So there I was at work last week, bored and realizing I needed to grind rep for SSO for the shield/neck/weapons but already hating what I had been doing due to the mana residue and naga ore quests. I decided since I didn’t feel like doing any work on my project I’d try to find the fastest way to get rep in a multi-boxer friendly way but with maximum efficiency and minimum collection, so I now present it for your laughter and ridicule.

I’d also like to firstly say thanks to Suvega for his thread on his dailies routine that gave me the basis for the 3 macros I use in this routine.

Phase 1:

1. Send 1 character to QD Isle, have rest at Shat (helps at the end of the night to use the Dalarian Teleport scroll on 4 characters and leave one at QD, or have a mage), and have the character at DQ grab Rediscovering Your Roots and head to Shat
2. At Shat have all characters grab Sunfury Attack Plans
3. Head east out of Shat up to Razorfang Ridge, have group loot on FFA and kill Razorthorn Flayers (which will drop Razorthorn Flayer Gland) until you have 1 gland on each character
4. Have each character use a gland on a ravager each (make sure the ravager is moving before you use a gland on it…they like to go into evade mode up there and then you waste the gland)
5. Once all characters have a ravager each go up to a mound of dirt and use the following macro on all characters. The ravagers will dig up one Razorthorn Root each, grab one per character and move to the next mound until you have 5 of them each

/cast Expose Razorthorn Root

6. Mount up and head northeast until you hit the Throne of Kil’Jaeden and the quest giver there
7. Grab Blood for Blood and Blast the Gateway then have everyone use their Sizzling Embers to get the little fireball ready
8. Start running round and killing Incandecent Fel Sparks until your balls level up to unstable status (the Fel Sparks will also level up your balls if you are just near them when they die as well, so if you see someone killing one run over to them and benefit, or if you are already killing one pull it over and let everyone benefit).
9. While doing this also kill 4 Wrath Herald and loot them with your main char to get 4 Demonic Blood to power your Fel Siphon
10. Once you have the 4 bloods, go find Felblood Initiates, use the Fel Siphon on one and tap it at the same time with one of your other characters to stop someone getting the credit for it. Once the drain has channeled the mob will turn into an Emaciated Felblood but WAIT until you see it lose its amour and turn to a white skin before killing it or you won’t get credit
11. Once you have killed the 4 initiates, run back through the demonic gateway with your unstable fireballs to blow it up and hand in the quests there
12. Fly back over to Honor Hold and get a bird to Area 52
13. Run up to Manaforge B’Nar and kill mobs until Sunfury Attack Plans drop. It’s random drop with round 20% droprate I think but it’s group lootable.

Phase 2:

14. Head back to Shat and go through the portal to QD, drop down into the bottom of the building and grab The Battle Must Go On, Know Your Ley Lines and The Air Strikes Must Continue
15. Leave the building and head southeast to the Dawning Square, kill 6 demons and the Emmisary of Hate (though will usually find it already dead) and have your main use the banner on it to finish The Battle Must Go On for the group. Also have your main use the astromancer crystal near the portal for part 1 of Know Your Lay Line
16. Head back up to the building north of the square, where the armorer is, grab Keeping The Enemy At Bay on the first floor landing and Crush the Dawnblade on the top floor
17. Head back down and noth to the boat on the right of the inn, grab Disrupt The Greengill Coast here
18. Head east to the greengill coast, kill Darkspine Sirens and loot the Orb of Murloc Control that each one drops on your main then proceed to use them on murlocs as you head west to the small shrine in the water
19. Have your main use the astromancer crystal at the shrine, all in group will get second part of Know Your Ley Lines done
20. Head back west to the boat and hand in Disrupt The Green Gill Coast
21. Head west to the inn, hand in Rediscovering Your Roots
22. Head west to the flightmaster, have all characters right-click to bring up the gossip screen with him and then use the following macro on all characters to have them mount and fly at the same time for The Air Strikes Must Continue

