Please bear with me as this document grows... It is and forever will be a work in progress.

I have general questions about multiboxing

How do I get started?

What are the differences between software and hardware multibox solutions?

How do I set up a hardware multiboxing solution?

How do I send keys to two copies of WoW running on a seperate machines?
What are some additional hardware tools?

How do I set up a software multiboxing solution?

How do I send keys to two copies of WoW running on a single machine?

How do I move my characters around?

What happens if my main dies?

What is a macro, and how can I use it to perform actions?

How do I set a keybinding?

What classes should I choose?

How should I level?

What can I do in the endgame?

Is dual boxing legal on World of Warcraft?

Where can I find more guides?

What servers do multiboxers play on?

Where can I find multiboxing videos?

Where can I find more multiboxing blogs?

Where can I go for help?

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Ah, the inevitable itch to try something new... For those who have been following my blog I've tried quite a few different group setups.

Suvega picked up a copy of Age of Conan over the past weekend and, while they have an excellent combat concept and really do hybrids some justice with their Bear Shaman class, the game is littered with bugs. It's fun to play a hybrid healer that actually plays multiple roles at the same time, but I don't know if that tidbit will keep me interested in the game. I'm not really that thrilled to monetarily support a game that, at least by any measure of quality, should still be in beta.

In any case, that's a tangent. Velani is back to raiding as enhancement after the unfortunate ban of many botters on my server (which includes the fellow involved in this post). Blizzard did a decent job purging out all of the cheaters in their recent sweep, and to all those hoping that they'd sweep multiboxers under the rug with the botters and wintraders, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

Anyway, with Velani raiding as enhancement this means that multiboxing as 1 resto shaman + 4 elemental shaman is going to become expensive with the constant respecs. I can still go 1 prot paladin + 4 elemental shaman, but more likely I will start priming Vyndree with some better healing gear.

Fursphere has really taken the 5-boxing Hunters and rolled with the idea, which I think is awesome. I got to play with 5 hunters over my vacation, and the concept actually feels like it could go somewhere. I know several readers have been asking me about how my hunters have been doing, and sadly they are still level 25 hanging out in Ashenvale and gathering their rest experience.

I ended up sticking with my warlocks, since I've already leveled them to their mid-50's, but sometimes it feels like it's just "too easy" with the locks. I haven't leveled them in some time, but I feel things might pick up again once I hit the outlands. Mmm... Seed of Corruption... too bad I don't get that until 70.

I just feel the itch to do something new and challenging. Perhaps I'll convince Suvega to do another try at Karazhan, or perhaps I'll start another lowbie group. Who knows. For the moment things have been pretty quiet and between my new group at work, raiding sunwell, and trying out Age of Conan my time has been pretty limited.

While this post has little to nothing to do with multiboxing, it does involve my resto shaman, Velani. Besides, you're at the mercy of my blogging so MWAHAHAHAHAHA

While my lack of posting up-to-date and interesting multiboxing topics is regrettable, be assured that I have been quite busy with my shaman (or at least ONE shaman) but haven't really had much of anything interesting to spew out at the general public.

However, my efforts over the past couple weeks are coming to a very frustrating end, so I figure since a blog is about 10% information and 90% QQ, this would probably be appropriate.

So, let's get right into it... On a very "blah" Thursday -- the 17th of April, in fact -- my boyfriend and karazhan-running partner Suvega turned to me and announced that our guild's enhancement shaman had, yet again, gamequit.
This began the inevitable question for our melee-heavy raiding guild: "Who do we know who plays a shaman?"

Well, who else?

Of course, what they should have asked was "Who do we know who plays an enhancement shaman" -- I very literally had zero enhancement gear. In fact, every single shaman, including my pre-multiboxing solo shaman, Velani, had been leveled elemental. The only enhancement experience I had was levels 1-20, and that one time I decided to respec for fun at level 45. I very quickly went back to elemental.

