So you have decided that multiboxing is the path you want to conquer, and have decided to create five characters? But what kind of multiboxer are you? I am not referring to being a casual gamer or a hardcore player here. It is not your gaming style that matters, it is your goals and intentions which we are looking into.

When I started my team a few months ago, this was the first question that was bothering me. Reading through the multiboxing forums, it was apparent that numerous intentions for becoming a multiboxer exist. Before starting to play my characters, it felt important to decide what I wanted to achieve in the endgame.

I basically had these options to chose from:

• Player vs. Player: there are quite a few battlegrounds to conquer and with Lake Wintergrasp, PvP in the world finally has become a real thing, too.
• Arenas: Arena games limit PvP to a fixed setting, and might offer another choice. Titles, great rewards, and a challenge to overcome.
• Achievements: a new addition with Wrath of the Lich King and one that leads to nice rewards, too. It seems like a giant world explorer book. Completing achievements definitely is a sign of exploring the world.
• Quests: Have you ever browsed one of the various WoW databases looking for quests? There are thousands of them and achievements like those for completing 1k, 2k, or 3k quests look achievable.
• Dungeons: Lore in World of Warcraft expands through quests, but just like it was from the very beginning of the game, most quests that continue game lore will lead you to dungeons. Most final quests will end in a dungeon. Prior to The Burning Crusade dungeons like Blackrock Depths, Lower Blackrock Spire, Upper Blackrock Spire, Stratholme, Scholomance, and Dire Maul presented a great amount of story lines, and this trend continued in the game addons.
• Professions: Making money is a viable option, too. Professions have received a great amount of love from Blizzard and with Wrath of the Lich King there are quite a few dailies to complete for gold, and every profession now has recipes that can be crafted to sell them on the auction houses for profits.

Looking at that list, I crossed PvP and arenas off the list. To be honest, I liked the old PvP system as it existed prior to the Burning Crusade, because engaging in a battleground had a result. Both titles and rewards did come with a meaning. It was fun. Now battlegrounds mostly feel like a grind for gear, and nobody really cares if battleground goals are achieved. I really miss the epic Alterac battles with people working to achieve quests for bonuses. Arena gaming does not really make a difference. It limits the amount of players and classes, and thus reduces everything to maths and gear.

This left me with achievements, quests, and dungeons. If you check WoWHead there are close to 1k of achievements for almost anything you can do in World of Warcraft.

• General achievements: this includes mostly easy to achieve stuff like picking up various vanity pets, mounts, reaching specific levels, learning various skill levels, or owning items that only have been available for a limited time frame.
• Quests: easy one. Reach a specific amount of quests per zone or continent for an achievement, and you’re done. Additional gimmicks include money owned through quests, and the number of quest. Personally I think the Loremaster achievements are tough but very tempting.
• Exploration: discovering zones and all their sub-zones… does not sound like hard work? Well, try to log in to one of your first characters. If happen to have one from the release of WoW in 2005, you will notice how many sub-zones you missed.
• PvP: this is one, where I am not sure if it’s for good or for bad. Some achievements are easy, just run arena or battleground matches over and over to get them done. Others… smell like a lot of luck and work.
• Dungeons & Raids: just run every available dungeon and raid in game. Some may need a normal and heroic run, and some even might need specific strategies. Not really hard but rather time consuming. At least you might get a chance to enter old world dungeons and raids like Blackwing Lair for the achievements. Those are still fun.
• Professions: awesome! Wanted to see how many fish you caught? How often you consumed cooked food? Bandages, crafted gear, it’s all here. Most of these achievements will happen to appear as you continue to play your character. There is no chance to avoid those but to not learn any profession.
• Reputation: cough prior to the first game expansion reputation was pure grind. With the Burning Crusade, this was eased, and with Wrath of the Lich King, there hardly is any grinding left. Except for a few old world reputations like the Timbermaw Furbolgs. If you want something hard, try getting as many reputations as possible up to exalted. This alone might take a few months.
• World events: this one is a bit misleading. Probably “Seasonal events” would have been a more suitable title. You will only find achievements for recurring events in here.
• Feats of Strength: yes, this is where world events appear. The Scourge Invasion, Ahn’Qiraj, etc. Plus various achievements for things that require a lot of work, or even money. Think of Collector’s Edition pets, Trading Card Game, and others.

