Thursday, August 27, 2009

Dualboxing and recruit a friend, its like having a pet who's awesome!

So I decided to try recruit a friend admittedly basically for power leveling purposes. I get 90 days of time to boost 5 characters to 60 so I can round out my stable of alts and pretty much have all my hordies and alliance characters at 60+ (On azuremyst apart from my pally and death knight, most of my characters are in the early to upper 40s).

Now, an obvious way to do this is run the same instance over and over again until you stop getting benefit from it. I tried that, its about as boring as playing a game can be. It is definately a viable tactic to use in your powerleveling arsenal, however for those of you who want to introduce a little variety, there is another multi boxing solution.

Now, it took me almost the entirety of the day yesterday browsing information, trying addons and such to get this to work. I am outlining what works for me, on my system, but it is by no means the only way to do it. I am also only ever running two characters together for ease and saving my own sanity.

So since powerleveling in instances is boring, what is the alternative? Buddy questing. Basically you set up two instances of Wow. You have to use some kind of software to send keystrokes to the second instance. I use HotKeyNet. Its simple and it works really well. You put your buddy on follow and set up macros. I created a team of Shammy on my main account and priest on the buddy. I used a priest because they can heal, do damage, and have utility spells. I will probably be taking this shammy elemental to make use of the priest's shield ability. The macros are the important part.

In the section where the numbers activate abilities (basic bar) I have macros like:
/target zerofish
/assist zerofish
/cast smite

This will cast smite at whatever target zerofish has targeted. HotKeyNet comes into play because you can actually send those commands to the other instance of wow without switching in between. Now, I know it is possible to have the same keystroke do both, but I wanted seperate hot keys for my slave. I've been using Q, W, and E. Basically Q uses the smite macro on the slave, W heals the master, E casts shield on the master. Its like having a really awesome hunter pet. Basically I get double DPS while questing and triple experience.

I'm definately not using this as my only method of leveling, but it is effective in between instance runs, and once my slave passes level 20ish, instances get more varied and less monotonous.

2 comments:

Darraxus said...

I dual boxed my Druid and Rogue to 60. My Druid is now at 80 and my Rogue is still at 60 o_o

Ruhtra said...

You know with four accounts between my wife and I, this could be interesting.

I hope you follow up with how the results are going for everyone else who doesn't work with you.