In any case, I swapped on what enhancement gear had been shoved my direction and not disenchanted (in fact, I had always passed on enhancement gear for d/e given the fact that I had thought I would NEVER need it), and found myself with a bunch of healing gear, greens, the Decapitator, Fiend-Slayer Boots, and Fury -- putting me at just BARELY 600 AP.

To put it very lightly, I needed gear. Badly.

But I'm not one to pass up a challenge. Sure, it was a hefty request, asking me to gear up to BT/Hyjal/Sunwell for next Tuesday's raid (5 days later), but with some determination it could be done. We set an aggressive schedule -- Heroic Magister's that night, Friday to Hyjal (my first ever Hyjal), 2x Zul'Aman and 1x Karazhan over the weekend, and Black Temple. Furthermore, level leatherworking to 375 for craftables (Velani was at 340-ish) and get my Aldor rep up to exalted (from honored).

But wait, there's more...

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So the debate has shown up a couple of times this week by various forum trolls. I figured I'd honestly discuss it for a bit since it's one of the only thing people have been bringing up in the fight to ban multiboxing without decent reason.

If you're new to multiboxing, you should probably catch up on what it is and a brief description of how it's done, as well as Blizzard GM post links... Read the FAQ: http://www.vboxing.net/faq

If you're interested in reading the locked forum troll threads (which I don't suggest), links are on the dual-boxing thread.

So let's start with the argument set-up. Multiboxing gives you no advantages over grouping, however general forum trolls have picked up on the fact that it gives you distinct disadvantages: "if you are playing your own 5-man instance group, you're missing out on the social aspect of the game."

Now, keep in mind. If you have 5 multiboxed characters in an instance, you still have guild chat and whispers, so you're not totally cut off from the "social" game. But ignoring that for a moment, yes. While multiboxing you don't have to speak to other people -- but neither do solo players who are questing/farming either.

What the general forum trolls fail to realize, is that nothing prevents a multiboxer from playing their characters "normally" with their friends and guildmates whenever they choose to. Sure, it does take a bit of set-up to make sure that your UI and your macros are all solo-friendly, but for the socially-minded multiboxer that's not even that big of a problem.

But this is also a sideways benefit -- if you're multiboxing, you can choose not to have to associate yourself with the cretins of society. Think of it this way -- would you WANT to group with a person like the aforementioned forum trolls, who will stop at nothing to slander your name for no reason? Is harassment a very "social" behavior?

Think of it this way -- if I were out on the street, walking my dogs, and a total stranger came up to me while I was minding my own business and obeying all the leash laws -- this is how the forum troll's conversation would have gone:

"Oh. DOG owner. I know you jerks. You guys think you're better than everyone else because you have these dogs that follow you around. You're so antisocial -- dog owners only spend time with dogs and never get outside and talk to REAL people and be part of a REAL society. You make me sick. You all should be arrested, and your filthy dogs too. I used to have a dog, then I realized how antisocial he made me -- and I got rid of it."

Well, what's stopping me from leaving my puppies at home and going out with my friends? Absolutely nothing. And would you honestly want to socialize with someone like the stranger in the example? Thanks, but no thanks.

So -- who's the real antisocial person? The multiboxer who does their own thing according to the rules of the world but, at the same time, isn't prevented from playing "normally" if and when they choose? Or the forum troll who harasses people because they are not "social" and yet contains no social skills of their own?

I know the hunter video came entirely out of nowhere. One moment I'm farming arena points on my shammies/priest, the next I've got 5 warlocks and a prot pally "boosting" video, and now hunters?

I admit it. I'm completely addicted to alt-aholism.

Suvega knows me well -- I was a Guild Wars junkie for one reason alone: theorycraft. Guild Wars had no respec fees, you could make your own instant-max-level PvP-only character and rush into random arenas and try out new builds and specs. Since I can't really do that in WoW, it means that when I get an idea that pops into my head ("maybe 5x multishot... maybe 5x dots...) it's very hard for me to shake.