/script SelectGossipOption(1)

23. Hotkey the arcane charges for this quest and then once you are in the dead scar just spam and target. It will likely take a few flights before you work out the positions of the mobs you need and even then it may take 2 flights to complete the quest depending on number of people also doing it and your accuracy
24. Have everyone right click the guy next to the flight master again and use the following macro to start all characters at the same time on Keeping The Enemy At Bay

/script SelectGossipOption(2)

25. Again, hotkey the flaming oil and use if once on the mast of each ship you pass on the flight path to set fire to the sails of each ship. For the third ship wait until you turn and fly up past it’s side to be in range.
26. Once you land, stay on the first ship and kill the 6 Dawnblade Reservists you need there as I found it’s annoying to get onto the other ships, need to jump and move up out of the water so usually will accept a wait time on that boat
27. Once the quest is completed have all characters right click the dragonhawk and use the Dead Scar macro to head back to QD
28. Head south into the small building with the quatermaster in it and grab Further Conversions then back out and head south to the Dawnblade area
29. Kill dawnblades as you go for Crush the Dawnblade and head into the big building to find 3 summoners around a blood crystal. The summoners are always in evade mode on Proudmoore so I’m not sure if they will agro or not, but head in there and have your main use the astromancer crystal to finish off Know Your Ley Lines
30. Once you have finished Crush the Dawnblade go SW and kill any Erratic Sentry you see, have your main use the Attuned Crystal Core on them until you have 5 and then head back to QD center

Phase 3:

31. Hand in Further Conversions at the quartermaster building
32. Hand in Know Your Ley Lines, The Air Strikes Must Continue and The Battle Must Go On in the center building
33. Head to armory building and hand in Keeping The Enemy At Bay and then up the top to hand in Crush The Dawnblade
34. Head back to Shat (I use the teleport scrolls from Know Your Ley Lines because if you don’t you can’t hand it in again until you destory them) and hand in Sunfury Attack Plans

Results:

At the end of this run you will get ~115g, 2700 SSO rep and 15 Sunwell Supplies giving you at least 15 greens to DE and a chance at a Badge of Justice per supply and will usually take about an hour or so depending on how co-operative the Razorfang Flayers and Sunfury mobs are being for the Glands and Plans.

Shareable Quests:

* Crush the dawnblade
* Disrupt the greengill coast
* Sunfury attack plans
* Rediscovering your roots

Unshareable Quests:

* Further conversions
* The battle must go on
* The air strikes must continue
* Know your ley lines
* Keeping the enemy at bay
* Blood for blood
* Blast the gateway

Well, had my folks down visiting a couple of weeks ago and during that time I decided to move my workspace around….Murphy’s kicked in and my old AMDx2 machine decided to fry it’s cpu when I turned them back on (yes I know, a UPS is next must-buy). It’s been sitting round looking all forlornly at me, but since it was a socket 939 there was not much I could do but retire it, scavenge parts and build a new box.

Looking over it, the only thing I could really salvage were the 2 7800GTX’s and the hard drives since when I decided to test the PSU with another older mobo/cpu I had, that cpu lasted about 5 seconds before frying as well so I figure the PSU was effectively dead and don’t want to take the risk. The hard drives were all PATA, which posed a small problem (this box was my file server) until I found an item called a TeraBox at the computer markets…it’s a small box with a 150W PSU that holds up to 4 PATA drives (to 2GB total) and can either have them set as individual drives or seen as one and then connects to a PC through USB. Given I have previously had issues with spanned drives, I have set these up as individual drives and has worked flawlessly so far under XP, Vista and a Mac, the only issue found with the Mac was I had to let the Mac reformat one of the drives to be able to write to it since it seems they can read NTFS but not write to it.

