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.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Saturday, January 26, 2008
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.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
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.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Tankadin goodness
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.
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.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Ghost wolf pack!
Just a little snapshot after gaining 40% run speed at level 20. /dancesCheers, Captn.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Fire and lightning!
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.
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