If anyone took a look at my character loading screen, they'd realize that ALL of the character slots are completely full. I've got 5 level 20-ish druids, 5 level 24 hunters, 5 level 45 warlocks, and a bunch of lowbies. Scatter in old Peapod, the gnome warrior that tanked for the shammies up until level 40, a lowbie rogue, and a lowbie warlock that I created prior to multiboxing...

Theorycraft is my little obsession. I love building specs. I love building macros. I love playing around with 5-man group synergy. This is why I'm constantly rerolling. Part of it is good -- know your enemy, know yourself. If I know what I would do if I was a hunter, or a druid, or a mage, or a warlock... I would know what I would use to counter those actions.

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Well, patch 2.4 doesn't really suck as I haven't really gotten a chance to check it out yet.

I came home from work yesterday to find one of my computers, Rex, offline and not responding to the power button. Now, Rex is my troublesome computer that I had purchased about a year ago. He's a core2duo, liquid cooled, with dual SLI video cards.

First things first, when he's on, he sounds like a jet engine. Now, you'd figure liquid cooling will be pretty silent, but NO. There's a giant fan that likes to rattle and will not screw in any tighter.

Secondly, we found another fan-related issue: one of the graphics cards' fans was misaligned and started making this high pitched squealing noise. We finally just popped it out until we felt like replacing the fan. It's not like, when we first got Rex, he was shipped with a dud video card that had to be replaced.

Third, his power supply started failing about 2 months ago. Rex started sputtering mid-game when I went into major cities and aoe'd things. He'd also randomly Blue-Screen-Of-Death on me. I never figured out what the BSOD was for, but I figured the random reboots were due to the power supply and replaced it with a brand new 500 watt power supply.

Finally, on Tuesday... PATCH DAY... he kicked the bucket. The motherboard had power but he refused to power on when the power button was pressed. Suvega swapped the power and reset buttons and still no luck, so it's not the physical button itself.

Ironically this is also the day that Suvega's new computer was shipped to our house, so Suvega gave me his old computer and I was able to kick Rex to the curb until I find a replacement.

So that was my patch day. I managed to update my addons and play for a half hour on my baby hunters, but that's pretty much it. Broken computers are depressing.

Well, it's that day again. Tuesday.

And I always end up working from home on maintenance day.

However, now's the perfect time to make sure all of my addons are updated. I've been plagued with the nag popups about "WIM has a new version" or "Deadly Boss Mods is out of date" so we'll finally get rid of those guys... at least for a little while.

*sigh*

Link: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5287373837

WTF! Its happeing all too often that I'm seeing 5 arcane mages rolling around in a chain gang spamming arcane explosion everywhere they go. Five elemental shamans casting the exact same spell at the exact same time on the exact same person! This cannot be legal in regards to botting, 1 person controlling 5 toons. Come on blizz....gotta find a fix for this!

Edit: I've been told that this is legal. But I don't see how. This is an unfair advantage of one person 5 manning anything. That is an unfair advantage, as blizzard has done in the past...anything that gives a player and unfair advantage is seen as an exploit. This is an exploit. I dont care what you say about the macro/app they use and its all legal...its a bending of the rules that should be frowned upon and stopped.

Blizzard I charge you with growing some nads and stopping this..yes you may have to ban some accounts in order for this to happen and you may lose a few hundred dollars out of your 100's of millions. But in order to keep the majority of your customer base happy, I highly recommend this be worked on now.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5287373837

Oops.

My bad. Should I not have chain-queued AV yesterday along with Suvega and a bunch of guildies/friends from Archimonde?

.... nah.

It was too much fun getting revenge for all those painful 0 honor AV matches that Stormstrike has been going through. And yes, we gave them a taste of their own IBGY-turtling, 0 bonus honor medicine, Stormstrike-style medicine.

On a side note, Suvega also got called out in our own realm forums too for our AV shenanigans.

Finally, I'm done with powerleveling my lowbies through SM...

And look! I found a 5th! After Mudd posted on my last warlock update, I remembered that, way back in the day, I had a level 40-ish warlock alt that I had forgotten about. What can I say, I'm an altaholic. Ironically enough, she looks almost exactly like the 4 new warlocks I had - a little different hair, but you can't even tell under the Chapeau.

