut it and things are a lot more bouncy now. Various knock backs and death grip have joined fear as multiboxer hazzard, not to mention retri-pallies who make their pretty lights while encased in their bubble.

I love that level 80 honor gear does not require badges from various battlegrounds, as I always disliked my negative impact with too many chars concentrated in one spot in the smaller battlegrounds. In AV, I go where needed and can play in a strategic fashion. WG is more hectic in this aspect, but being able to take out vehicles extremely fast is a big plus.

Tomorrow I will get the hateful pants. I worked around the ilvl 213 WG chestpiece for the hateful set. Bracers, belt and boots are next.

Boxing Update

2009-05-29T10:08:00.000+01:00

What has happened since my last post?

Aquired 4x Titanium Spellshock Ring.
Bought 5x Tattered Dreadmist Mantle for 40 badges each.
Levelled 1x Shaman and 4x Druid from 60->75.5
Dual-speeced 1x Shaman resto and replaced Flame Shock with Earth Shield and Chain Lightning with Riptide, leaving the other elemental spells in place and sequence.
Bought 4x Protective Barricade of the Light for 35 badges each.
Bought 4x Hateful Gladiator's Mail Spaulders for 31600 honor each.

My short range goals are to get the 5th shaman to 80 and start WG/AV with the five shamans grinding for level 80 PvP gear. I plan to do 5v5 arena as before with four shamans and one other person sorting the healing.

80

2009-02-24T01:13:00.004+01:00

After enjoying flying around in Northrend I set to the Sons of Hodir quest chain in Storm Peaks. After also doing the Frosthold and Earthen quests in western Storm Peaks, I started my work for the Argent Dawn. Then the Shadow Vault, the Fleshworks and the Death's Rise quests and....DING!

A bit of shoring up materials and then my first level 80 shaman weapons were sorted: [Titansteel Guardian]. Time for bed! =]

Finally!

2009-02-20T23:44:00.001+01:00

After some questing in Sholazar and Zul'Drak my shaman group hit level 77. The first thing I did was jump back to Dalaran, and test /follow with epic flight speec in Northrend with one character. I was a bit worried that it might break and make epic flight for the group near-useless. It worked out fine! Yay! YEEEEHAAA!

So I dug into the purses of my various characters to shore up the next money for the other three shaman's flying pleasure. Fortunately enough, I am a compulsive miner and had been a busy bee. Yet, I still could only buy the epic flying skill and cold-weather flying for three of the four shaman. So I took all my fungible assets and chucked them at the auction house. At the end of the day I had enough liquidity to sort out the last shaman.

I spent 24800g on this yesterday, but flying around fast in Northrend with five characters at once is well worth it. Time to take the four shaman to Storm Peaks and do the Sons of Hodir quest chain! =]

Back to boxing!

2009-02-15T20:16:00.004+01:00

Being basically done with everything not on a weekly lockout that I could possibly do on my tankadin, prot warrior and unholy tank death knight, it's time again to look at my boxing!

This weekend, I did the Violet Hold on normal three times and Drak-Theron Keep once. My level 75 shaman did have quests for both places. While the yield of quest xp for Drak-Theron is much higher, Violet Hold is much quicker.

I wasn't very lucky on my first go at Violet Hold. My first random boss was the water elemental, called 'water boy' through clenched teeth. Fighting him at the door, I got through it. Then, the next one my personal least favorite random boss - the ethereal who summons his AoEing orbs. I got through both of those without any deaths. Then I fumbled on the final boss moving my shamans in the wrong direction after the threat-wipe and teleport - straight into the breath! =]

The second and third go saw me mowing down the voidwalker, beholder, doggie and the ethereal again - plus drop the dragon both times. That brought me up from 75.5 to 76! I took the shamans to the basin for some relaxed questing to 77 now.

How the desktop changes!

2009-02-05T23:31:00.006+01:00

Looking over some old stuff, I noticed how much my setup has changed since I started boxing two years ago. Originally, I used three additional Sony VAIO notebooks that I borrowed from work to to bring up the number of computers to five. Not knowing where to put them, I originally just put them left and right, which was very simple, but not ergonomic at all.

Being fed up with this, I build a shelf above my computer desk to hold the additional notebooks, which looked much more tidy and formed a rough three by two matrix. This was much much better and was my setup for the remainder of the time that I used one computer per WoW session.

Finally then, last summer, I made the step to one computer running all five sessions and using KeyClone to broadcast my keyboard input. I had added one 22" screen between the two 19" displays I already had. I continue to use Multiplicity by Stardock to control both desktops that I use with the master keyboard and mouse. The additional notebooks went back to the sample stock at work and their space is now occupied with all the stuff that usually accumulates around computers.

Four Flavours of Tanking

2009-01-08T23:44:00.000+01:00

The Wrath of the Lich King has thrown a big spanner into the works of my multiboxing! Now, after the expansion has been out for two months, the highest level of boxing I have done in Wrath is the Ring of Blood 2.0 in Zul'Drak with me using my Shamans to nuke and heal while I tank. On the other hand I have three level 80 chars that I played in normal single-char play. So what's up?

Firstly, Wrath is so much more fun and there are so many more things to do that for me there is subjectively much less need for boxing to entertain myself.
Secondly, Wrath introduces two features that are not a multiboxer's friend: phasing and vehicles. Some zones have your chars act along and do not phase the group into the same instance. While in a vehicle, /follow is not effective and while for some quests one can work around that and accomplish the objectives with one char and have the others positioned to get the credit, for others this is impossible. Both features are great in my opinion and enhance gameplay for non-boxers, but they are a pain for a boxer.
Thirdly, I have a different sort of pet project going!

My heart in WoW has been in tanking since just after starting to raid back in Molten Core. From then to T5 content I played my warrior tank as my main. For T6 and the Mount Hyjal waves I changed my main raid char to my paladin tank. Now, with wrath introducing Death Knights as fourth tanking class, I got it into my head to sample them all!

First, I pushed my paladin Stephanius to 80 and through heroics and raids. The paladin was and is my main for guild raids. Yet, I then pushed my death knight Tacitus to 80 and got him kitted out in heroics as tank. This week Monday I hit 80 on my warrior tank Ivl and did a bunch of heroics since then. My druid Ægis is still level 70 and I am working his herbalism up. As soon as that is on the level, I will push him through Northrend. This will then give me first hand experience in all tanking flavors!

I expect to take up boxing again once things in Wrath have settled down a bit, but at the moment I am too busy having single player fun! =]

Cheers, Steph.

The Headless Horseman

2008-10-31T10:01:00.002+01:00

Die he shall! Again! And again! And some more! Why does the bastard not cough up his mount for me already! Every day I go and visit the Scarlet Monastery graveyard for another chance to try my luck. So far, my luck has been rotten. I got loads of Squashlings, cloth helms and a bunch of swords, but did not get to see a single mount. I understand it is the lowest dropchance item of the lot, but I really want it! For this week, I have been doing 13 attempts by myself per day, using the tankadin and three sets of four chars to summon and dps. I also did another 3-6 attempts per day with the kind help of guild mates.

A guild mate of mine and and the half dozen other people on my server that I saw on the mount clearly show that it does drop - just not for me! Ah well. Tomorrow will be the last chance to get one, Hallows End is over at 4:00am on Sunday.

Besides my obsession with the Horseman's mount and keeping up my tries in ZG, I have been rather busy raiding with my guild in Black Temple and doing all the ZA's that the dungeon lockout timers allow for a chance of getting rid of my engineering tank headpiece. I do have engineering on my warrior tank Ivl as well, but I want to drop it on my tankadin.

The Hunter and Druid team is now on the edge of level 65/66 since the last weekend. That is just enough to give me four additional summons of the Horseman per day. My last real leveling action on them has been to complete the Hemet Nersingway chain in Nagrand and upgrade the Hunter's weapons with the quest reward.

My first exotic pet was the white core hound from Azuremyst Isle, but the constant screen bouncing was just too annoying, so I set out to tame Silithids in Silithus instead. I am really enjoying the Silithids as pets. I like their animations and looks. Silithids are cunning pets, making them all-round pets with a couple of abilities that are neat in PvP. Such as netting enemies - something the spider family non-exotic pets can do as well, and increasing their damage output if they or their target is low on health. I look forward to pushing the hunters some more on the weekend.

DingDingDing - You have reached level 60!

2008-10-22T11:49:00.003+01:00

As promised by Blizzard, the granting of levels earned within the RAF scheme is now working again. My druid Ægis and my fifth shaman Æteam are now 15% away from level 61! Yay!

To complete my personal RAF project, I now need to transfer these two chars to my main account, and two druids from the RAF accounts to two of my secondary accounts. Unfortunately, the paid character transfer is down for maintainance at the moment. According to an announcement on the 'Website and Forum' section of Blizzard's EU forums normal service is expected to resume tomorrow. Yay again!

For leveling, I will group the Shaman with the Moonkin Druids and the Druid with the Beastmaster Hunters. The Shaman is going to be elemental to help with the lovely caster totems, while the Druid is going to be Resto instead of the target purpose feral tanking, to supply the hunter group with heals and resses. There is a handy tool to consider group and raid buffs supplied by different classes and specs provided by MMO-Champion.

Funny side-note. After having an instant level 60, it cost me 925g to buy 75 and 150 riding skill, a fast mount and all spells at the trainer. The Trainer alone took 225g.

RAF goodness and patch 3.0.2

2008-10-20T23:46:00.000+01:00

The WoW 3.0.2 patch that hit the servers last Wednesday has such a wide range of changes that I won't even try to touch upon them. I am very happy with the changes for my tankadin. While Wednesday was a bit too shaky to raid, Thursday it was on. My guild went back to the Black Temple and we were giggling at the fast pace and the sudden power boost we received. The upgrade in DPS combined with the -30% HP nerf for the mobs makes the dungeon fly by. Before the patch, my guild was at MH 5/5 BT 5/9 and our best shot at RoS, the 6th BT boss was getting to the 3rd of three phases. Including a 40 minute server downtime and a late start, we dropped five bosses we already had conquered and one-shotted the RoS in two hours flat. Then, on Sunday, we killed Mother Shahraz and the Illidari Council and thereby not only gained six T6 tokens, but also access to Illidan himself. Being out of time, we left him for the following week. In a nutshell, for my guild this is a chance to see a number of encounters that we had not gotten to yet and great fun. I like it!

I also had a giggle with exotic pets on my hunters. I tamed the white core hound on Azuremyst Isle for them. Being fed up with the bouncing and the hounds stopping to use their breath before they tear into mobs, I shelved them and got myself Silithids from Silithus instead. These beasties nail down mobs with webs for four seconds. There are next to no mobs outside instances that live longer than four seconds against my four hunters. And for those, I can still use the net on a rotation. Good times ahead!

But there is not only sunshine. Elemental shamans have not been buffed like other classes. The new damage spell requires level 75, lightning damage has been nerfed a bit with reference to other classes debuffs now affecting and increasing the shaman damage in raids. Which is great for PvE, but for PvP it just means a flat damage reduction. Of course this is a temporary situation between the 3.0 patch and the expansion, so no need to get too worked up about it! =]

Also, the arena system is FUBAR at the moment. I don't even mean the retribution pallies being temporarily overpowered to a silly extend, I am sure that even without changes that would be ok at 80. My first arena after the patch saw one of my four chars unable to enter. Then lag in the arena that was sufficient to make it pure guesswork. Then both teams lost points. I decided then and there that I can spent my time this week in a better way then doing arena.

