Gnomeregan

I apologize for not posting any new info for so long. I am generally a very lazy individual, procrastination is practically written on my forehead. Most of the stuff written here have usually happened a while prior to the actual post. For the latest scoop, you can always talk to me in game, I am more that happy to share the quirky happenings and any interesting game style mechanics that I have developed. I have also forgotten to tape any footage of myself inside, but rest assured, you are not missing anything interesting.

That being said, I have cleared Gnomeregan at level 28, and have found it pretty bland. Nothing really interesting happened. None of the bosses did anything special, and I did not have any new abilities to test out. I did find a rather poorly created encounter that is suppose to summon what I am guessing is the first boss. You have to speak to a little gnome named Blastmaster Emi Shortfuse who will begin blasting the sides of the walls in the small room which give way to an array of mobs. The unpleasant fact she forgets to mention before she starts is her incredibly poor health and armor condition, as I have never seen an escort styled NPC die quicker than her. Although part of it was my fault, but I would think it could happen to anyone.

Razorfen Kraul

After my rather unrewarding experience in Shadowfang Keep, I chose to seek higher level instances earlier to keep the excitement coming. My choice at level 26 became Razorfen Kraul an instance filled with what appears to be boars standing on their hind legs. A reference to Animal Farm perhaps? Regardless I was a little more satisfied with this instance than my previous one, but still hoping for harder challenges. Links to the video are at the bottom of the post.

The major difference in this instance than all my previous is the fact that almost every creature seems it is necessary to flee once they get below 15% health. A very annoying trait that will catch you by surprise if you are not prepared for it. Luckily my paladin gained a new skill which counteracts the opponents need to flee. Namely Seal of Justice, that when judged will cause an enemy to be filled with outrage causing it to fight to the bitter end. However to my annoyance, the incredibly long cooldown (10 seconds) of the Judgement attack makes it almost impossible to use my essential aggro generating judgement before the target feels the need to book it out of there. Luckily my shaman are rather sturdy meaning there was never any need to try to maintain control and heal mid fight.

Shadowfang Keep

As I was merrily on my way to Shadowfang Keep, I kept stumbling upon a kill quest after kill quest in various locations. Quest givers in the middle of the road want those ugly looking monstrosities called mining dwarves out of their Southern Barrens to preserve the wondrous nature of the desert. By the time I got to Shadowfang Keep, and acquired the necessary quests into the area, I had turned level 23. Since most of the mobs in SFK are around 18-22, with the last boss being 23, I pretty much breezed through it.

I did however manage to record a short video of the later portion of the run, to which I have added a short explanation of how my methods of multiboxing are conducted. However recording it wasn’t as hard as the actual editing and encoding. I haven’t edited video in a good while, so re-learning the software was time consuming. I also had tons of problems capturing the video and encoding it. I ended up using a program called Camstudio, which captures the entire screen rather than a single window. I made the mistake of capturing in reduced resolution of 640×512 rather than my monitor’s resolution 1280×1024. This resulted in double compression when making the final version, which reduced the quality to below what would have been had I used a high quality original. A mistake that I will try to avoid in the future.

Nifter in SFK from Nifter MB on Vimeo.
FileFront High Quality Download (94 MB)

Wailing Caverns

At the moment I hit level 20, I ran straight to Orgrimmar to grab the new spells for both my shaman and paladin. Their class trainers are conveniently in the same location. Once this was done, it was straight to Wailing Caverns.

I had already done the gruelingly unjust collection quest called Altered Beings for each of my characters, in order to gain the quest which requires killing 4 Leaders of the Fang. The reason being that this quest provides a very nice weapon upgrade for each and every one of my party members, and thus justifies the work. Would have been easier if there weren’t a bunch of other people there trying to gather the collection items, but such is the hardships of multiboxing. All other collection quests with regard to this instance were not accepted.

Anyway, beginnings of the instance were a little slow (had to run back to buy water!), but moved at a fairly consistent pace. The addition of Consecration and Tremor Totem spells were life savers in this instance, because of the high number of creatures with the Fear spell. I didn’t even notice that any of my characters were being feared until my paladin got feared. With the particle effect graphics turned to the absolute lowest, the only indication you have of another player being subject to fear is a slightly darker colour of their entire body, similar to how a poison discolours a player. My initial thought was a malfunction in my broadcasting software resulting in characters running off sometimes as I spam attack or follow.