Speaking of Chapeau, I also managed to deck each one out with an Illusionary Rod, Hypnotic Blade, Robe of Doan, and Triune Amulet. And yes, I had plenty more left to d/e.

Where, oh where can she be??

... Why... leveling 4 warlocks.

Ding 30.

Two of my shammies got to experience Gruul this weekend. It started out with all 5, then as more people started showing up, I ended up benching 3 of them. Thank God, because the strat for shatters was "GTFO away from the shaman!" -- I ended up coming away with my tier 4 pants, which is a very nice upgrade considering my gear level.

I also farmed quite a bit of AV thanks to the kill honor. We're getting better - with help we can almost always grab IBGY which is a big improvement for the alliance on Stormstrike. Once we take the GY we can usually start hitting towers as long as people don't bail on me before the GY fully caps. Is it just me or are horde not defending IBGY as much? Anyway, I got to say hi to my good buddy Drek and even win once or twice. Anyway, I was able to get my PvP trinket yesterday which has greatly improved my survivability.

Finally, Suvega convinced me to go with him to collect Lunar Festival coins. This involved zerging into Orgrimmar/Thunder bluff/Undercity. Orgrimmar, despite being the most populated, was a joke. We ran in the back door and ignored all the guards -- the guards quit chasing us when we got to the Lunar Festival elder and we were able to talk to her without alerting the horde on LocalDefense. Then we actually ran out the front door -- literally ran out right on top of all the horde between the bank and the AH -- and were only chased by a few people.

...I have to imagine what they must have thought when 10 alliance started running through the center of their city.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4463926517&sid=1
EDIT: They found me again! http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4464266808&sid=1

For those who don't know, I've got a nice little FAQ write-up for non-multiboxers here.

AV was fun, but Stormstrike alliance always loses. Strangely enough, we won 1 AV last night, and I've gotten to see Drek for the first time in MONTHS. Also, earth ele's make great Galv tanks when healed appropriately.

GameDame, LesserHealingWave, TwoAndAHalfOrcs and Asirae suggested a shaman "shared topic" over on BlogAzeroth -- this is normally not my "style" (do I have a style?) but I thought it would be fun. Besides, I've got 5 times the opinion, amirite?

What I like about playing a 5 shaman

1. Support
Perhaps it's the girl in me, but I need to feel needed. Shaman are the best single group buffers in the game. Fort? Bah! Kings? Double Bah! Shaman buffs are not only powerful, but we can lay four of them, change them as situations transition, and some of them even stack! Furthermore, Shaman provide additional buffs via Heroism and Unleashed Rage.

2. Dynamic
Because of the variety of spells in a shaman arsenal, a shaman's fight is often dynamic. We can change our totem strategies whenever the need arises. Sure, we have to spec into a tree to be good at it, so we're no TRUE hybrid, but if anyone had multiple roles to fill in a single fight, it would be a shaman. We're often called upon to provide interrupts, heals, and important buffs (grounding totem, anyone?) in a single fight, which means that, while Lightning Bolt spam may not be thrilling, a Shaman has many other things to keep in mind during fights.

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Our second day in Kara...

Maiden down
1x holy priest / 1x resto shaman / 3x elemental shaman = me
1x holy priest / 1x prot warrior / 3x fire mage = Suvega

Opera: Wizard of Oz down
1x prot paladin / 1x resto shaman / 3x elemental shaman = me
1x holy priest / 1x prot warrior / 3x fire mage = Suvega

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Attumen and Moroes "2-manned"

1x resto shaman / 3x elemental shaman / 1x prot paladin = me
1x holy priest / 3x fire mage / 1x prot warrior = Suvega

Attumen dropped the horse mount, too!

Lewts: [Gloves of Saintly Blessings], [Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable], [Drape of the Righteous], [Fiery Warhorse's Reins], [Schematic: Stabilized Eternium Scope], [Kamaei's Cerulean Skirt], [Brooch of Unquenchable Fury]

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