The most annoying thing after the patch for me was that all of my many characters required some time spent on the talents, keybinds and macros. Besides my main I made the Druid, Hunter and Shaman quads combat ready.

The Druids were level 50 when the patch hit. I pushed them to 60 over the weekend, using different zones past 50 to avoid doing the exact same quests as I hit with the Hunters recently. From Un-goro I went to Felwood, then Winterspring. With only a quarter level to go I headed over to the Eastern Plaguelands to hand in a bunch of quests from Winterspring there. Ding 60 for another four 60s!

Then, when I brought the Druids to Ironforge to use the accrued RAF levels to boost my fifth Shaman and the fifth Druid to 60, I was up for some frustration. I had read already about this, but was still disappointed to see it confirmed. Instead of being able to grant 29 levels, the Druids were only able to grant 5 levels. Blizzard lost the data regarding the granting levels earned in the patch, leaving me with only the levels earned after the patch to grant. This is a bit of a bummer, because my plan was to level the Druids and the Hunters from level 60 to level 70 together with one of these two chars before the expansion is available. While there were no news on this from Blizzard, and already a "sorry, deal with it" post from the US community managers, yesterday Blizzard announced that this issue will be fixed with the weekly maintainance. That gives me a warm fuzzy feeling and the confidence that I can resume my original plan and shrug off the little delay in timeline. =]

Leveling Ðøøm

2008-10-13T09:27:00.003+01:00

After the Nightelf starting zones Disneyland and Disney World, I could not stomach their 3rd zone Eurodisney anymore. I share the take that Gianna Masetti, creator of 'The Noob' webcomic has on elves: "Elves are slender and beautiful as well as annoying. They live in forests where they molest small animals and play boring music all night long.", quoted from Episode 2 of currently 324. A recommended fun read - unless you have never played an MMO. =]

I continued to the Wetlands, zipped through the kill quests in Duskwood to hit 30. Then entered Stranglethorn. When I had only collection quests and a few level 40 quests left, I went to Theramore for a spell, then back to STV to hit 40. Now I am in Tanaris at level 43. I am quite happy with my pace so far. My 10 RAF days plus the 30 days you get with the WoW box will last till November 5th, so I am well ahead of the payment enrage timer.

Ðøøm!

2008-10-08T18:40:00.001+01:00

With the four goat riders at level 60, I reached the halfway milestone for my RAF project. This gives me two times 29 levels to grant. Once I finished the RAF project by leveling another four chars, I will have the same again for a total of 58 levels to grant for each veteran account.

This is an important part of my plan. The fifth Æteam and my only druid were stuck close to level 20 on my main account. Leveling a single char feels like slow motion after being used to the killing power of the boxing team. When I raid with just one char, the pace is fast. But solo play on a single char is just underwhelming.

To take advantage of the level granting, I deleted the two lowbie characters on the main account and recreated one of them on each veteran account used in the RAF project and played them a bit until they were close to, but not yet at level 3. After granting the first 29 levels, they are at level 31. With the second 29 levels granted, they will be at level 60, with only minimal XP to go till level 61.

One decision I had to make, was what class between balance druids and gnome mages I should pick for my next RAF group. Among my current level 70 chars, there is one mage. I have another one at 60 from vanilla WoW times. One of the level 20+ chars was my only druid ever. Considering this, druids are the choice to make. However, the idea of having four female gnomes with pink bobtails bounce through BGs spamming Arcane Explosion has a certain appeal as well. On the other hand, druids have a bunch of things they can spec for and having five druids to play with, I could do interesting things with stealth.

I choose druids. They are now level 10. To make things a bit smoother flowing, I got them a [Simple Black Dress] enchanted with 6mp5. This chest is level 37, so it can take BC-enchants. I also got them vendor bought white bracers and boots enchanted with +7int and minor speed respectively and tux pants with +25dmg+15sta. I was not very imaginative with names. Meet Ðøøm, Ðoøm, Ðøom and Ðøðm.

1652 rating - Guardian Ring is mine!

2008-10-06T23:45:00.001+01:00

After playing three late games we won 9, 8 and 17 points respectively, bumping my personal rating to 1652. A quick trip to Stormwind later, I bought and equipped the [Guardian's Band of Dominance] on my four Shaman. This replaces the
[Violet Signet of the Archmage] and bumps my resilience to 440. /dances the happy dance.

The four Goatmen of Nuking

2008-10-06T21:13:00.002+01:00

Less than two weeks after starting the hunter team and with just over two days /played I hit my target of level 60. With the x3 RAF XP bonus, the leveling was surprisingly easy. By just doing the quests that I remembered and was willing to go for, I usually outleveled zones pretty quickly.

I quested in Dun Morgoth, Loch Modan, Duskwood, the Wetlands, Arathi, Stranglethrone, Theramore, Tanaris, Un-goro and in the Plaguelands. I went for training only every 10 levels or when I was out of ammo. The killing power made things go really quickly, allowing me to plow through the zones and not even flinch from the devilsaurs in Un-goro. The only time I entered an instance was to get the armor plated boars in Razorfen Kraul. No boosting, no instances.

Now I need to do it again to have enough levels to grant for two chars. =] I am still debating what I will go for. Either four gnome mages or a bunch of druids. Druids would make more sense to round out my character selection, but I like the idea of four female gnomes with pink bobtails bouncing through battlegrounds while spamming arcane explosion. We'll see. =]

Spec improved Recruit a Friend!

2008-09-30T00:22:00.003+01:00

Looking at my accounts, one thing is certain: Not enough characters! When one is used to playing five chars, then leveling a single char feels like slow-motion. In anticipation of the expansion being launched in November, I therefore decided to get two additional four char teams up to 60 and at the same time collect gift levels to boost two chars I had idle for a good while.

To do this effectively, I created two new accounts using the RAF program and started playing four dwarf hunters. With only a few hours spent, I am almost level 30 now, which is where 60% speed mount is now available.

I decided not to bother with any gear and created non-binding uniforms instead. Happily enough, Beerfest is up at the moment! This allowed me to round out my character's outfit with the groovy hats you see in the picture. =]

Great Brewfest Kodo

2008-09-23T19:07:00.005+01:00

Today, on my 8th private try, I got lucky! Coren realized that I wouldn't give him any peace unless he coughs up the kodo. And so he submitted! yay!

I also got a bunch of the 45 stamina trinkets, both in the healing over time and damage over time version and all the trinkets I could use. Considering that one can not sell unwanted trinkets to vendors, the yield per time is not that high - without the lure of the mount. =]

I also bagged two Direbrew's Remote. Those do have a one hour cooldown, but are basically like a mage gate to the Grim Guzzler in BRD. They can be used anywhere. In instances, in battlegrounds. Fun! 18 players have left the battleground. Ooops! =]

1609 - S4 chest here I come!

2008-09-21T20:30:00.000+01:00

In the past month I have been between 1500 and 1600 rating. Whatever points we won was lost not soon afterwards. Often to teams which by their gear, with S4 head or S3 shoulders clearly show that they reformed, dropped their team rating to 1500 and then go and steamroll the people who are actually at that range. I had that happen a lot to me. Looking at the timeline, of me hitting 70 just ahead of the season 4 start and needing a while to get geared with pvp gear. At first everyone was at 1500, and by the time I learned enough and gathered enough kit, people were reforming. This gives the impression of treating water with no end in sight.

If that wouldn't be bad enough, my healing buddy will not have the time to play with me or much at all past next week, so I was looking at finding a new arena buddy in short order. Then, we got pushed back all the way to 1500 in a streak of losses last week. Doom! Black doom!

But! Alas, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Light in the shape of a paladin whom I talked to about the matter previously. 11 games played and won later, the 1600 line was crossed. Funny enough, the 10th game found us looking in a bit of confusing at a warrior running in all alone and being fried. Then a mage did the same. On investigation I found what looked like three boxed shaman in the other team's starting room. I guess control trouble. That won us 3 points and brought me to 1598. I couldn't say anything for fear of jinxing our luck, but we won the next game, which turned out to be a real fight.

/dances the happy dance!

Mount Mount mount mount! mount! waaaaah

2008-09-21T18:44:00.001+01:00

You will never guess it, but I have not been lucky so far and am therefore still searching for that special mount for my main tankadin.

I diligently go and kill both the Bloodlord Mandokir and the tiger boss in Zul'Gurub every 3 days, but besides some improvements in the total time to do so, there have not been any occasions to celebrate. My best time for both of them is 21 minutes, from the entrance to looting the second boss. That is of course with dodging basically all trash mobs.

I also have gone after Coren Direbrew in the Grim Guzzler. He already tried to bribe me with a bunch of stuff, including the Coren's Lucky Coin and 3x Dark Iron Smoking Pipe. I could of course have bought the badge equivalent of those, but I didn't really feel the need for them, considering that my current trinkets are better for my primary use of the respective characters.

Admittedly, I can see a giggle effect in having 4x Balebrew Charm. But what I really want, is of course the Great Brewfest Kodo. So of course that is what I am missing so far. I got one Swift Brewfest Ram, but considering that I play alliance and can easily get the PvP Ram or one of the Dwarven Rams, that is more a teaser price than any consolation.

On the good side, I have 9 tries per day, using my main and nine of my multibox chars. We'll see how my luck goes during the few days that brewfest lasts!

Zul'Gurub fun

2008-09-04T10:33:00.003+01:00

Today, I went back to Zul'Gurub. I have always wanted the raptor mount that the Bloodlord can drop. I have seen both the tiger and the raptor drop back in the day of vanilla WoW and level 60 raiding, but alas - the dice were not with me.

Of course the dice situation is a bit more sunny when there are just five characters instead of 20. Of course, the difference between 20 players and one player is even more helpful in helping me rig the outcome for the loot distribution. =]

Other Multiboxers have successfully done both the tiger and the bloodlord bosses in ZG, and reported about it in blogs, posts and with youtube movies. So there was absolutely no question if it was possible. It is.

However, I have previously tried going after the Bloodlord, augumenting my Tankadin with my Priest, two Warlocks and one Mage. Back then I was using the same tactics as we used back in the day. And it went badly. Since then I have been mostly boxing my four Shaman, therefore I decided to take the Tankadin and the four Shaman.

Today, I dropped the Bloodlord without any problem on the first go. I also went for the Tiger boss just after it. Here I ran out of mana due to not countering the healing done by one of the adds effectively. Luckily the encounter can be reset by running out of his immediate area. On the second go, I made it. =]

Alas, no mount. Lucky enough ZG resets tonight, so I can go again tomorrow.

1598 Rating, 5 arena points left

2008-08-20T09:46:00.005+01:00

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

2008-08-18T11:18:00.003+01:00

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!

2008-08-14T14:08:00.003+01:00

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

2008-08-03T17:22:00.005+01:00

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.

Player reactions to M-boxing in BGs

2008-07-23T09:58:00.000+01:00

Initially I intended to include another aspect of Battlegrounds and Multi-boxing in the previous post, but looking at the length, I decided against doing so. The previous post is focussed on a tactical and effectiveness level of what I do in battlegrounds. Now I am looking at the reactions of other players to me being in the battleground with them.

