Mystic Worlds

WOW 5-Box Experiment: Ramparts Completed!

Level 55 AOE Style is too Squishy
I had a suspicion before entering Ramparts that my AOE Disc/Holy spec wasn’t going to work.  My adventures in Stratholm, where I’d gone to test out the 5-man configuration and bring the lowest two priests to level 55, highlighted the holes.  Chief among them is that the team I was trying to mimic hadn’t gone into Outland until they were level 60.  I had two level 70 characters in my group but the other three are only level 55.  AOE styling the Priests and Mage meant they had to be close to the mobs and would routinely pull aggro.  The damage output was acceptable but they folded too quickly when attacked.  At level 55, I was missing an important element to that style, damage mitigation using Pain Suppression.

Even though we made it through Stratholm, it was more painful than I expected.  Determined to get away from content and quests I’d done more times than I wanted, I went forward with my strategy to head into Hellfire Citadel anyway.  Realizing that the AOE wasn’t going to work, I switched the Priests back to Shadow again.

Going Shadow would provide passive tank healing.  More importantly, it would keep the casters further away from the fray.  I reconfigured the casters for ranged DPS.  The Priests were given self-healing macros, which also necessitate getting right back into Shadow.  And while I was at it, I decided to setup one Priest as the only one who’d drop form to heal the tank, while the others continue doing DPS.  Two play sessions later, we were ready to rumble.

Back in WOW: The Entrenched Gorilla

While it needles me to find myself back in WOW, that’s what I’m playing.  I enjoyed my stint in W101 and even spent some quality time doing the PVP Arena.  Balance + Death + trickles of Storm are a fun combination to play in a team.  My only suggestion for KI in regards to PVP is please set a timer for when the match should end as a draw.  I was in a 2 v 2, where the system had matched two Life players against two Balance players that went on for 2+ hours!  OMG that’s way too long for a match.  Everyone was complaining but didn’t want to be the team to throw the match.  We would have been more than happy with a draw after 60 minutes!!!!  Trying to avoid the long drawn-out matches I started doing 1 v 1 and those can easily reach 45 to 60 minutes too. Yikes.

This time last year, I was doing a tri-box experiment in WOW.  My objective was to 5-box TBC content that I hadn’t seen - almost all of the instances.  When multi-boxing, a good percentage of 5-box teams are all of the same class or at least 4 of the same class.  My plan was to have a Paladin tank and 4 shadow priests.  Not an obvious choice, I did some research that showed Shadow Priest were workable because of their mana and health regeneration talents.  Fights that required burst damage could however, prove tricky.  The only caster classes I was interesting in playing were Priests or Warlocks.  Although I have a Druid, Boomkin isn’t a spec that’s ever appealed to me.

Ultimately, I decided on priests to avoid soul shard and pet management times 4.  Mage was also an early consideration.  I put a Mage in my trio but I quickly learned that I can’t stand Mage play-style.  And I do mean, I HATED IT!!  You couldn’t pay me to play a Mage as a main, that’s how much I dislike the class.  The plan was to ditch her ass in Outland for the Warlock.  I kept the Mage in the trio even once I realized how much I disliked it, as an option for certain encounters.  That decision necessitated she be moved off being a main account, to being included as a bundle so she could be swapped out as necessary or shelved altogether.  I transferred her to the account with the 70 Druid and Warlock.  Those three on an account would give me nice flexibility in slot 5.

Writing, Woes and Cataclysm

Writing Workshops

I struggled through the screen writing workshop but never completed my first draft.  It’s not the goal of the first workshop but something you’d really like to do within a few months afterward.  Since this was all just an experiment to find the form and length most suited to my style, I wasn't too deterred.  I pushed on and signed up for Introduction to Short Fiction, even though I felt my plots are too complicated for 5000 words or less.  It’s an experiment right? So there’s nothing to lose in a learning experience.

Early on in the Short Fiction course I discovered something amazing and kooky about my stories, something I think contributes to my inability to finish a projected. For whatever reason, the stories I concoct, while interesting and enjoyable for others to read – at least according to some of the workshop critiques, the stories do not interest me.  Say what???  I came to this insane realization, that I was writing stories I wouldn’t read myself, much less buy.  They were my ideas, characters and plots but they weren’t in the types of universes I enjoy escaping to when I read fiction. 

RP in MMORPG: Lovin’ Azeroth Advisor

My recent find of Living Sims (LS), an actual interior design magazine for The Sims, got me thinking about what makes the role-playing in a game come alive for me.  Clearly, this group of artists and TS fans takes that game very seriously.  I personally haven’t felt like that about a game in several years. Perhaps I won’t ever feel like that about a game again.  That’s a sad thought.