Level 10-20

Things are a vast improvement over my experience in the single digits. I am starting to get the hang of playing the characters and the methods for tackling various situations. As soon as I ditched each and every collection quest, the leveling speed miraculously improved.

The start of the Ghostlands zone at level 16 was also a main cause for the improvement. The enormous quantity of quests in the zone gave me enough “slay the dragon” tasks bust my breaks as I was riding downhill to level 20. Major buckets of fun! I don’t even realize I’m doing elite quests until I read the general chat about some poor “loner” seeking a group in order to complete it.

I already mentioned that I have cleared Ragefire Chasm at level 14, so I will not go into full detail about it here.

I have started gearing my last shaman, Niftar with caster oriented gear in order to boost his healing capabilities if they ever become crucial to my success. I don’t run a damage meter, so I can’t really tell how much it is affecting his damage per second (DPS) compared to the others, but at this level I don’t really care.

Overall I am extremely happy with my progress. I feel a lot more powerful and capable, ready to take on bigger challenges and higher levels of noob hate. My major goal for the near future is reworking my macros to create a more instance friendly version which would be more intuitive and responsive. Might take a while, I’m rather lazy, as you can tell by the length of this post.

Ragefire Chasm – Cleared

My very first instance run was conducted at level 14. The famous Ragefire Chasm got a taste of my righteous fury, or more precisely, the lack thereof. As soon as I started I began to run into various problems. First of all, I actually had to heal my tank, which has never been required up to this point. As easy as it sounds, it gave me the most of my problems.

Up until this point the group only faced single mobs, which is a vast difference from pulling 2-3 elites. The moment my first heal lands on the tank, he loses aggro of the extra mobs. This leads to mass mayhem as I scramble to regain control, but fail miserably as the tank still requires healing. The moment I lose my healer or tank, things go downhill as I frantically try to switch to another character and co-ordinate the assault further. In many cases, my awkwardly positioned macros and numerous modifier keys were the death of me, resulting in me mashing random buttons in hopes of changing the focus/kill target. Several wipes later, I learned to quickly smack 1-2 targets with melee and judgement attacks before switching to the primary kill target at least keeping aggro past the first heal.

Level 1-10

Paladin: Niftyr
Shaman: Niftur, Niftor, Niftir, Niftar

I made 1 Blood Elf Paladin and 4 Tauren Shaman. Dragged my little elf from his starting zone all the way to the Mulgore plains to begin his career with his macho guardians. Belive it or not that was the easiest part.

Multi-Boxing – How Does Work?

Multi-boxing is the art of controlling multiple characters simultaneously. Initially named after the need to use multiple computers to accomplish.

This can be done using different methods. Primarily a hardware method, and a software method. A hardware method is done using multiple PCs and controlling it by using splitters, multicasters, and switches. Basically you use one mouse and keyboard, but you can chose to multiply the signal to each PC, or using various switches send signals to specific PCs. This is a rather expensive option, but provides best results as each PC controls their own client with minimal slow downs.

The other option is software. A software which multiplies the signal it receives from the mouse or keyboard to specific applications. There are certain limitation to this method. The mouse cannot be used in all windows simultaneously. Although there are programs which let you pass in mouse clicks. It is very difficult, if not impossible to use mouse turn using these programs.

My Setup:

The method I use is entirely software. I use a single 19 inch monitor, with 1280 by 1024 resolution, on to which I fit 5 game clients. I use a key broadcasting software called Keyclone. Which has so far shown good results, however I have yet to try any others, so my opinion of it is still biased.

The Very Beginning

Welcome to my very first blog post. I am entirely new to this sort of environment, and I am not entirely sure as to the conventions and rules that might be involved with it. If I mess up, go easy on me.

In my life as a player I have read many blogs of various players that logged their adventures while multi-boxing. It allowed me to experience some aspects in greater detail combined with screenshots and videos along with author commentary. It was a great resource filled with information that I found interesting. Hence the reason why this blog is created. I can share the quirky things I come across, as well as keep a log for myself in case I ever want to look back upon my adventures.