To start with, players do notice my charaters often before the battle even starts and comment on me being there. The reaction is often confusion: "How can you clone yourself?", "How did you hack this?", "WTF?!" and "How?" are quotes that come to my mind to respresent those reactions. My personal least favorite are people that ride after me, totally ignoring the ongoing fight and contributing nothing to the game, going into specator and quizz mode at the same time. "Google multi-boxing later, fight the Horde now please." is the gist of my usual reply to that. Flagging them as inactive is another response, but I do not like doing that.

Another kind of peril are people who see me, know what multi-boxing is and expect me and every other boxer to totally pwn the Horde without any action being required of the other players. A permutation of this attitude is people who consider me their personal bodyguard, pet, peon or pawn and start giving me orders. If their expectations are then not met, the blame for any adverse turn the game takes is laid at my door. I think everyone knows that it's the people who are afk, fighting over a patch of ground in the middle of nowhere instead of for an objective of the game at hand who are letting the team down, but still feel happier blaming someone who sticks out of the crowd like I and other boxers do.

Which also brings me to the more vocal reactions. Firstly, people see my characters and are puzzeled by what they behold. Besides the already mentioned examples, there is one general trend. People believe that there must be a trick, a cheat, a hack or similar. The idea that all my characters are created and developed just like any other escapes them. Maybe that is a sign of me being very crazy, or them being a bit guillible, but hey one thing they are sure of is that this must be foul play. The best known methods of foul play in WoW are commonly thrown as accusations while the accuser tries to grasp what is actually going on and ignores all indications to the contrary. I have stopped responding to these cries of foul beyond any short correction, such as "I am multiboxing, not botting.". Often I do not need to do that, because some other player will answer "Multi-boxing", "It's allowed" or "It's legal".

Another type of response comes from players who do know what multiboxing is and do not like it. These range from straight outbursts with the generic message of lamer, cheater, looser, no-lifer to outright hartred expressed with comments such as "You/This should be banned". I respect that a small but vocal minority hates multi-boxing, but their pleasure is not on the top of my priority list. This group is also most likely to turn the battleground chat that should be used for "3 inc GM" or "SH bunker, quick" to a live chat version of the very popular WoW forum QQing and trolling. Just like on the forums, the same already discussed and dealt-with arguments are dragged forth, ignoring the official responses from Blizzard staff that should close the discussion. This group is also likely to predict utter failure and ruin for our side due to me being there and boxing. My usual answer for that is "hehe, check the stats later" and of course winning the game.

Naturally, not necessarily pleasant assumptions regarding the motivation of the QQers come to mind, but I don't really want to dewell on that. My reasoning is rather straightforward and pragmatic. I contribute to the team's goal, often more than my fair share. I can do that because inherent in boxing is focus of power. By taking four slots instead of three, I can focus 10% of the firepower in Altherac Valley where I want it. The frustration of convincing people to go for an strategically important objective and the huge benefit associated with pre-made group where people are expected to work together illustrate how important this is. Coordination is the source of me being more effective than average in battlegrounds. I am absolutely certain that an equal amount of characters controlled by one person per character, working together and knowing what they are doing will always outperform me, but that just is not the case in the average battleground. Compared to the average benefit for the group by slot, I deliver more. Yet, I am working to improve my play and come up with countermoves for coordinated groups of opponents as far as possible.

Battlegrounds and Multi-boxing

2008-07-22T22:10:00.000+01:00

After hitting level 70 in June, I have done quite a bunch of hours in battlegrounds. I wrote before about the woes of being forced to go and get a number of marks, what I want to focus on now is actually the game play itself.

For me personally, my favorite battleground for my quad boxing is Alterac Valley, followed by Eye of the Storm. Arathi Basin is ok-ish, but Warsong Gulch is my bane.

AV has the perfect group and map size for my taste. Me bringing four characters out of forty is just 10%, yet I can have a significant influence on the game result. Holding the Alliance bunkers in mid-field or retaking Dun Baldar's graveyards and then wiping the horde attack, as well as blasting through horde defense at Galvan or just going to push the graveyards in the attack - all of these are things that I can do with a good success rate. Usually I just look at the distribution of the Alliance team on the map to decide between attack and defense after Galvan. Good times.

For EotS and AB, a team of fifteen players has me taking 26% of the slots. In EotS I usually go for the attack on the southern part of the map and then jump bases as needed. The thing that I love about EotS is that what matters is who is left standing, with no flag tagging or interrupting at the bases themselves. That also prevents ninja-flagtagging and interrupt games and is more forgiving for PuG base guards. Also, jumping the enemy flag carrier and then returning the flag to your own base is good fun, but that is something that I don't actively go looking for.

Arathi Basin can be good fun, but most of the time it is just horrible. Nearly all my positive experiences in AB were the occasional premades. Usually I can take any base that I want - unless it is defended by 2/3rds or more of the opposing team. The trouble in PuGs is that I can count on nobody actually bothering to defend bases. Even if there are 2-3 people from my team at a base when the minute of taking it is over, I can be nearly certain that these will run off to die in some god-forsaken hill or on the road to nowhere rather than guard the base or call incoming attacks. Another bane in this battleground is that bases can shift owner rather quickly. If that happens when I am dying, I risk having my characters split between graveyards all over the map, wasting time until I am back to full fighting strength. My best role in AB is to be the flying company and come fast and hard to the defense of any node that needs it. Shock army indeed.

Warsong. Oh dear. About the only thing I can really do in PuGs is go after the enemy flag carrier and hope for the best. In this battleground, death is the worst out of all battlegrounds, because the timings are so close and I loose a lot of time regrouping. However, I can not really deal damage on the move, and the flag carrier and his escort are usually in a hurry. Suffice to say that the only reason that gets me into Warsong is a guild pre-made or marks that I have to collect.

Kara - Part 2

2008-07-19T21:32:00.003+01:00

After previously clearing the first half of Kara with Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, R&J, Nightbane and the Curator yesterday, we cleared to the Shade and gave that a few goes. However we forgot to use dampen magic and I had to struggle with the fight. Let me just mention that moving four chars in flame wreath is an instant wipe =]

Tonight, I went back, with the two healers from the previous night, one hunter, one mage and another healer. We worked through the annoying magic immune wyrms, then got the Shade down on the first go. That was a very long attempt though, almost getting to a second sheep&pryo, with two reincarnations and two battleresses. Then we killed Illhoof, taking two attempts, played some chess and then dropped the prince.

All in all, I must say that with five people that know what they are doing to go along and help with things such as being the focus for the shaman in a fight like Nightbane, Karazhan is absolutely doable! I am now at 31 Badge of Justice and confident that I will get more this way.

WIM and what it can do for you

2008-07-16T23:01:00.005+01:00

WoW Instant Messenger is a chat addon that I really like and can only recommend. To explain what it does, I want to use two simple pictures. The first one here shows regular chat.

The second one shows the WIM window, which can hold several conversations, each in it's own tab. This is very helpful to keep track of different conversations. Of course there are some conversations that one can just ignore, but hey, at least there is the choice. =]

You can find the mod at www.WIMaddon.com.

5-boxing in Kara with guild mates

2008-07-16T00:32:00.004+01:00

As already mentioned, I planned to find out how doable Kara is for badge farming for my shaman. After asking for interest on the guild forums we went for it tonight. Two mages, one hunter, one resto druid and one resto shaman joined my shaman and my tankadin for this trial run. For the maiden, the druid swapped to a paladin for reliable cleansing of her DoT.

We dropped Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Crone, Nightbane and Curator. Then we worked up to the shade and Illhoof. Due to time running out we just gave Illhoof two tries and then called time. We had one silly wipe on attumen trash, plus the two on Illhoof. I had a few silly shaman deaths due to carelessly overnuking as well.

Overall I dare call this a qualified success and proof that this is a viable option. That Kara can be boxed is nothing new, other boxers have done 2x5 or even 1x10. What I did is easy by comparison, in particular because fully half of the raid completely outgears Kara. I had a lot of fun on this run and we had a couple of WOW moments. For example the Curator trash mobs did not have the time to teleport to the healers.

Oh woe, marks...

2008-07-13T23:01:00.003+01:00

After finishing a project on Friday, I had some time to play again. My first move was to go after WSG marks for the [Merciless Gladiator's Mail Leggings]. After getting that and buying up primal mana between BGs for the [Runic Spellthread]. I got those nailed in time for a trip to my family and then set out on Sunday to work on the AB marks for my [Merciless Gladiator's Mail Armor]. Over the Sunday morning, I suffered horribly there, reminding me of something a guild mate posted a while ago: PvP Lemmings.

Then, in the afternoon, my luck seemed to change - or just different sorts of people were playing. First one, then another PuG win. I was already missing the green guild chat when PvPing. On an impulse, I dropped [Pony Slaystation] on a bank alt and put my pony's back into my actual guild.

In a few games together with a few guild mates I got my remaining AB marks to the 30 needed for the chest piece. I ended up with 8k honor to go when I stopped playing 1.5h before raid time.

I am looking forward to the chest for two reasons. Firstly, the 4/4 piece gladiator set bonus: 50% less spell pushback due to damage. Secondly, getting rid of the grey skirt looks. With this weeks arena points I will be able to buy the [Brutal Gladiator's Mail Gauntlets]. So the big question is: what will come first: 8k more honor or Wednesday? =]

Shopping list

2008-07-13T00:50:00.005+01:00

After the S2 chest, I am left with four equipment slots that cry for an update: Cloak, Wrists, Boots and a second ring. That would be all fine and dandy, except for a little hick-up. Three of the four bits require arena rating, and the fourth slot is best filled for 60 Badges of Justice. Further, there is also the matter of the shield, but that is less urgent. Playing conservatively and not expecting too much in the way of arena rating, I need to plan ahead and consider my options for these slots.

[Cloak of Subjugated Power] 60x Badge of Justice
[Sergeant's Heavy Cape] 7,548H 20AB
I plan to have a go at Kara with the help of some guild mates and see how it goes to evaluate the badge option.

[Guardian's Mail Bracers] 11794 Honor, 20 WSG, 1575R
[Vindicator's Mail Bracers] 9199H 20WSG

[Guardian's Mail Sabatons] 17850 Honor, 40 EotS, 1700R
[Vindicator's Mail Sabatons] 13,923H 40EotS

[Guardian's Band of Dominance] 15,300H 10AV, 1650 Rating
[No alternative noob! Get rating]
It's a pity that I did not have the presence of mind to buy the Veteran's Band of Dominance, before it was no longer available! Hindsight is a beautiful thing. At the moment I use [Vindicator's Band of Dominance] and [Burning Blade Cultist Band].
The Auchindoun PvP rings do have resilience, but due to their low ilvl, I prefer to go for a straight damage item there. Easy options there would be the [Dreamcrystal Band], which is BoE and comes from a charged depleted ring, or maybe the Kara rep rings, from [Violet Signet] for friendly rep to [Violet Signet of the Archmage] at exalted rep.

[Vengeful Gladiator's Barrier] 1500AP 1800R?
[Merciless Gladiator's Barrier] 15,000H 20EotS
At the moment I still use [Spellbreaker's Buckler] which has nice stats for PvP, which put it far behind a bunch of weaker items in the replacement priority. I fear I will never qualify for [Brutal Gladiator's Barrier], a truly beautiful shield.

WoWwiki has a very handy reference for all arena gear cost and requirements. It's only failing is that it isn't the first article that pops up when you search for it. =]

For Pony!