Once I had digged through the list, I decided to just focus on achievements. Getting as many as possible would naturally lead me to doing all quests, and stepping into all of those dungeons and raids.

So, what is your game? What part of WoW does entertain you the most? For me, I can clearly state that I love to explore the whole world with all that’s inside.

General macros

The following macros can be used for all classes, and only serve a purpose out of combat. It is not required to have these on any keybindings. You might want to put them on an actionbar for less used stuff, e.g. bar 5.

Consume conjured food and water

/use [nocombat] (name of conjured food)
/use [nocombat] (name of conjured water)

Focus

This macro will use the group leader’s target and assign focus to it.

/assist party1
/focus

In order to clear the focus, the following macro is required, too.

/clearfocus [targetfocus, dead]

Mounting

The following macro will mount a character using either a land mount or a flight mount, depending on the zone a character is in. If the zone allows flying mounts, the macro will always use the flying mount, otherwise the land mount.

If you are currently mounted, you will be dismounted.

#showtooltip 
/cast [outdoors,nomounted,flyable] (name of flying mount)
/cast [outdoors,nomounted] (name of land mount)
/dismount [mounted]

Spell casting

The following macro can be used to assist the group leader, and assist him in order to attack his target.

#showtooltip
/target [targetparty1,nodead]
/assist
/cast [exists,harm,nodead] (spell name)

Class specific macros

The following macros will only work for specific classes, and some might need a counterpart on another character.

Mage macros

Conjure / Consume food and water

/use [nocombat] (name of conjured food)
/use [nocombat] (name of conjured water)
/use [combat] (name of conjured mana gem)
/cast [mod:ctrl] Conjure Food
/cast [mod:alt] Conjure Water
/cast [mod:shift] (name of Conjure Mana Gem)

Polymorph focus

This macro will sheep the current focus.

#showtooltip Polymorph
/cast [targetfocus] Polymorph

Portal creation

This macro allows an Alliance mage to cast any portal to the Alliance towns with just one key. It uses modifiers in order to select the actual portal to be used.

#showtooltip
/cast Portal: Exodar
/cast [mod:lshift] Portal: Ironforge
/cast [mod:lalt] Portal: Stormwind
/cast [mod:lctrl] Portal: Darnassus
/cast [mod:ralt] Portal: Shattrath

Teleport

This macro allows an Alliance mage to teleport to the Alliance towns with just one key. It uses modifiers in order to select the actual teleport to be used.

#showtooltip
/cast Teleport: Exodar
/cast [mod:lshift] Teleport: Ironforge
/cast [mod:lalt] Teleport: Stormwind
/cast [mod:lctrl] Teleport: Darnassus
/cast [mod:ralt] Teleport: Shattrath

Paladin macros

Divine Intervention

This macro will cycle through a list of characters which are alive and friendly, and will cast Divine Intervention on the first target that fulfills these two conditions, in order to save a class with a resurrection spell.

#showtooltip Divine Intervention
/cast [targetBrista,help,nodead][targetPriswa,help,nodead] Divine Intervention

Righteous Defense

One little secret that while in a regular group (not raid) the [raid] returns true for your group members but NOT for you. This way you will never try to cast Blessing of Protection on yourself. If the mob targets you, the macro will do nothing.

The castsequence effectively gives you a “backup” taunt. If your first one gets resisted or you need to re-taunt before the cooldown is up it will use Blessing of Protection.

#showtooltip Righteous Defense
/castsequence [targettargettarget,help,raid] reset15 Righteous Defense,Blessing of Protection

Priest macros

Multi-purpose healing / debuffing

/cast [modifier:lctrl, targetparty1, exists,party,nodead] Renew; [modifier:lshift, targetparty1, exists,party,nodead] Flash Heal; [modifier:rctrl, targetparty1, exists,party,nodead] Resurrection; [targetparty1, exists,party,nodead] Heal

Shackle focus

This macro will shackle the current focus.