With the drives sorted, and my mind already set on what I wanted out of the new PC (quad core, sli, 8Gb RAM), I decided that I could get by with just getting the RAM, CPU, Motherboard and case/PSU this week and use the GTX’s initially to see if I need to look at upgrading to the 9800 series (either GTX or GX2) so off to the markets I went this weekend and grabbed what I needed, to be pleasently surprised. I ended up getting an evga 780i motherboard, 8Gb of PNY RAM (though a little annoyed, thought it was 5-5-5-15 but is 5-5-5-18), a Q6600 CPU and a cheapish case with PSU for $800. The case I gimped myself with as my current main machine was in a Super Lanboy case with a 650W Antec PSU so decided to put the new build in that and so just needed something to hold the current build of Q6600, 4Gb, 9600GT and this seems to be holding well. If it becomes an issue I intend to grab an Antec 900 case and 850W modular PSU anyway so it’s not a major problem to have that machine out of action for a week till the next markets.

I spent all saturday putting the new pc together (well also taking the other one apart and putting it back together in the new box) and installing Vista64 SP1 which all went reasonably quickly, the only concern I had was the new botherboard has an 8 pin power2 while my PSU only had a 4 pin but reading the manual it seems the 8 pin is only needed if running quad SLI so I gave the 4 pin a try and the system fired up and appears stable still.

Once built and in place I ran the first testto see if I could see any improvement in multiboxing World of Warcraft, and I put one monitor on on card, the second monitor on the other and had SLI disabled (mainly because I intend to run 4 monitors on this machine) and found the effect to be disasterous…I was getting single digit framerates on all 5 instances of WoW which was unacceptable, machine was turned off and both monitors plugged into card 1.

For the second attempt, I’m not sure what the issue is but I am getting only around 15fps on all 5 instances when running at the same time, and only around 35fps when running a single instance of WoW which is about 1/2 of what I was seeing with a single 7800GTX under XP32 SP3…at this stage I am thinking it is something to do with having the SLI bridge in place between the two cards, so I’ll likely try taking that off tonight and see if I see any improvement, and I also have to see if going to SLI shows me any upgrades with FSX.

At this stage I’m happy with the new pc, but not ecstatic since I haven’t seen the improvements I’d expected and found one of the reasons for going with a new SLI build (running monitors on all cards) is likely not going to work. It might be the 7800’s that are the issue so the next phase will be to finialise what I planned and add either 2 9800GTX’s or 2 9800GX2’s, so will update this once I get them in place and tested.

Well, I have decided to bit the bullet and level up another 3 shaman to give me a little bit more flexibility in group makeup. I also have a friend that has a level 62 warrior sitting around unloved due to not having much luck with groups since he’s a loldps spec so thought I’d start up a group to help him level as well with my initial thinking of doing 4 druids to tank and heal while he dps’s but I think I can change that around using shaman and still achieve my goals.

Currently I’m going to boost the 3 new shaman + 1 other up to outland using Smara with the following outline:

• 1 - 10 - Newbie zone
• 10 - 15- Deadmines
• 15 - 20 - Stockades
• 20 - 40 - SM
• 40 - 50 - BRD
• 50 - 55 - Scholo/Strat
• 55+ - Outland

Once I hit 55 with them I’ll (likely)  stop worrying about the 4th boostee and just start running with Smara + Baanmee + 3 other shaman through Ramparts until they hit 60 and then drop Baanmee from the group and add in my friends warrior while continuing to use Smara to tank them through to 70.

Once the 3 shaman are at 70 I’ll be able to either run the current Five Fingers or Smara + 4 Shaman as dictacted by what I’m doing, eg Smara + Shaman for PvP, but also it could be easier to gear Smara up more quickly using just the shaman and then have him essentially boost the current group through instances for loot or badges by having him outgear the instances. This is dependent on me being able to use the shaman as effectively in instances as others have shown is possible in videos either on youtube or in the video forum at http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums.