2008-07-08T01:16:00.001+01:00

After ring, weapon, necklace, belt and helmet, I got myself the S2 shoulders today. After plundering the AH for Scryer rep items, I got enough tomes for eight tokens per char, and enough rings to bring two chars to exalted and one just shy of exalted. I guess I will have to wait a bit for the AH to recover from my shopping spree. I will also need some time to recover from the AB torture and have a nap. =]

Oh, due to some anti-boxing comments and someone connecting my guild's name to that, I preferred to stick a purely decorative guild name on my team. It is not my idea, I saw it first in AV on a tauren warrior and found it quite funny. It also nicely dovetails with Richard's battlecry "For Pony!".

Conjured Biscuits

2008-06-28T18:03:00.004+01:00

Every time that I started playing with my shaman team, I first logged in with my mage Alaire to make a mage table and stock up on biscuits. Usually I would use only very few of them and have the rest decay when logging out.

Yesterday I decided to change that. I gave the daily quests on the isle a whirl and did the same today, giving me friendly reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive and access to the non-decaying [Naaru Ration]. Yummy!

Shopping list woes

2008-06-26T22:40:00.002+01:00

With the purchase of [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] I have now spent 40k honor. At the time that I am typing this I have 12k honor and 650 arena points. Now, I figure the first thing to buy with arena points would be [Brutal Gladiator's Mail Gauntlets], which require no rating. Easy. But what about the honor?

[Guardian's Mail Girdle] 17850 Honor, 40 AB, no rating requirement.
[Guardian's Mail Bracers] 11794 Honor, 20 WSG, 1575 Rating.
[Guardian's Mail Sabatons] 17850 Honor, 40 EotS, 1700 Rating.

I think we have a clear winner here also. These bits are so awesome that I will worry later about the other slots. =]

Seasonal Eye-candy

2008-06-23T08:53:00.002+01:00

At first glance at the quests available in town for the seasonal flavor, I was shocked at how fiddly they are. A quest item with a cast time 0.1 seconds shorter than the target stays up with a constantly changing target. Tossing torches that doesn't work well with the wow camera to track it. Add someone else doing the same quests at the same time and it is pure chaos.

BUT! there is a component to this that is similar to looking up the elders all over the world, but gives you not only tokens but also gold. 6g and 5 tokens for visiting bonfire of your own faction, 12g and 10 tokens for visiting one of the opposite faction. Making a trip to around those bonfires nets you around 500g and enough tokens to buy some eye candy.

So I took my shamans around the game world, bagged the gold and got the eye candy going: [Brazier of Dancing Flames].

Honor Shopping

2008-06-18T00:14:00.007+01:00

Closing in on 25.200 honor and 20 EotS tokens, I knew I had to do something about temptation. The Season 1 [Gladiator's Gavel] provides 199 spellpower, is worth an enchant which gives another 40 spellpower and allows me to equip a shield. I already have a quest shield bagged on all characters, the [Spellbreaker's Buckler] with 29 spell damage. Compared to the [Battle Mage's Baton] from the Ring of Blood in Nagrand, that is a significant upgrade. The S1 Gavel and Shield combo gives 268 spell damage. the staff gives 85 spell damage - and some crit. 183 more spelldamage is huge - considering that I am currently at 470 odd total and just short of 1k is full S3 kit.

Now, the problem with that is that it is very attractive but in seven days there will be Season 4 starting and bumping the S2 [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] down to honor - supposedly for the same price. The S2 gavel gives 26 more spell damage and just over 1% spell hit. So it is quite sensible to wait for this.

To avoid that I succumbed to this temptation, I went and spent my honor on the [Vindicator's Band of Dominance]. That is 15k honor and 10 AV marks, and more importantly, still part of the honor kit after S4 hits, since people usually use the current season's honor ring along with the previous season's honor ring.

Now I can PvP my heart out to get honor together for the next two bits to buy after Wednesday: [Merciless Gladiator's Gavel] and [Merciless Gladiator's Barrier]. That should cost me 25.200 honor for the gavel and 15.000 honor for the shield, plus 20 EoTs tokens for each. I can't wait, but I'll have to! =]

A bridge too far

2008-06-15T00:21:00.001+01:00

Oh. My. God. I love quad shaman pvp. Even with my 'of the noob' gear I am able to strike decisively. When I start defending on the bridge, I almost pity the attacking horde.

After my first PvP weekend I have 13.5k honor and am supposed to get 350ish arena points. I also had 51 AV marks. These are typically decaying in the mailbox of a PvP char. That fact, combined with my strong dislike of the Elephant mount motivated me to blow them on the Stormpike goat, which I promptly did. Time for bed now. =]

First steps in PvP

2008-06-14T22:10:00.004+01:00

After reaching 70 on Thursday night, I could finally equip the blues that I had waiting in the shaman backpacks. Yet, the preparations were not complete. I was still short of Sha'tar revered reputation and all the fancy and expensive metagems had requirements that I could not fulfill. A couple of quests and Arcatraz finished my Sha'tar rep grind and after collecting a few more spirit shards I bought the Auchenai caster metagems.

Then I headed out and hit Alterac Valley again and also Eye of the Storm. I must say it was a very positive experience and great fun. While my individual characters are very weak, the combination is quite devastating.

I met a hunter at the Relief Hut that happened to be from my server, we got talking and decided on the fly to do some arenas for giggles. The hunter brought his main to battle for this, a rather well PvE geared resto shaman. We started out with a used team just under 1500 and played ten games, loosing 7, but winning 3. There was nobody as badly geared as my characters, by far. In some of our losses we lost 6 points, or 7, making the teams that opposed us quite a bit higher rated then us. This resulted in the rating not moving much.

Besides being very entertaining, the setup shows a lot of promise. Bad gear, me as arena noob, not having all my spells set up for ready use and a bunch of other things are all things that can be improved for sure, given time.

Playing with lighting is immensely entertaining. I am enjoying pvping with the shamans very much! Oh. AV is up. Laters =]

70!

2008-06-12T23:55:00.000+01:00

After 10 days /played over an extended period of time, my four shamans hit 70 tonight. That brought a lot of fetching, carrying and running with itself, but seeing the four of them lined up in noob pvp gear uniform with four baby elephants to accompany them just had me grinning without even hitting a key.

After a bit of messing around with gems, a few enchants and respecting to cover up some blunders I made on the way to 70, I stuck my toe into the water of Alterac Valley. I just played twice. The very first bit of text that greeted me when I entered was some random player from another server recognize me as multiboxer and show a positive reaction. That is a good omen as far as I am concerned.

Considering that I have not done any pvp setup for my controls, was using a pve geared tank totally superflous just because I did not want to set things up fully yet and that my resilience is just as low as my spelldamage, I was positively surprised what I could do already.

I look with anticipation to the weekend! Time for bed, work and then pvp! Yay.

To-do list

2008-06-11T08:32:00.003+01:00

Right, things that I need to get for my team are:

3900 Sha'tar Rep With the help of the WoW Reputation Calculator, it is a breeze to find some quest chains to help out with that. Due to the Mechanar farming for the totem, I don't really want to use instances. ;]
The Journal of Val'zareq: Portends of War 150rep+500 rep for follow up battle.
Akama's Promise Chain 1012rep and a temporary shield
Harbringer of Doom Chain 2000rep temp neck and belt but 3 dungeon runs for the 2nd half.

400k xp looking at the above quest chains, that will take care of itself.

Enchants There is an awesome post by Boylston here, but it does not link to the materials needed. So I looked up that information to tally them up for my shopping list:
Formula: Enchant Chest - Major Resilience 4gpe 10ad
Formula: Enchant Bracer - Spellpower 6lps 6pf 6pw
Formula: Enchant Gloves - Major Spellpower 6gpe 6lps 6pm
Mystic Spellthread 5pm 1rt or Runic Spellthread 10pm 1pn 1rt
Formula: Enchant Boots - Fortitude 12ad
Formula: Enchant Shield - Major Stamina 15ad
Formula: Enchant Cloak - Spell Penetration 2gpe 6ad 2pm

gpe 4+6+2=12x4=48
ad 10+12+15+6=43x4=172
lps 6+6=12x4=48
pf 6x4=24
pw 6x4=24
pm 6+5+2=13x4=52

uh-oh. This is going to be expensive!

Next I need to figure out the most sensible honor and arena point allocation.

Level 69 - 4/4 Totem of the Void

2008-06-10T23:47:00.000+01:00

When I finally got the fourth totem, I was happy to turn my back on Mechanar indeed. I ended up at 8162/12000 towards revered with the Sha'tar and 230k/770k towards level 70.

Now it is time to seriously look for enchanting materials and maybe already put a shopping list or better priority order together for honor bits and pieces.

But I will leave that for another day.

Name Change Woes

2008-06-09T12:30:00.008+01:00

For the shaman team I originally picked names that were individual and loosely based on the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and void. That was all good and well, but did not really work as intended. Maybe if I had gone straight with the element names, using replacement letters where they were taken it would have been ok, but as it was, it has been annoying me for a while. No longer though!

Saturday around noon I decided to change the names of the shamans. I had a silly idea, played around with it a bit and liked it. After a look at the account management, I was not too sure how long the name changes would take and how long the characters would be not available for playing. So I went and tested it with the low level shaman Aethera that I had left aside to boost the other four. The name change went through smoothly and instantly. Yay!

I changed the names of Firma and Flama next, again instant service, everything was going well. Then I hit a serious bump in the road. Payment problem. A quick call to my bank gave me my credit card contact and this again gave me the information that there was no problem from the Credit Card company's side. So it had to be Blizzard. Who are available for Billing problems Monday to Friday. Great news for me with the weekend just starting.

So I made a character each on the accounts with Lavia and Venta to sit on the names that I wanted. And waited. And waited. My first guess was 24h cooldown after the third payment. No joy.

Next stop, Monday morning. I called the toll free number listed on the wow website and spoke to a friendly female agent at billing. I explained my problem, she sorted it with the payment department, and I could change the 4th name. Yay! When I tried to change the fifth name - blocked again. ARRGH! Another call, another agent, another time on hold. And I could change the 5th name. Finally!

Now, what is the whole thing about? Meet Æteam, Ætèam, Ætéam, Ætëam and Ætêam! I remember the A-Team on TV when I was a kid. How they amazingly built a tank from cardboard and vegetables before battle, each episode. That is very much like me putting down a forest of totems when fighting. I used Æ instead of A because it seperates itself a bit from the T - and seriously cuts down on random whispers. ;]

This is a portrait of my four shamans standing on top of each other after I renamed them. Yay!

Having virtually identical names is a tactical advantage in BGs for a multiboxer. If the characters are perfectly stacked on top of each other, dissimilar names leaves you with a blob of text. With very similar names, it looks like just one name. Devious, I know. Also calling focus fire is more difficult: 'all on... never mind!'.

Level 68 - Totem of Void 1/4

2008-06-08T23:40:00.000+01:00

After making the last post, my next boxing time was spent trying the Black Morass. However, that was a bit too hectic for my taste. I did Old Hillsbarad two more times for decent xp and CoT rep. Bringing me to 4/5 of the Seer's Mail set and three quarters of the way to level 68.

After that I picked up the gryphon points north of Zangermarsh and did a few quests to get to get to level 68. After training up, I headed to Tempest Keep. Using my first multiboxing team, I gave my shaman's a leg up into the Mechanar by summoning them into the instance.

A quick test run showed that I can get the key to the cache of the legion quickly and without much hassle. Naturally, there is always the luck of getting the drop, but its definitely doable.