/cast [targetfocus] Shackle Undead

Shaman macros

Totems

Repeatedly executing this macro will stomp the listed totems one by one. If you wait longer than 7 seconds, the macro will reset and start from zero with the first totem listed.

/castsequence [nomod] reset7 Healing Stream Totem,Strength of Earth Totem,Windfury Totem,Searing Totem

It has been an interesting day with the team progressing slowly from the starting area into Bloodhoof Village. Roughly six hours it took from level 1 to level 10 with the team. Usually you can get from 1 to 10 in ~ 2 hours.

Why does this take so much time? Well, do you remember your first days in the starting areas? Remember, the starting areas mostly consist of kill quests where you need to kill x types of mobs, or pick-up x parts of mobs that usually not drop on every kill. Killing quests not really is an issue. Five shamans throwing a lightning bolt or an earth shock will usually put an end to every mobs’ existence with just one shot. I even tried mobs four or five levels higher than my little family, and it worked out well.

Pick-up quests though… hurt a lot. Grab a big backpack and additional bags, and bring drinks, food, and time. It seems that the drop rates for quest items in groups are only 2/3 of 1/2 of the usual rates. Where it takes one kill when playing solo, it takes four or more in a group for everyone to get the quest item. After a few trials where I was slowly getting sick by the window and character switching for each quest item, I decided to switch loot over to free-for-all mode.

This improved things a lot. At first, the random window switching for looting disappeared, I now could loot for each character step by step, toon by toon. That improved things a lot, less time wasted. After a while I noticed, this also helped with experience gain. Due to the higher amount of mob kills, I was back into the standard experience frame for the quests I did, and did not lag behind by a level or two. So now my quests are not red but all yellow which I think gives just the right amount of experience to level.

I logged off around half past nine in the evening, when the wife demanded my attention, with my experience being half on the road to level 11, and parked Ivida, Ivide, Ividi, Ivido, and Ividu in the Bloodhoof Village inn. Since I’ll take a little break to focus on a few other tasks now, they should get two or three days rested bonus.

Only slightly related… it did not last very long, until my team was discovered. Once I reach level 6 and entered the plains of Mulgore people noticed the five Tauren running around and one shooting things. It did not take long until the General chat was hit by messages like

[1. General:] WTF … how many Ivid… are there?

[1. General:] F*ckin’ multicheaters!

Of course, followed by the usual reactions towards multi-boxing, half being amazed, the other half decided to page a game master.

Have you ever noticed how many different eye colours and face variants there are for Tauren characters? Then add fur colour, horn style and colour and you will end up with lots of different styles where tiny details might make the one little thing to delete your character and start from scratch.

Thus my confession comes with easy heart: yes, I have tried out four different team styles until I finally decided on how the Stompers should look like. Once of the main aspects to consider was the role-play aspect. Playing on a RP realm should very likely lead you to create characters conforming to the RP policies, and thus I sat at home and realized:

Hey, I will be a multi-boxing role-player!

Does this sound weird to you? It did not to me. But let’s see a picture instead of all the reading.

Aren’t they a bunch of shiny Tauren?

One of the primary decisions you will have to make is whether you do want to multi-box using multiple computers or if you do want to jump into this adventure using a single computer. This decision is not an easy one, so I will try to provide a few pointers for the multi-boxing rookies.

At first sight you will probably notice that you need multiple accounts for this whole thing to work. Buying new accounts is easy these days, the World of Warcraft battlechest is available with the original game and the expansion The Burning Crusade. The Good Thing#8482; is: it comes with DVD media, so you can save a lot of time on your first installation.

I am still not sure if you can buy accounts online as I could not find this option on the World of Warcraft Europe site. If you have any links for that, feel free to comment on this post.

