Vrooooom!

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

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!

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

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!

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.