After the Sunday raid, I went for a couple more casual attempts, putting me halfway to level 69 and 3000 rep short of honored with the Sha'tar. I also got one Totem of the Void so far. At this rate, I should have all four by the time I reach 70.

Rep!

2008-06-07T11:47:00.003+01:00

This morning I took my four shamans to Old Hillsbarad. My objective was to complete the quests in the instance to collect the reputation. I plan to have the five bits of baby-pvp rep armor ready to equip by the time the shamans reach 70. Getting 3000 more CoT reputation will see my shamans honored with the faction and 4/5 done for the set. Leaving only Sha'tar rep to do.

I sailed through the first part of the instance. Breaking Trall out was a bit tighter, because I rely on mana biscuits to regain mana on Steph. On the gauntlet from the keep to the gate I intentionally stopped damage while hanging in there with judgement and seal of wisdom, which - combined with a pot or two - did the trick.

Then at the battle in Tarren mill, my shamans were dying left and right, like flies. If not faster. Add to that that the epoch hunter dispells buffs. Like seals. Doh. Clearly I needed a new plan. I stuck the shamans into Tabetha's house's lobby and brought the waves of dragonkin into the house, breaking line of sight on those pesky caster mobs that like to hang back cleanly. This worked like a charm and left me with the team upright at the end of the fight and all that rep nicely bagged.

Time to do some shopping before I try my hand at the follow up Black Morass. I don't know yet if I will be able to do that place with my 4x67 noob elemental shamans and my tank, but I will know this afternoon. If the answer should be 'nope', I can go and do Durnholde twice more or so to get the rep I need.

We'll see. =]

Sethekk Halls and 67!

2008-06-05T10:03:00.002+01:00

After finishing Nagrand with Durn the Hungerer, I was left with Viktor half a box and the four shamans 12 boxes short of level 67. I did all the group quests with these five chars, with the exception of Durn, for which a guildmate gave me a hand, and of course the Ring of Blood, for which another guildmate did the same, tanking out of the party.

While I fully plan to go for shield and 1h mace at 70, I took the Battle Mage-Baton from the Ring of Blood for all five characters. It has just the right stats and is a serious improvement. I can level without the armor provided by a shield.

One thing that I keep an eye on while leveling these characters is rep. Rep with Honor Hold, Cenarion Expedition, Lower City, Caverns of Time and the Sha'tar. Passing through the Hellfire Peninsula and doing the Ramparts boss kill quest, Zangermarsh and locating the lost expedition members in the Slave Pens and the Underbog and doing a couple of quests in Terrokar allowed me to get halfway to my target. That means it left me honored with Honor Hold and the Cenarion Expedition, and on the way to honored with the Lower City.

Looking at the shamans being half a level behind Viktor and them needing more Lower City rep, I parked Viktor and headed to Sethekk halls to get some instance xp. I made a mage table with Alaire, then logged her and grabbed biscuits with the shamans and my tankadin Stephanius. That saw me ready for the dungeon.

The way I went about it was to just tank and dps. My tank is sufficiently geared that no healing is needed in the time until a group of mobs is put down. The only time I healed was at about 30% of the first bosses health. One thing that is very nasty in this place are the mind control totems dropped by the Time Lost Controllers. However, the combination of taking this mob as first target, opening fire on it before it reached the tank and stunning it if still alive when it arrives at the tank did the trick nicely.

I completed Sethekk halls the first time on Monday, taking the last boss in the first go. It also brought me to honored with the Lower City! Then I fell out of bed early today. Too early to head to work, by enough of a margin to clear the dungoen again. That took me to level 67 on the shamans. All shamans had rested XP saved up and were bagging about 1500xp per trash mob kill, adding up very quickly.

I will definitely do some more dungeons for leveling purposes - not just in the Caverns of time for that rep, but also in Mechanar for the Lightning Totem. I have not tried yet, but aparently it is possible to summon people into Mechanar with a warlock, which allows character that do not have a flying mount or are not even 70 to get in there. Considering that I really need that lightning totem drop for all four shamans from the Mechanar Chest and that I plan to PvP with these shamans - making a flying mount totally unnecessary, that is awesome. I have three level 70 warlocks, so with a bit of fiddling I can get my characters into Mechanar and set to go by myself. I can hardly wait. =]

Ghost wolf sideeffects

2008-05-17T13:12:00.002+01:00

After killing 2143235213452 wolves, if not more I was able to gather 60 wolf tails. Another moment where you wonder how many WoW critters manager to get around without ears, teeth, tails or other default parts of their anatomy. Talking xp boxes, it took me eight boxes to get all of them. Anyway, level 64 now, and the cloth spellpower quest reward headpiece looks kinda neat with the drenai horns. Neat enough to make me take a screenshot. =]

Reported!

2008-05-12T16:05:00.005+01:00

[05/12/08]
17:03[Loórd]: ha i reported you! injoy your ban
17:03[Viktor]: Multiboxing is legit, and fine with Blizzard.
17:03[Loórd]: haha you havre been reported enjoy ban
17:03[Viktor]: sorry for wasting your time and that of the GM
17:03[Loórd]: haha
17:03[Loórd]: haha enjoy ban
17:03[Loórd]: ha!
17:03[Viktor]: seriously, search the customer service forums for multiboxing
17:04[Loórd]: how do u feel? ass

This is a level one alt that a horde rogue named Króul made just to gloat about just reporting me.
Then he logged back to his character and laughed and spat at me.

Unfortunately, I expect that the poor guy will not get any more educated and remain active faithfully as an unwanted and cluesless deputy-GM. ;-]

Who knows, maybe he even did report me and I might have a GM talk to me for the first time about multiboxing.

Anyway, level 63.5 and ticking.

Welcome to Hellfire Peninsula!

2008-05-04T03:04:00.000+01:00

After leaving the pack at 56.5, I pushed my quests a bit to 57 and then nuked Stratholme for the remainder to 58. Time to rejoice and enjoy the sudden availability of useful quest rewards multiplying the spellpower on the shaman gear significantly. Instead of using a warlock or my tankadin as before, I now used a shadow specced priest that I had left at level 60 for ages with the shamans. My choice for level 60s to dust off was between a rogue, a mage or this priest. I have Alaire geared and working as waitress mage. Captn is healing, but a shadow priest might be interesting. A rogue, melee when multiboxing just causes headaches. So, Viktor the shadowpriest is the choice.

After milking the quests in eastern Hellfire, the team dinged 60. I hopped over to buy the epic land mounts and riding skill. For the moment, the mounts are as shown here, but I want to get rid of those. I like the idea of going for goats, which would also consume my surplus runecloth for Ironforge reputation, or alternatively could be sorted with spare PvP tokens - but that is a bit down the line.

Time for the daily quest 'hug thy pillow'.

Vrooooom!

2008-05-03T03:33:00.006+01:00

Today, I had a bunch of hours available to play, and I decided to really push hard on the shamans. I was annoyed with being stuck in the old lands. I started the day at level 52. I ended it at level 56, with half of the next level sorted. That means that I will hit the magic level 58 tomorrow. Yay!

To do that, I did quests in the Western and Eastern Plaguelands, as well as in Felwood and Winterspring. After leveling a bunch of times to 60 and later to 70, I know the juicy quest chains like the back of my hand - no, I don't study them, I just have good memory - and made good use of that.

A funny incident occurred when I followed up on the satyr chain in Felwood with the escort quest for Arei. After doing the patrol through the area with the ironwood treants, the escort leads up to the road, where an ambush is spawned. On the last two dozen yards to the road, I noticed a tauren druid in his spiffy lion form prance about.

Now, I play sissy PvE mode, so we are both not flagged. Knowing spoilsport behavior, I expected the druid to try to interfere with my escort quest in a critical moment. As expected, the tauren druid turned pvp-enabled a few seconds after the ambush when he attacked the alliance NPC - to kill him and make me fail the quest. This was not a good moral call. It was also a bit stupid, considering that the druid himself was level 55ish, and I had four level 55 shamans as well as a level 70 warlock there. Rest in peace, dear Wixzen, pity you had to leave us. On another note, I am not sure if this poor guy is aware of it, but his character name is just one additional letter away from the German term for 'to jerk off'. Either way, the whole thing just took a few seconds, but it contributed to my entertainment, so I hope the same is true for you.

Cheers, Steph.

Five-oh

2008-04-23T09:16:00.003+01:00

Must resist the temptation to loot, must resist the temptation to loot, must...oh, sorry about that. It is absolutely ineffective to give in to the temptation and click all the sparkling piles. While doing the five levels from 45 to 50 in Stratholme's entrance area, I used to loot all the mobs while my tankadin was drinking. Then I realized how much time I was wasting that could be better spent by doing dailies, which net me more than the three truckloads of runecloth, level 55 blue BoE's, tons of greens and one world drop epic would net me. But! the main thing is: Hello level 50! Hello Totem of Wrath. Hello +12% crit and hit for the party. Yay!

Next up, plaguelands quests. I am a bit fed up with this nuking. =]

Cheers, Steph.

Welcome to Stratholme!

2008-04-21T20:11:00.002+01:00

As soon as I got my baby shaman pack to level 45, it was time to test how nuking a level 60 instance works. As the pile of glittering corpses attests, it goes quite well. I am too lazy at the moment to work out the formula to see how much the xp per kill are currently reduced due to the level difference being too great. I prefer to just wait and see how the numbers run along.

Nuking a bunch of packs in Stratholme with my my tankadin does result in a significant amount of spam on the screen, as you can see here. I am not sure yet how I will proceed once my shaman pack hits the magic level 58, but I am content to milk this at the moment. We will see.

Cheers, Steph.

Gearing up

2008-04-07T08:45:00.002+01:00

I have spent considerable gold and time on getting some gear for my minions in the past weeks. Previously, I had done only shadoweave tailoring on my three warlocks and after being fed up with loosing 5v5 arena games due to fear bought the S2 shoulders to blow my arena points.

Now, my generic party setup has changed by shelfing Elaire and adding Stephanius, to do PvE and quest content. I have since then gotten Captn 2/2 Whitemend and 3/3 Primal Mooncloth, Alaire 2/2 Spellstrike and 3/3 Spellfire, Dlaire and Blaire 2/2 Spellstrike to keep the Frozen Shadoweave company and just this week I spent some badges on vortexes and got Blaire and Dlaire a Belt of Blasting each.

While I do spent a lot of time raiding, I do not raid with my minions or even with Captn. What I do at the top end of the line is heroic 5 man instances. The big question is now for me: how much I can follow the magic dps guidelines for raids for that?

Cheers, Steph.

More screenspace!

2008-04-07T01:48:00.001+01:00

On request of someone who was dissatisfied with the setup picture below, here is a new one. I have in the meantime added another monitor and use two desktops and three notebooks, instead of one desktop and four notebooks now.

Cheers, Captn.

Heroic Botanica cleared!

2008-03-12T18:57:00.005+01:00

With a very happy grin on my face I can now report that I have made some definite progress with my five-boxing: I cleared Botanica in Heroic mode with my characters Stephanius, Captn, Alaire, Blaire and Dlaire.

After clearing the Steamvaults a couple of times, I went for other instances and cleared Mechanar, Botanica and Arcatraz as well as Shattered Halls several times each in normal mode. I spent considerable time in Botanica to practice, get Scryer tokens, Sha'tar rep and the Bangle of Endless Blessings for Captn.