World of Warcraft does have pretty low hardware requirements, which are meant to allow as many gamers into the world as possible. With the current requirements and the expected upgrade in the 2nd expansion Wrath of the Lich King a newly bought computer from 2006 should run the game well, even if you push the video settings to the maximum. Where the maximum would give you a view distance of approximately 50 yards and all possible details like ground clutter (aka. green stuff), buildings and non-player characters and flying objects visible very early. Plus shiny weather and nicely shaded polygons and character shadows.

Basically you can nail hardware requirements down to the following if you want to play without stuttering screens:

• 1.5Ghz CPU. This is sufficient. You can run full details with a single-core CPU like that.
• 1GB RAM: I played having only 512MB on Windows XP. With Vista available and sold on most new PCs, 1GB is the recommended minimum.
• Any 3D graphics card which comes with 256MB RAM. It does not really matter if it supports DirectX 10. DirectX 9 is fine, and the World of Warcraft graphics engine will not support DirectX 10 before a 3rd expansion gets released (which means not before 2009).
• A big hard disk. Preferably 160GB to 200GB. If possible a system with multiple hard disks. One for the operating system, one for each World of Warcraft instance.

This should work pretty well, if you plan to run multiple computers for your adventures. I have tried this with a slightly bigger system configuration. I did use AMD64 CPUs with 2GHz and 2GB RAM. Operating system was Windows XP, but Vista would work, too.

Now you may ask, why should you buy four or five computers for what ever number of characters you want to play? The quick answer: it is easier. Grab identical computers from your favourite store, install your Windows of choice, and install World of Warcraft with all available updates. Connecting these systems to be controlled by one mouse and one keyboard is done by hardware, and it’s less likely you could fail here.

To make life easier, I would recommend to have one monitor for each computer. A TFT display with 15” size will work well, you can run WoW with a resolution of 1024×768 on this display.

Now all you miss is just one keyboard and mouse, and a little Open Source tool named Synergy. It allows you to broadcast mouse and keyboard input to multiple systems connected over a local network.

If you combine all that, you will very likely end up with quite a few € to spend for your multi-boxing adventure, not to mention the space requirements. Thus I would recommend this route only for those who have the space and the money. Since I am an IT professional, I have had the hardware available and could try this route. The chance for failure indeed is lower. The price tag you ask? For me it was ~ 1.800 € for a total of five identical systems, as in Germany – where I live currently – you can buy a machine fulfilling the minimum requirements for as low as 200 € and a decent 15” flat panel display for ~ 150 to 160 €.

A description of the one system variant will follow in the next upcoming post.

To quote the inscription on the [item]Blessed Prayer Beads[/item]:

“A friend in need is a friend without beads.”

Or in this case, he should just have the Goblin mail services sent a letter to the Stompers, Inc. which is how I decided to name my little team. By the name you might have guessed, it will be a team made up by Tauren characters. I have created five female Tauren shamans. Wait … female you say?

Why no big men? Come on! Have you ever been waiting around the Arathi Basin battle master in Shattrath with a bunch of male Tauren warriors, shamans, druids, etc. around? Nothing but shoulders to be seen and not a single pixel of the battle master.

Being a polite person I decided to choose female characters instead. They are smaller and their shoulder pads are not that over-sized. Thus let me introduce you to my all new team and it’s members. Hereby I proudly introduce you to Stompers, Inc.

• Ivida: she will be the pack’s chief in charge, mainly because she has been created on my account that has both Collector’s Editions activated, thus you will very likely see Ivida running around with a Mini Diablo or with a tiny murloc baby that listens to the name Lurky. Ividia looks pretty impressive, her black fur and the green eyes make for a good match.
• The stomping damage crew aka. Ivide, Ividi, Ividji, and Ividu. As you may notice they do share hair style and eyes with Ivida, but all have different horns and fur style. Still they are what you expect from a Tauren female. Creatures bound to the force and will of nature.

A crew shot will follow soon, as my new 22” flat panel display will arrive tomorrow morning. A shiny Samsung 226CW display shall enter my home office room very, very soon. Did I mention that I’m pretty much excited by the dimensions of that beast?

Look forward, as we’ll soon start leveling the team up to 70. I’ll try to detail the whole process as much as possible, to make it easier for multi-boxing newcomers.