More screenspace!

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!

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!

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?

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

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

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

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

Cheers, Captn.

Level 39 - Saying goodbye to the Cathdral

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

Captn.

Back from RL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers, Captn.

Desk cleanup

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.