After responding to someone's desperate cry for a healer yesterday night, and ending up in a pug with an ill-equipped tank, I was painfully forced to acknowledge that the only thing holding my team back from doing heroics was myself. So I went for it. It took me a while and cost me half a dozen stupid wipes, but I bagged 25 badges in Botanica today.

I will defenitely now look out for the daily heroics, not just for the daily normal!

On a pure eyecandy level, I have now started to use 'Parrot' with a little modification as suggested on the dual-boxing.com forums, showing my party's damage in the HUD, like shown here. Besides neat looks, this also organizes the combat log information into groups by type and time. Thereby AoE attacks show as one big number, even combined into one number if its a seed from each warlock, like in this screenshot.

Cheers, Steph.

Back in the saddle again!

2008-03-04T01:41:00.000+01:00

After spending almost a month criss-crossing Europe on behalf of my job and then attending a RL guild meeting, I am back home and on holiday. Today I did my first multiboxing for a dog's age and cleared the Steamvaults. This was using my tankadin Stephanius, Blaire, Dlaire, Alaire and Captn. And no, it was not heroic mode. My objective was to remind myself of what I learned before and to get back in the groove.

I am quite satisfied with the result. No useful drops, but loads of armaments, ore, herbs and a couple of shards came my way. =]

Not too shabby for my first day's worth of holiday!

Cheers, Captn.

Level 40-43 - Where to?

2008-01-31T12:46:00.000+01:00

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

2008-01-26T15:09:00.000+01:00

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

2008-01-23T15:40:00.000+01:00

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.

Desk cleanup

2007-10-27T20:00:00.001+01:00

When I started fiveboxing, I was very lazy in setting things up. Unlike many other multiboxers I am using notebooks for my secondary characters. Not just because I happened to have them at hand, but also because they just take less space and energy than desktops, come with displays, keyboard and touchpad and also do not produce as much heat as desktops would.

Now, I ended up scattering the notebooks left and right of my keyboard which ended up to be a very wide setup. effectively the three notebooks were barely in my peripheral vision.

Today I got out of my chair and went shopping for some DIY supplies. I ended up spending 20 Euro for a 30cmx250cm board that was cut to a 160cm length and had the remaining bit cut in half to serve as legs. That makes it as wide as my desk, and just high enough to clear my 19" TFTs and the desktop that I have on my table.

The nice thing about this is that the shelf is exactly horizontal in my field of view, just like the base of the notebooks that are on top of it. Sure, its a 2" gap in total, but lightyears better than the previous blind spot situation.

Cheers, Captn.

Tankadin goodness

2007-09-11T16:09:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since I did anything with Team Minion or my little wolves that would be worth mentioning. I had good times playing on my tank warrior main in raids for the most part, but I was really held back from doing something more worthwhile with the team by two things, firstly not having a control setup that includes a tank and secondly haveing a mixed keyboard hammering/mouse clicking tanking habbit that does not mix well at all with doing other things at the side.

First, I had to re-think and re-do my entire key mapping. When playing with the all squishy 1xpriest/3xwarlock/1xmage combo, I had the priest as my primary character, used Clique to heal and so forth by clicking the party portraits and used the action bars for attack spells on the warlocks and mage.

Adding a tank to that mix does not work so very well. With the tank being the puller and providing the usual focus point of a group, i.e. dps the mob the tank designated as kill target, heal the tank and so on, there is no question that the tank needs to be the primary character. I use my warrior tank as my primary character on raids, so doing anything with the way I control the character that jeopardizes that is totally out of the question. That again means that I have to rework my controls to make the healer work as secondary character.

What I did not notice when I looked for it the first time was that the keybindings in WoW list the primary and secondary action bar, then a load of other stuff and then, after three or so pages of scrolling, the remaining action bars. They are there! Which means that I can set up a non-primary action bar to sort the healing and assign key combinations to it that are most likely never going to be used by accident.

For my trial run for this concept I programmed the lowermost six programmeable buttons on my Logitech G15 with simple macros each containing only one key stroke, for example CTRL+SHIFT+J. That again is bound to Captn's action bar 4, slot 1, where the macro /cast [target=player1] greater heal is placed. The same for player2..5 and prayer of healing and rudimentary healing via a secondary character is sorted. I must say it worked amazingly well. Greater heals are mana efficient and effecive. I will play with using ALT as additional modifier in the macro to squeeze another spell in, but mostly that is what I need.

The second thing is the tanking style. A warrior needs to work for his threat on every single target. The multimob abilities are not really great, doing not much threat, bring on long or longish cooldowns or just limited to four mobs. With trash pulls of up to eight mobs that is a bit of a bother.

As it happens, I had this paladin just sitting there somewhere halfway to 70. I used to raid with him back in the Molten Core days and a paladin was actually my first WoW character. In any case, I decided to try out paladin tanking. What I read up front and what I found in practice is that a paladin makes an simply amazing tank for multiple mobs with very little attention needed. Pull, then you can mostly just hit the holy shield and consecration buttons every couple of seconds and you are good to go. It is only a question of healing how many mobs you can hold. Simply amazing and extremely useful if you have something else to do as well, such as hit the greater heal button or the nuke focus target button!

I cleared the Slave Pens when testing and then started doing the Mana Tombs. Nothing special in those places, but I still had quests open with my paladin for them. Anyway, I am reasonably happy with the result and have leveled my paladin to 70 now. I am sure the fact that I now have a control setup that accommodates the paladin and a tank that requires much less micro management will be good. I am eager to see how far I can take it.

Cheers, Captn.

Ghost wolf pack!

2007-08-09T00:41:00.001+01:00

Just a little snapshot after gaining 40% run speed at level 20. /dances

Cheers, Captn.

Fire and lightning!

2007-08-07T10:40:00.001+01:00

After seeing a number of videos from XboxGorefiend with his 5xShammy team, I decided to give that a go myself. I created a bunch of drenai shamans and played them up to level 18 in the last four days. It was the first time for me in the Drenai starter zones and I can only recommend that you try them. There is not only nice scenery, but also nice special effects to some quests. Definitely worth a look and entertaining, unlike doing the other starter zones another time.

Shock and loot. That is how it is looking at the moment. I am eager to get to level 20 and have ghost wolf to help me get around. I was aiming at that yesterday but got delayed by talking to people going WTF?!? every couple of minutes. Shammy spells are more flashy than that of my primary team, from direct casts to selfbuffs like lightning shield and rockbiter.

This definitely motivates me to make a 'Multibox FAQ' youtube clip to save me a lot of typing =]

Cheers, Captn.

About that 'WTS dreadsteed boost'

2007-08-07T10:34:00.000+01:00

I neglected to comment on that bit on the end of the clip. Considering that my team is still stuck on slow gryphons and the difference to my netherdrake is quite striking, I am interested in getting swift mounts. The problem is that since that is 5200g per head, the total is 26000g.

My team gives me a lot of grinding power, but I hardly ever use it, preferring to do something more fun instead. Then the raids are taking a lot of time. That combined with the boosts that I did for a number of guildmates made me consider the option of selling boosts for the dreadsteed or pally charger quests. The cost of the mats/payments to npcs would be still below the price of a regular mount, even if I demand a fee of 150g or so for the hour of work.

Anyway, I am not going to post this offer anywhere really, but if you want to take it me up on it, we can see what we can do. =]

Cheers, Captn.

Mission: Dreadsteed

2007-08-02T23:58:00.000+01:00

Since reaching 70, I have at a number of occasions helped guildmates with their warlock or paladin epic mount quests. These days to get a group together to head to Scholomance or Dire Maul for these quests or otherwise. However, the class specific mounts are both nicer and cheaper than the generic racial mounts and riding skill purchase. Naturally the person who wants the mount is sufficiently motivated, but what about the others?

If these others is just me, that impact can be minimized and getting the group to be a go is much easier.

To illustrate how this works, I captured a bit of the action with fraps and cut it together to a youtube clip. Considering that the amount of subtitles or titles would have just been silly, I went for a narrative voice-over this time, even though I don't have an exceptional microphone or English as my mother tongue. =]

Anyway, here it is:

Cheers, Captn.

Mission: Terminate Sons of Gruul

2007-07-04T04:01:00.000+01:00

After being done with the Netherwing on my main and being not yet eligible to do it with Team Minion, I was a bit unsure what to target next. I have not yet touched the Ogri'la quests with any character but have helped others to do the last few bits before the actual Ogri'la quests.

When I went for Grulloc, I got swashed. He does too much damage for the felguards to keep up in threat with the healing that they need. Luckily the quest item can be picked up wether you are in the party with the looting rights or not, so I could be a bit creative. I asked nicely and found a druid guildmate who was willing to lend me a paw on this mission. A short while later Grulloc, Maggoc and Slaag were down and I went back to the Ring of Blood to turn in the completed quests.

Next up where the quests that I had already helped with as tank. The summoning of the ogre warlock Vim'gol and afterwards the final son of gruul, Skulloc. The fight with Vim'gul is a bit tricky. Five players have to be in fiery circles around the altar to summon him and to interrupt his power-up at 50% health. The warlock does damage to all present players and pets, and the circles are further apart than casting or Prayer of Healing range. I put one character into each circle, with the toes as close to the altar as possible. As soon as the summon was complete, I ran forward to the center with Captn to be able to heal all chars with Prayer of Healing. At 50% I had to spring back to be in position to interrupt his power-up. Then I could finish him. For Skulloc I had a guildmate help again to work around the threat issue and viola, Orgi'la here I come!

The ogres gave a party to mark the occasion. =]

Cheers, Captn.

Not dead!

2007-07-01T10:31:00.000+01:00

While I have been playing as much as before, I have been focussing on playing my warrior Ivl rather than Team Minion. You can see one rather graphic archivement in the picture here. What you can not see directly is all the goodies I collected and the stack of heroic badges being almost tall enough to reach the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600.

As I type this, Team Minion is en-route with the team to Cosmowrench to utterly annihilate some quest mobs though, so its not like I gave up on the project, I just gave it a break while doing many other things in game.

Cheers, Captn.

Altherac Valley here I come!

2007-06-08T18:41:00.000+01:00

'Amazing, absolutely amazing!' is the summary I can give for the expedition I made to Altherac Valley on Thursday evening. Xzin mentioned the other day that 'there is allways AV' which made me consider this destination again for my team. Sure, you can not longer join AV as a group, but if you join the queue at the same moment your chances of getting into the same battleground are good. So far I have not had any chars left to sit one out.

How often have you wished that anyone in AV would just come over to where they are needed to take a graveyard, tower or whatever? With five chars at my disposal, I do no longer need to worry about that part. Since AV is huge and people tend to scatter all over, having focussed killing power is a definite advantage. Nowhere as good as when doing the same thing with the guild's PvP group (which I should have remembered without Xzin's reminder) but then considering the difference between able PvPers at each char coordinating over TS and me playing my five chars by myself, that should not be any surprise.

It gave me a very welcome and needed relief from a a very tough couple of days at work where I needed to rush to meet a couple of deadlines and could do little else but work and sleep. Horray for the deadlines being archived and the weekend being here!

/goes to queue for AV

Captn out.

