This article documents how my multi-boxing setup, including managing characters, setting who is the master character, character following options, macros, targeting enemies and character warnings.
The Team
My team are all female alliance Draenei. They all have a racial healing spell that comes in useful on occasions.
- Yaswar - Warrior (Protection)
- Yasprie - Priest (Discipline/Holy)
- Yasmage - Mage (Fire)
- Yasham - Shaman (Elemental)
- Yashan - Shaman (Elemental)
The warrior is the tank and my master character, the priest is my healer, and the mage and shamans are my damage dealers.
Tank
I chose a warrior for my tank because I love playing a warrior! And also a warrior does not use mana, so it can deal damage without indefinitely (well until dead). Warriors have AOE capabilities in Thunderclap and Shockwave which are very useful for tanking.
Healer
The priest has very good group heal spells as well as a HOT and fast single target healing spells. To the party, the priest brings the following utilities: stamina, spirit and shadow protection buffs with dispell magic, abolish disease and shackle undead spells.
DPS - Mage
My mage gets me around. Portals to all the cities are very useful. Crowd control in the form of polymorph is useful as well as the ability to do arcane, frost and fire damage.
DPS - Shaman
The two shamans provide useful utility with a variety of totems, the most useful for me being the tremor totem which dispells fear, charm and sleep effects. The shamans also make great wipe recovery with their reincarnation ability. Their ability to equip shields and act as off tanks is also useful in certain situations.
Software / Hardware Setup
Computer Specification
I have a single PC that runs all the wow instances. The PC contains an Intel Quad Core Q6600 CPU, 4GB of RAM, a single 500GB Hard Disk Drive, and a Nvidia Geforce GTX260 (768MB). Attached to the geforce are two monitors, a 21inch widescreen (1680x1050) and a 19inch (1280x1024). The operating systrem is Microsoft Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate.
The World of Warcraft Windows
I use software called hotkeynet. Hotkeynet launches all five instances of World of Warcraft and sizes them to fit onto my two monitors. Hotkeynet also forwards keypresses from my keyboard to all five wow instances.
My tank is played on the 21inch in a 1680x1050 window. The other 4 characters share the 19inch monitor, each take up a quarter of the screen with a window of 640x512 pixels.