Back in my days of playing Asheron’s Call 2, I felt that way – inspired by the character I played to do something that reached beyond the confines of AC2’s virtual space.  I wrote many role-playing short stories, wrote a monthly column on Warcry and built picture journals that I shared online with other gaming enthusiasts.  Even though I haven’t been inspired at an RP level since AC2, my excitement about gaming and whatever fun I’m having, turns into lots of blog posts and photo albums.

Encouraged by the helpfulness of LS – yes, I took away some design tips for when I start playing The Sims 3, I decided to check out Azeroth Advisor for World of Warcraft.  If you’re not familiar with Azeroth Advisor, it’s an add-on developed by Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios that sends you a regularly scheduled and personalized newsletter for your WOW character.

Inside your personalized Azeroth Advisor newsletter:

• Zones & instances for your experience level
• Harvesting zones for your profession level
• New spells, abilities and talents
• Tips for using class defining abilities
• Unique gear upgrades you should consider
• Bits of lore and fluff about your class
• Notable lore characters of the same class
• Grouping etiquette and tips
• Comparison of your base stats vs. other players

Color me Purple

The next workshop in the screenwriting series I’m attending this summer starts this week.  I’m eager to be underway again.  I’m also looking forward to receiving feedback on the edits I’ve made since the last course.  Still multi-boxing my trio in World of Warcraft, I really wanted to reach level 40 before the long evenings of writing begin again and I did.

Two things come with hitting level 40 that I was excited about reaching.  First is access to a faster ground mount, which is very beneficial since I’m zigzagging zones a lot more.  Three linked characters means that I finish the quests I’m interested in doing in an area very quickly.  I can even do more of the collection quests, something you typically skip when multi-boxing, since getting 10 pig ears across three characters can be tedious.  However, with higher level Holy Nova x2 and Arcane Explosion, I’m finding that doing them for quests intended for my level is easier.  Plus there are some zones that I just like – the view, ambiance and the mobs.  After I’ve completed the quests on my list, I sometimes linger and AOE grind.  The coastline of Stranglethorn Vale would be one of the places that I find rather soothing in WOW.

I just started messing with using the trio to AOE.  Having never played a mid level Mage before, I started by doing what I recall seeing other Mages do – freeze mobs in place then Blizzard them dead with the Priests bubbling and healing.  Recently, it dawned on me that just running the trio in together and letting them do Holy Nova and Arcane Explosion was MUCH FASTER.  When Holy Nova was a talent in the Holy tree it was very inefficient as a damage spell because the mana consumption was so high.  One or two uses and you were dry.  Many Priests purchased the spell but down ranked it to level 1, and only used it as a means of breaking rogue stealth in PVP.  Now that it’s a purchased spell, it does nice damage and consumes less mana. 

Trio Stylin' and Mounted

My multi-box trio is about to hit level 40.  It’s happened very quickly in my opinion.  So much so, that I stopped trying to complete each zone.  I started skipping around to the quests I remembered liking most and have only farmed mobs here and there for crafting materials.  My Warlock does tailoring for the trio to fill in their gaps in gear.  When I needed silk to make them all new boots and sashes, it was easier to have the trio farm the cloth so they’d get XP for the effort as well as the materials.  I like seeing big fat ogres go boom, as they drop with an earth rumbling thud at my feet.

Scarlet Monastery (SM) is one of my favorite instances.  For me, it was the first of the lowbie instances you run multiple times for the rewards – gear for yourself, cloth for crafting or to sell, sellable Bind-on-Equip items for the Auction House and vendor trash (gold).  It’s the first introduction to what end gaming raid feels like in World of Warcraft.  It’s the first time I recall needing to know the intricacies of each instance wing.  It’s the first piece of instanced content that has an attunement of sorts – you need to loot the Scarlet key from the box in Doan’s Chamber, to gain entry into the Cathedral and Armory wings.   And it was the first time as a Warlock, I was told to cast certain de-buffs (Recklessness) on the mobs to prevent them from running away and returning with additional combatants.   The instances before SM were pretty much spank-n-tank.  SM is the one I recall waking me up to how instanced content, as well as the coordination and planning required, manifested itself in WOW.

Bit More Blogging. Shock-n-Horror in WOW

The first Screenwriting Workshop has ended.  I now have a two week hiatus until the next workshop in the series begins.  I didn’t walk away with a completed script.  A flaw was revealed rather late in the game which necessitated a large plot change – meaning stop the presses, fix the plot and re-write.  Regardless, I’m still pleased with where I ended.

Summer is a little less hectic at work.  Not because the amount of work slows down but the amount of meetings drop off significantly as a result of people taking vacation.  This means you actually get to work during the workday.  *GASP*  As apposed to being in meetings all day and working during the late afternoon into early evening.  Have I mentioned recently how much I hate being in Corporate America?  Probably have, uh?