Battle of the Crimson Watch

2007-05-30T00:38:00.001+01:00

After I made that last post here things definitely looked better. Someone asked me if I could help with Ruul the Darkener. I used my warrior instead of Elaire and did that. Then we went on to the Cipher of damnation and I literally had my commands crossed and messed up big time. Then I swapped back to the usual team setup without my warrior and everything went peachy. Kinda nice to know that I can do the Cipher of Damnation finish by myself on the fly now.

After that someone asked in guild chat for the Battle of the Crimson Watch, a demon showdown that follows a drop of the nuisance named patrol through the Path of Conquest in Shadowmoon Valley. I needed that quest done for my team, but had learned to take the 'recommended players: 4' as a practical joke from Blizzard. We gathered a party of guildies plus my team as second party and did it twice, with the only casualty being one of my felguards. I guess average itemization has improved since I did it back in January. Anyway, nice to have the fancy tabards and to bag the 25g each.

I did not bother to reform 'Team Minion' before doing my 10 5v5 rated arena games. In the whole ten games I made about 10 kills. My best game this time around was with a -4 rating. Ah well. I will see how many points I loose due to my lower rating and then consider if I just spent 200g each week to get me closer to the Gladiator's War Staff.

Captn out.

EU-GM Eilanai on Multi-Boxing

2007-05-29T20:17:00.000+01:00

It has been a few days since I had time to play. Too much work at the moment. On the good side, its not going to stay that way for ever, in fact things should be back to normal in about two weeks for me.

After being told 'I will lol when you get banned for that' shortly after I logged in, I did a bit forum browsing on the EU WoW forums and found THIS THREAD. In this thread a fellow multi boxer asks for clarification after being suspended after botting accusations.

GM Eilanai responds:
Hi Franchesca,

From what I can see the initial suspension was due to suspicion that you may have been using a third party program to control your characters, not for the multi-boxing itself. Since then, the matter was investigated by our Account Administration team and you should have access to your accounts again.

There is no problem with you playing multiple characters, as long as you are the owner of the accounts and are in control of them (i.e. no third party programs, and no macro-usage that is not normally possible in-game).

Have fun playing ;) Eilanai
Game Master // CS Forum Representative - EN

"The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.."

Nice one!

Just because posts on the offical forums have a habbit of decaying and I do not expect anyone who is sceptic to take my word on the matter, I added a screenshot.

I hope to have something worth reporting again soon =]

Cheers, Captn.

Oh right, pictures!

2007-05-19T15:47:00.000+01:00

I will add a couple of pictures to the previous posts when I get home. I urgently need to return my attention to the real life meeting of my guild now which some kind Belgian members organized for the guild. /raises pint in salute

Captn out.

Teron Gorefiend

2007-05-18T11:32:00.000+01:00

While running about in Shadowmoon Vally with the one or other objective, I was allways looking for ash to pick up. Collecting 15 of these per character was not so easy since they are not merrily spawning or concentrated in any one place. So I went after the few bits of ash that I was still missing and then started the actual quest chain. Naturally, killing the 15 Shadowmoon Harbringers took me no time at all, which sent me right on my way to do the bidding of the ancient shadowmoon spirit.

Getting the Gorefiend's Cloak and Gorefiend's Truncheon is fairly easy, I fumbled dismounting my dps chars for the ghost knights with the truncheon, but still made it without casualties on my side. Much more interesting is the encounter to recover Gorefiend's Armor.

Vhel'kur, spawn of Deathwing, who is in turn the big bad daddy to his cute dragon cubs Nefarian and Onyxia has Gorefiend's Armor. His ghost circles above the Netherwing Ridge. Standing on the tallest peak of the tallest hill on Netherwing Ridge, you have to ranged pull the dragon's ghost towards the hill's summit. On the first try I messed up the pull and got eaten before I could do anything dps wise. On the next pull I overnuked and my warlocks got shredded by the dragon's 3.5k hits faster than I could heal. On the third try however, I pulled him as intended, then sent in the felguards and gave them time to get a lead in threat. I had dished out two greater heals when I started attacking with my warlocks and the mage. This time everything went peachy. I got him down loosing only one of my three felguards in the process. Considering that the felguards do not have hit points exceeding two of his hits, that wasn't too bad really.

The reward for me on this chain was Evoker's Helmet of Second Sight, which is a very nice hat as far as spell crit and spell damage goes. Naturally I still have a better healing oriented green for Captn, but for the mage and the warlocks this is a clear improvement.

Captn out.

Team Minion

2007-05-16T22:49:00.000+01:00

After giving all the nifty gladiator's gear a longing look I decided to see what I could do in arena's. I formed a 5v5 arena team for my five characters called 'Team Minion'. After forming it at the Nagrand arena, I entered an skirmish arena. Let it be said, that I was slaughtered very quickly. Not being arena experienced at all, I had left my corner on foot instead of mounted and faced an Al-Akkir pre-made that looked at me a bit puzzeled and then took my chars apart.

I will need to look at strategies that may give me some success chances, one thing certainly is improving the location of my mounting and dismounting macros. Tripple Seed of Corruption and three Shadow Burns and the one Fire Blast should be a nice welcome for any team, but I will have to see how things go.

On leaving my skirmish round, I got hammered by a horde team at the arena master in Nagrand. Arena noob that I am I wasnt aware yet of this being expected. Upon returning to my corpses and ressing outside the walls of the little enclosure, I had an undead shadow priest start attacking captn. I guess the rest of the pack was outside of his tab or V-healthbar range. I hit fel-domination, summoned felguards in 0.5 seconds and smoshed him flat in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

Then I made sure I got the hell out of dodge city.

I will see how it goes later in actual matches after I adjusted a bit to the rush situation and will of course let you know. =]

Captn out.

Cipher of Dammnation, 2nd Attempt

2007-05-16T02:27:00.000+01:00

This week I spent some time working on the Cipher of Damnation and the Theron Gorefiend chains. My motivation to continue the Cipher of Damnation chain for it's own sake was not so high after the frustration I had met earlier with the earlier parts of the chain, the tubers in particular. Now, I have to say that the tubers must have been the absolute worst of the chain. The originally very horrible looking part with the naga's chests was not so hard after all. The keys are bind on pickup, but one can unlock a box without looting it, so I could just kill and loot the nagas and open all the boxes with Captn for the rest of the team.

The part with the blood eleves was relatively easy, with the rotten egg having a good droprate. I did of course make it more difficult for myself by heading over to the path of conquest and killing groups of blood elves there instead of going to the quest fortification as intended where the type of elves that drop the quest armor scraps are abundant. Ruul the Darkener slaughtered me in no time. I put that aside for later and did the next cipher part instead. I met no trouble at all with the demons guarding the next part.

As luck would have it, the guild's main tank was willing and available to help me with Ruul and the fire lord, so I could bag my fancy Staff of the Redeemer and Oronok's Ancient Scepter. An for me unexpected benefit were the nifty arcanist looking and stat wise better than my boring previous shoulderpieces that you get during the chain as well: Spaulders of the Torn-heart.

Captn out.

We are airborne!

2007-05-15T01:44:00.000+01:00

After a bit more than three hours of questing in southern Netherstorm, the time had come to take a trip down to Shadowmoon Valley and get the fifth gryphon. Now I can move the team around with less hassle withhin zones.

Of course it is still a long way to swift gryphons - 26k gold do not just fall from the sky and maybe I will stop saving for it before I am a fifth of the way towards that goal, but hey, who knows. I had a look at the arena vendor today. I will see if I give it a go. With there being not much arena queue time, I think I can dare to field my chars as a 5v5 team. But that is for another day.

Captn out.

Level 70 - Gryphon time!

2007-05-13T23:30:00.000+01:00

/dances with happiness. After completing nearly all Blade's Edge quests, I headed over to Netherstorm. There I worked the Scryer mana-forge chain, various quests around Area 52 and then the Kirin-Tor, where the last three team-members hit 70 when handing in one of the ghost-town quests. Captn was a bit ahead since I handed in the Nagrand dust for bags with him, netting XP each time.

I have to say that I wish that was all there was to it, but unfortunately I know now that I could have been at 70 much earlier, if I had stayed on track as noted above. I went to Shadowmoon Valley on Sunday morning and did the Path of Conquest chain. That worked beautifully. Then I started the Cipher to Dammnation quest chain. The first part was no problem, trapping the souls of the elementals actually does work for each char in one go. Then came the horror. The quest with the tuber roots, the pigs and the rock flayers. Not only do I need 50 roots, but the quest is just too frustrating. Uneven terrain. Spawn of attackable pigs next to agressive flayers. The range of the whistle for the pigs being allmost allways just too short to call a surviving pig. The pig spawn rate...ARGH. The next part was winning the key lottery among the naga five times in a row. That is the point where I said...some other time and moved back to Netherstorm.

If you have keen eyes or click on the thumbnail to see the full size picture you will notice that something is wrong there. I did not have enough gold to buy five gryphons. Even after a bit of scratching the coins among my other chars, I could find only enough for four gryphons. To avoid that I reinforce the impression that I would be discriminating Dlaire as with the XP in Searing Gorge, this time Blaire needs to be patient. I figure it wont be too long, since I can not finish the 20g quests in northern Netherstorm.

Cheers, Captn.

Level 68 - Finally!

2007-05-10T02:06:00.000+01:00

The title says it all. I have not been making much progress in the last few days. Partly due to limited time. I could not play as much as I wanted, and I did actually go and do some other in game things besides leveling team Minion.

For a while I entertained the notion to save all the quest-xp money from now on. I started grinding around the Mana Forges in Netherstorm. On the bright side, I got my main's Scryer rep maxed out, grinding rep items worth 20k scryer rep in just over six hours. While that is quite nice, I did not make any noticeable progress regarding XP. 160xp per kill is just horrible, not matter how fast you kill.

So I forgot about the idea of trying to maximise quest xp gold. I will bag what remains, but until then I will use quest xp as primary xp source again.

Again, it is too late. Captn out.

Hellfire Citadel & Coilfang Reservoir

2007-05-04T01:42:00.000+01:00

For a while now I wanted to re-visit the Hellfire Citadel's first wing, the Ramparts. I had tried this dungeon before with discouraging results. While I did manage to clear all the trash in about two hours and drop the first and second bosses I was not really happy with this. Firstly, I took about twice as long as the average group in their low 60s should take. Next, I had problems with the second boss and dropped him only after asking a friendly druid to replace one of my chars. The druid told me later that he didnt do that much, two or three decurses and a self heal, but still, I did not do it by myself. The final boss was just a mess with me being unable to dodge the fire. I am convinced that this was mostly due to my characters gear not yet being any good. While leveling to 66 the hitpoints of my characters and felguards has doubled and my spell damage has increased a great deal.

So I decided it would be time to give it another shot. I cleared the way to the second and third boss in about 50 minutes without any wipes and leaving Watchkeeper Gargolmar crushed under my collective heels. After carefully arranging my party in a semi-circle out of Omor the Unscarred's aggro range, I attacked. Two or three decurses done with Alaire by single clicking the respective healthbar did the decursing thanks to a nice add-on called Clique. The same add-on also makes healing using the mouse and passive targetting very convinient for me on Captn.

Then it was time to move on to our pals Vazruden and Nazan. While Vazruden did not have much time to be rude to anyone his steed and lord Nazan saw to having my party for dinner well done instead of rare. I litterally got roasted by his fire pits. Not allowing him to discourage me that easily, I went in for another try. This time I dropped Vazruden without any healing being done by Captn and had spread my team up front. When Nazan landed I sent the felguards to him and ran the party through him. Then I continued to hammer him with salvo's while pressing CTRL-2 in between to make the felguards move slightly before attacking again. It was not pretty. I lost two chars and two felguards, but put Nazan down.

