Multi-boxing!

Krista and I have been battling WoW burnout for a while now, and I’ve gotten to deal with some personal stuff that’s made me reevaluate my priorities, so we hadn’t been playing much.

We’ve transferred our main toons over to a new server with our guild (the announced changes to PvP for Mists were kind of the straw to break the camel’s back, although I think most of us are relieved to not have to go through the PvP gankfest that I remember from the beginning of Cata).

However, the bank guild that we had finally caved and set up on our old server can’t be transferred unless it’s at least level two. I rearranged all my remaining alts on the old server into the bank guild, and I’ve have been doing fishing and cooking dailies when I have the time and inclination to do so. I’ve also actually gotten a little bit of a bug and enjoyed leveling my baby warlock from 40-something to 66, and I’ve gotten a DK up to 80 for the first time as well.

More recently, we were enticed by the new pretty Recruit-A-Friend mount, so we might have gone ahead and signed up for RAF accounts with the excuse of having more toons to group up and use to get extra guild exp.

We had each gotten a RAF account when Blizz first introduced the incentive, mainly to try it out (and maybe for the zhevra mount too). Back then, we set the baby RAF toons on follow, and bounced through dungeons on level-capped toons to clear the way. We took advantage of the increased exp gains and freebie summons as long as the account link was active, and then we let the subscriptions lapse (until the Scroll of Resurrection incentive offered another mount, and we took advantage of the freebie 80 toons to powerlevel a few of our lowbie alts through dungeons while we had the RAF accounts active).

Ghostbusters!

This time around, instead of each of us running around with a useless loot mule on follow, we decided to take a shot at multi-boxing. Krista researched a few different programs before settling on ISBoxer. We followed the guide and went through the quick start wizard, and soon Krista was controlling two pallies, and I had a hunter and priest.

We quickly figured out that 1) controlling two melee toons is kind of a pain in the ass and 2) controlling two rdps with different rotations is similarly a pain in the ass. We dropped that first group composition shortly after level 10.

Pretty wolfies all in a row.

The solution, obviously, was to roll four hunters.

It was a lot easier to manage the rotation of dual-boxing hunters, and we quickly got the little humans up to their mid teens (with a lot of gigglefits at how quickly things died) before deciding to take a shot at four-manning Deadmines.

Lemme tell ya, hunters are squishy.

We did somehow manage to clear Deadmines (and got the achievement for the baby bank guild, as well as a nice chunk of guild exp for being in a guild group) with only one actual wipe, but there was also a nice little repair bill from taking turns at playing kite-the-boss.

After finding a video guide showing how to heal with Grid on one character through the other character’s screen, we tried again, this time with a mage/priest and warrior/druid combo. We figured that we’d primarily play the mage and warrior, with Krista’s priest healing and my druid playing critchicken.

I quickly learned that trying to manage any kind of rdps rotation while meleeing is beyond what I care to attempt to juggle in game, and switched to keeping the druid as a pocket healer.

We four-manned Deadmines with our new combo (marveling at the difference with actual tank and healy-type toons), hit 20 and got class quests in Shadowfang Keep, and decided to take a whack at four-manning that one too. We quickly noticed a difficulty with mana management on Krista’s priest and my druid.

After a few frustrating shots at the second boss, we took a break from SFK and dual-boxing to level up another mage to replace Krista’s priest. Managing two mages with the same rotations made it a lot easier for Krista to nuke stuff, and we made steady progress through SFK before hitting a brick wall on the last boss, Lord Godfrey, where we ended up buying a few greens off the AH and cheating with a few heirlooms.

We wrapped up last night with a nice chunk of guild exp from quests and dungeons (we’re almost halfway through level one! >.>); four-man experiences in Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, and Stockades; and four level 25 toons ready for more.

I’d post a screenshot of our current group, but both my warrior and druid look like they got dressed in the dark.

While I do miss the camaraderie of SiB while we’re working on the baby bank guild, I’m actually having a lot of fun dual-boxing and working on my warlock and DK. Dual-boxing a tank and healer has been one of the most rewardingly challenging things I’ve done in game so far, especially with a tank class that I’m completely unfamiliar with, considering my 85 warrior made it to level cap as arms and has rusted in Stormwind ever since.

I don’t know that I’d be too interested to try dual-boxing in PvP, but I’m definitely enjoying the PvE side of it.