Level 1

The screenshot shows the team after I brought all characters together for the first time. This is in the human starting area, Northshire Abbey. From left to right you can see Dlaire, Elaire, Captn, Alaire and Blaire.

Before this, I had done a test run. Being satisfied, I went about getting the required bits and pieces together. These are primarily five computers and five World of Warcraft accounts.


The Platform

Blizzard has kept the minimum hardware requirements of WoW intentionally low, to avoid artifical shrinking of their potential customer base. I had three computers available already. All of them are Sony VAIO computers. I primarily use a VGC-RC102 desktop with two 19" displays and a VGN-C1Z/B notebook with a 13.3" widescreen display. Due to the low minimum spec requirements even my old PCG-V505CP with 32MB ATI Radeon 9200 graphics can run the game client. Not as nice as the RC102 or the C1S, both of them can run two clients at once, but it does the job. I needed two more units to complete my platform for five clients. Lucky enough I am in the sitation to have access to a large amount of Sony reference hardware.
Two PCG-V505DP notebooks from this pool are now temporarily the fourth and fifth in my setup. From left to right, C1Z, V505CP, RC102 displays, V505DP, V505DP, with the Logitech G15 keyboard and MX1000 in the front. Yeah baby!

Account management

Getting more WoW copies was mostly a question of 'am I really doing this?'. The price for the basic game had been dropped to 20 euro at the launch of the expansion. I already had my primary WoW/BC account and a secondary account for bank characters and such.

I picked up three copies of the original game and upgraded two of them with the expansion pack to give me the race/class mix that I wanted for my party setup. Only the drenai priest and mage accounts need the expansion, so I could have done with just one account upgrade, but I wanted to have a warlock on my primary account, so one more upgrade was needed.

Party setup

The setup I decided on is one priest, one mage and three warlocks. There are several reasons for this, both in game mechanics and a more simple one. The simple reason is that I have already played six of the nine avaialbe classes ad nauseam, while not really getting into druids or warlocks before. Even though it is possible now after the expansion for the Alliance, I am not really interested in playing a shaman. Or a druid for that matter. But warlocks do interest me, so here we go.

Game mechanics reasons include that none of the group buff abilities are wasted in this setup. The priest increases the warlocks damage as well as the whole parties health, can heal and remove diseases and magic effects. The warlocks provide self-resses, health stones as replacement for healing potions and can on top of that provide another health buff via their imp. The mage can increase the whole parties mana, remove curses, conjure water and bread as replacement for bought, collected or crafted consumeables and can portal the party to a number of handy locations.

As far balance goes, my party is overpowered in damage dealing capabilities, has sufficient healing, but lacks a real tank. More on that later.

Time to hit the pillow. Captn out.