After some rejoicing that I could finally get rid of the quest items hogging bagspace I went for the next wing of the instance. I found it to be actually easier on the micro-management, the hardest fight being the second boss with this four waves of pawns before he enters the fray. The trash and the last boss were comaritively easy. The last boss presented me with the Raiments of Divine Authority. Not that these robes would look very good, but hey, they are better for healing than the Goldwave Tunic that everyone gets as soon as they set foot into Outland.

Not being easily sated, I then entered the Slave Pens in the Coilfang Reservoir. Here I had more trouble. Mennu the Betrayer, the first boss in this instance is a totem hugging shaman. It took me three tries to get him down. The key was to give the felguards some lead time and only then gradually start to nuke as well as making sure that lava and healing totems were hit with Smite Rank 1 by Captn. The big lobster also known as Rokmar the Crackler presented me with less trouble by comparison, but also took me three tries.

At that point it was quite late and my concentration was waning. I decided to leave the rest of the Coilfang Reservoir for another day.

Captn out.

Level 66 - Blade's Edge Mountains

2007-05-03T01:55:00.000+01:00

After completing reaching level 65, I had only very few quests left in Terrokar Forest and Nagrand. I completed the ones that were feasible and got a couple of boxes worth of XP together. Instead of then going for annoying collection quests, I took to the air with the public transport to the Orebor Harborage. From there I headed north to Sylvanaar.

The Blade's Edge Mountains are famous for being almost as horrible in terrain design as Azshara. People love to have a zone cut into little bits between which they can not easily move! I know I do. Anyway, I grabbed all the quests at Sylvanaar and directed my attention to the birdies, wolves and ogres in the area. This with quite a bit of random slaughter of anything that crossed my path brought me up to level 66.

Looking at the way I was playing my team, I decided to make some changes in the warlock spec. Simply put, I dropped all Affliction points and put them into Destruction instead. With my shadow bolt salvo's I recon I will get more out of having the improved shadow bolt giving the next five direct shadow damage spells 20% damage bonus after a crit. Especially since my warlock's crit rate is getting in a range where this is a worthwhile consideration. I have 22.22% now, but since one warlock triggering the effect does the trick for the others as well, its quite nice.

Piggy Bank Massacre!

2007-05-01T03:07:00.000+01:00

Yesterday night someone was talking about the need to get another fast gryphon since the slow one just does not do the trick anymore once you know the fast one's speed. That got me thinking. Well, counting actually. I had taken approx 1k from my main when getting elite mounts for the team. Now each team character had around 800g from questing 60 to 65. Right on!

A couple of minutes later I could fly around giddy with joy at the speed. I put the speed to good use right away and did some night mining until I really needed to head to bed.

Captn, out.

Level 65 - The Ring of Blood

2007-04-30T02:04:00.000+01:00

Even before reaching 64, reaching 65 was the real milestone that I had in mind. Not just because its a nice number, but because it is the minimum level requirement for the Ring of Blood in Nagrand. Admittedly, the amount of XP you get in these fighting rounds converted to gold at max level in addition to the 11g or so that you get regularly is appealing, but the weapons that the quest offers are awesome as well. And I wanted that set of [Battle Mage's Baton] very much.

Upon arriving in Nagrand on Sunday morning I first did the hunters quests. Then I did them again. I realized only when picking up the boss drops from Gutripper that I had forgotten to share the quest with my minions. ARGH! Anyway, I got over it and took it as a refresher to make sure there is a [4] in the quest log ahead of the quest I am doing before doing it. After the hunters quest, I picked up what I could from the Kurenai and the Throne of the Elements. I finished the Ogre chain, need to face Gorok the Usurper now and need to free Corki one last time. All that combined did it and brought to 65.

It was after 1am though so I was not too sure if I would find a friendly guild tank for the arena bouts. I could have messed about trying to make do with the felguards, but from tanking the arena fights myself on my warrior I do know that these guys hit nasty, so my hope on the felguards making it was low. In any case, a friendly feral druid from my guild was willing to help me out after his last BG for the day.

We did the five bouts without fail. Blaire got killed by the warmaul champion, but besides that everything went picture perfect. For constant DPS and constant healing using 'Clique' was awesome. I could click the tank's bar for greater heal while hammering the keyboard for dps. Then I got my new fancy staves as shown in the picture above.

Anyway, time to hit the sack.

Captn, out.

Level 64 - Terrokar Forest and the Bone Wastes

2007-04-29T02:17:00.000+01:00

Disguised as orc cultists, I infiltrated the cultist camp just south of Shattrath City. After some spywork utter destruction followed, for the camp, not for me. The most difficult part of the mission was to skirt all wolves and lizards on the way to the camp since all combat action break the disguise. Some horrified cultists escaped, mostly because I could not be bothered to chase them down after my mission was accomplished. The scattered throughout Terrokar Forest, but their warnings were ignored by the minions of Terrok and the blood elves.

I have been massively enjoying my setup while questing in Terrokar. I skipped a number of collection quests, but followed quest chains like the Skettis chain dilligently. The mana bomb thread has been eliminated. The warped peons were spanked. The Bone wastes hold a number of interesting quests, with a high number of kill quests to my delight! The picture here shows the bone dragon after I was done with him. I also dropped the bone worm.

Alas! I no longer 'have' to wear the [Wanderer's Stiched Trousers] as seen on this picture which I took when hearthing back to Shattrath City. I say 'have to' because a quest reward from the Allerian Stronghold has better stats. Which leaves my party looking like shown here. For some reason I really liked the semi-naked looks that the Wanderer's Trousers gave my minions. Maybe the reason has something to do with insufficient fresh air, insufficient cold showers or similar. In any case, the new flashy red pants with white stripes are not bad looking and certainly better in stats. Pants! But I disgress, I shall wrench myself away from this topic to avoid that I look like a child who has just been deprived of his favorite toy.

After all these quests I was level 64! Time to get new spells and grimoires. The pet ability training is also the reason why I have for once no felguards out.
Ready for the hunter quests in Nagrand!

Level 62 - Shrooms!

2007-04-25T00:48:00.000+01:00

Giant mushrooms in fact. Zangermarsh has many of those. The quests from Honor Hold, The Temple, the Cenarion Expedition and the Longbears in the Hellfire Peninsula are done. I was not idle in Zangermarsh either, completing all quests with the exception of the eel fillet ones, and the western Cenarion watcher, Sporegar and northern Broken quests.

Just now I got Fel Armor and Molten Armor respectively as well as a new rank in shadow bolt and fire bolt. That should certainly increase the amount of targets that I can insta-gib with one salvo to 98% of my level range.

The quest rewards are equipping my team nicely. If you check the Armory link you will see that most of my crappy items are history now, replaced with Outland quest rewards. Some of these substitutions were gigantic upgrades since I had not worked on improving my characters gear in a focussed way. Knowing that I am trying to level anyway and that the yummy Outland quest items are on the menu made me rather lazy with gear.

Captn out.

Mission: Dreadsteed Accomplished!

2007-04-21T20:24:00.000+01:00

"Use: Summons three Dreadsteeds, one Elekk and one Horse. These are very fast mounts." I have to plead guilty to riding about town unnecessarily enjoying the motion. I will post a bit more later, now its dinnertime.

Captn out.

Level 60!

2007-04-21T08:34:00.000+01:00

While this exclamation does not carry the weight it did before, I am still happy of having reached this milestone. The very first thing I did was grab an elite elekk for Captn and an elite horse for Alaire and start the Dreadsteed quest for Elaire, Blaire and Dlaire. The picture shows me ready to lay waste to the owl beast population in Winterspring. Not that I have anything against owl beasts, but I need their blood for the quest chain.

I can not wait for the whole party to be elite mount equipped. A whole new cursing speed experience!

In other news, I changed my macro setup from /cast [target=party1target] shadow bolt to [target=focustarget] style. The motivation to finally get this done was a guildmate who wanted to do a Zul'Gurub run for giggles. We could have juggled the groups, but since I will have the same problem with not being able to depend on the group setup for targeting in PvP, I got it done and over with. ZG was fun. there were 11 chars including my five, some of the other six 70. It was past 3am in the morning when we finished, so I ask for your forgiveness for not making any fancy videos or remembering to snap nice pictures. Bat and Snake died.

Back to the Dreadsteed quest now

Captn out.

Level 58 - Outland here I come!

2007-04-19T23:55:00.000+01:00

I was literally out of quests. Well, there were a few left, but they were the 'pay this' or 'find me this thing on the other side of the world' or '42232 rare drops on the double types'. So, I headed through the dark portal into the XP rich desolation of the Hellfire Peninsula.

Having already made it to 70 on my warrior and having past the first couple of zones with my hunter the zones themselves were no news to me. However, my warrior was wearing T2 raiding gear and the hunt PvP epics. Doing even the first couple of quests in the eastern part of the Hellfire Peninsula with the mostly green equipped caster team was very rewarding by comparison. New Hat. New Chest. New Staff. New Legs. New neck. New wand. But I am sure I missed something. Oops, yes I did, the overlord trinket. Awesome rewards for me, most of them significant upgrades.

The XP pours in at a faster pace than in the old lands and I am closing the gap from 58 to 60 fast.

New movie clips!

2007-04-17T00:24:00.000+01:00

After playing around with them on the weekend, I uploaded two new videos to YouTube today. The first is a collection of things that I did in the Blackrock Depths, with a goof in the fight in the chamber of the Seven and Jailbreak.

The second clip is composed out of a number of nice takedowns with affliction and with demonology after reaching level 50.

Cheers, Captn.

Level 56.2 - Jailbreak!

2007-04-14T21:26:00.000+01:00

After the previous attempt at conquering the Blackrock Depths ended at General Angerforge, this time I scored much better. I went in the party a couple of boxes into level 56 with Captn in the lead. What I did accomplish the last time, was getting the Shadowforge Key.

Heading in, I picked up the 'Attunement to the Core' quest and went directly through the garrison to the General's Hangout. It was not much later that I was happy to have survived pulling a bigger corner group with a runner. I need to mention that my Hellfire AoE is not very suited to dealing with Fire Elementals. Luckily enough banish evens the odds, even though I was not prepared to apply it as comfortly in combat as sheep. While there was no single wipe, I did see Captn's 'Spirit of Redemption' too frequently, but I did drop General Angerforge as well as Golem Lord Angelmach on the first go.

Since it did go so well, I did not return to Winsor immediately, but put down Ribbley, the Flame Ambassador and the Spirits of the Seven as well. Then I strolled over the bridge making good use of 'banish' and picked up the core fragements needed for 'Attunement to the Core'.

Then I turned on my collective heels, and started clearing the way around the Ring of Law, then the entry hall, the storage room and the way down to Windsor's cell. After this extensive preparation I revisited Winsor. Unlike the last 3563 times when I was helping others with their Onyxia chain in BRD, I did not have to explain anything, which was just as well. Suffice to say, that the actual Jailbreak escort quest went off without a hitch. Even my trio of felguards kept Winsor's buff until the escort was finished to my joy.

I am now off to Winterspring with a brief stop to do the 'First and the Last' Blightcaller prequest in the Plaguelands.

I did hit the screenshot and fraps buttons and will review the results shortly.

Captn out.