Feeling slightly less stressed at work means, I feel better at the end of the workday, which turns my heart and attention to gaming.  I’m still tickled by my little multi-boxing adventure.  I recently transferred my own level 70s to a fourth account so that I could start the process of learning to 4-box in a tank.  I had a level 43 Paladin sitting on Whisperwind to use for practice.  When I grabbed my level 70 characters, I was shocked and dismayed to find that when I’d grouped up all our max level characters and allowed my nephew to play the “monster account”, he’d changed professions but never leveled up what he’d selected.

Multi-Boxing WOW’s 5-Man Content

My tri-box leveling experiment in World of Warcraft has been moving along smoothly.  I have most of the kinks worked out for coordinating combat.  It’s less tool controlled and not as sophisticated as the setups I’ve read about on Dual-boxing.com.  Yet it works for me.  Now that I understand the underlying mechanics of multi-boxing, I might revisit my setup.

The quick nature of WOW combat hadn’t entered my mind when I decided to give multi-boxing a try.  It was comments from my previous posts on the subject made me nod my head in agreement – yes, WOW combat can be very fast, which makes multi-boxing more challenging.  Not paying attention when I was running the trio to Scarlet Monastery ended in a wipe.  I walked them right into a cluster of level 15 elite mobs that are on a parallel road to SM.  By the time I looked over and realized what I had done, I didn’t switch control off the dead main character in time to run away and save the other two.  Or the strange way Mind Flay sometimes gets cast on something other than the intended target, even though all the other attacks from the character just before Mind Flay in the macro landed on the right target.  This oddity with that one spell sometimes pulls adds that pound us into the dirt.  Yep, things can get out of control very quickly in WOW combat.

More Nits-n-Grits of Multi-Boxing WOW

As an addition to my earlier post on multi-boxing World of Warcraft, here are a few more details for a base setup.  Just some more technical items for people who’d like to give this a try.  I don’t have time to dress up the wording so excuse the direct approach of a bullet list.

Getting Started

• Choose your chars and their classes.  Decide which of them will be your main/leader.  That character is going to pull aggro so they need to be able to take a punch but that doesn’t mean for leveling purposes that it needs to be a real tank class.  Any class will do just understand they will get hit often and plan accordingly.
• Choose near identical names if you’re on a PVP server or will participate in Battlegrounds.  Sure, it may confuse you at times too in the beginning but it will make it much harder for opponents to identify who they want to focus fire down.  For that reason, I’m also keeping mine dressed the same since they can all wear cloth.  I haven’t done BGs yet but I plan to in the upper 30s.

I suggest using Keyclone to pass keys to all of your characters at a minimum.  However, there are many other great features you can use if you’re going to do this for several levels such as:

1. Defining do-not-pass keys – for me, these are activities reserved for the leader from whom all of my gaming encounters take place through.  Selecting combat targets, chatting with other players, opening mods, etc. are all mapped to keys that will not get passed to the passive/slave/following characters.
2. Establishing Override Settings – this is a keybind that pauses Keyclone.  I need this for chatting so that I’m not sending the stream of strokes to the others and macro work is done paused for the same reason.
3. Configuring the Maximizer – allows you to create a screen layout for your copies and say which character is loaded into which pane.  As far as I’m aware, you can’t do this unless you’ve created multiple copies of WOW as each one is mapped to a WOW.exe file. 
4. Using the Command Editor - You can go the additional route of mapping each to a character by providing the login name and you can use Keyclone to launch WOW, put characters in the correct pane and have the log-in name only, already sitting there.

Multi-Boxing World of Warcraft

What do you do when you’re re-subscribed to WOW to help a cousin, who also subscribed but hands you her account and bails?  Hmm, I have it, you multi-box.

I tiptoed my way through minor league multi-boxing last year.  It was during a time in WOW when I was getting very bored.  Having done it a tiny bit back then, I knew where to head for updated information on this eccentric approach to MMO gaming, Dual-boxing.com.

Reading through the forums, my eyes crossed at the setups people were talking about, even on the low-end and simple.  I didn’t want to download a bunch of stuff or mess with a lot of techno-geek strategies.  I decided that I’d macro my setup as much as possible so that I understood the core mechanics and use Keyclone for keystroke management like I had before.

I decided to do fresh characters for the experiment and roll on a PVE server.  No way in heck I wanted to attempt this bit of insanity while dealing with PVP.  Off to Whisperwind I went, where I had a mid level alchemist and tailor to help outfit my trio.  Hell no to grinding professions for the umpteenth time in WOW.  For some insane reason, dual boxing wasn't good enough.  I wanted to tri-box.  And if by some miracle I stuck with the characters, I could add two more from our stable of accounts and join the hardcore multi-boxers by 5-boxing my way through Blizzard's 5-man content.  I thought it would be a very cool way to see all the dungeons I'd previously missed AND the new ones from WotLK.