Peter's Blog

No new developments but I thought I'd expand on my Multi-boxing setup.

It's not actually multi-boxing but two instances of WoW running on a single computer. It has an nvidia graphics card and is running with two monitors so I have the warrior leading on the main screen and the priest following on the second.

I didn't do anything special at all to set up the second account, just applied for it online through my main account, sent an invitation email to one of my many email addresses, clicked the link in the email and set up a new account with all the same details as my main account (it is important that the accounts are similar: it stops you signing your own guild charter but allows you to transfer characters between accounts and it reassures blizz that you aren't a gold farmer).

I fired up a standard wow instance on linux, logged in with the new account username/password and created the warrior. I fired up a second instance and logged in on that to my main account. From my dabbling in WTF files I am aware that the settings for different accounts are stored in different subdirectories of the WTF directory so I didn't think there would be a clash. I had no problems with the wow instance on the new account except that it defaulted to loading all my add-ons, even old rubbish that threw up errors and died. I've altered this now and only enabled my must-haves: tbags and titan. Sometime I will get round to setting up a pair of wow directories with their own WTF directory but linking to single copies of the umpteen gigabytes of everything else.

When I log in I set the priest's focus on the warrior and I use the macros I mentioned yesterday for the priest to heal the warrior and blast the warrior's target. I also have a simple

/follow [target=focus]

macro to make the priest follow the warrior. The following is a little buggy and the priest can get stuck at the sides of doorways and stuff but I am learning to use my peripheral vision to check she is keeping up. Any movement of the priest on her own will break the follow so it's good to have one button (F1) to start it again.

When the warrior charges the priest follows at her own gentle pace and arrives a couple of yards behind her in the fight. She cannot smite or Mind Blast until she has stopped moving but that's cool, it gives the warrior time to get agro and cast a Rend (the talents the warrior have thus far mean the charge generates enough rage for an instant rend). When I'm setting up for bigger tanking fights I have learnt to park the priest some distance away so she isn't drawn into the fight so easily.

Speaking of tactics, something else I forgot to use in my gnoll camp endeavours (against four or five gnolls I might add) was the priest's Inner Fire armour buff.

I've done more research into multi-boxing and apparently Blizzard are cool with the idea of a single keyboard controlling more than one character, as long as there is someone there typing at it. This means I could set up something that would, for example, redirect F1-F12 on the warriors keyboard onto the priests action bar. That would make things a bit easier than mousing between screens throughout each fight.

I want to reassure the world that I am doing this for two reasons:

• to level my alts up faster.
• because it is an interesting variation on the game

I'm not planning on dominating arenas or farming heroic 5-mans single handed. I think it's safe for me to say that:

• the best arena teams are not multi-boxers
• the only advantage of multi-boxing in pvp would be well-coordinated focus firing and generally good communication within the team.
• even multi-boxing wouldn't make me a good enough player

Having four or five mages simultaneously fireblasting from a single keypress might not be cheating but is not sportsmanlike.