I’ve got the 3 new shaman created already so it’s just a matter of leveling them up to 10 now to get them over to deadmines, and will likely do that tonight after I run my 10 welfare epic games and then tomorrow before maintenence. I think that will be the better way to do it as Smara is currently in Azeroth leveling up mining after I dropped blacksmithing on him as discussed earlier, got him up to 55 last night so guessing it will be another day or two to get him up to 300 and then it’s off to instancing properly with the Five Fingers. One side-effect of picking up mining with Smara is that I can drop it on Ivanasukle now which I was going to do with the intention of her grabbing inscription when WotLK releases but now I think I’ll put that onto a deathknight and grab tailoring on Ivana for the bop purple Spellfire items that seem to be great dps upgrades according to http://www.maxdps.com and some of the best I’ll get outside of sneaking them into a black temple raid somehow so just makes sense really.

Just a small change made to the site today that shouldn’t affect anything but does mean I have to go through and change a few links so something could get broken for a few minutes at times.

I’ve changed over from using ItemStats to display the tooltip popups for WoW items to being powered by WoWHead as it includes quests and spells in it’s available items and seems to get updated more often than ItemStats (which hasn’t been updated since Feb 2007) and is a single line of code to add if I update or redo the site, as opposed to the voodoo I had to do to get ItemStats to work initially.

Hopefully no-one will notice any broken posts while I go back and update where I need to but if you do, it should be fixed fairly quickly.

I’m going to have to answer with a resounding “Hell NO”.

I put it in last night for a quick 30 minute while I waited for chicken to defrost before I cooked dinner…4 hours later I managed to put it down long enough to go cook, eat and get back to it. The missions flow on easily from each other, the story is actually really good (yes, I was suprised because I had low expectations for it) and, for me, the best part has been the upgraded physics.

Each vehicle has very distinct physics and handling and should actually make it necessary to make good choices for each mission. For example, trucks/vans handle like crap and understeer like a bitch so you won’t want to be taking one of those for a chase mission…on the other hand, something like the Maclaren Mercedes style car is beautiful to drive, handles corners like it’s on rails but is slightly fragile so it would not be a good choice for a mission that requires ramming an opponent out of their car. This leads to players having to make more decisions about missions apart from just what weapons to take, and more choices and decisions is always a good thing in a game.

Now onto what may be the most controvertial subject regarding the game, sex and censorship. Yes, the game has been censored in Australia and no-one is quite sure what that entails (R* isn’t talking at this stage, most likely to avoid giving out spoilers on the game and that’s fair enough) but after what I saw last night I would say some of it is the sex in the game. Without giving away spoilers I hope, last night I picked up a hooker to see what happened and once you go to a secluded area the camera pulls back to show the rear bumper and lights of your car with some bouncing and that’s it. One of the other ways sex is involved in the game is through girlfriends for Niko and getting them to invite you up to their place so I worked on that for a little bit last night too and managed to get invited up, again the camera just cuts to an outside view of the apartment they are in, there are sounds and the controller rumbles and that’s it. Taking these two instances into account and comparing them against what has been said by R* about the game I think we can safely conclude that these are likely places that censorship has been put in and to me it doesn’t impact on the game or the story so I don’t have a problem with it, though it was funny that the hooker was allowed to say “So, you going to fuck me like the nasty bitch I am?” when I picked her up but then we go to a G rated cut-scene…guess it just goes to show the double standards that are prevalent in regards to games still.

I haven’t bothered trying multiplayer yet, and likely won’t until I finish the single player game and given I’m about 13% finished after around 6 hours I don’t see myself getting into the multiplayer aspect for a few weeks but when the single-player is honestly this good I don’t think I want to split the experience up until I’ve fully experienced it.

After pre-ordering Grand Theft Auto 4 back in August 2007, I now have my special edition in my hot little hands and from what I can see even from the contents of the pack it was worth it. I was going to put some photos up but the batteries in my camera are dead and I have none recharged so that will have to wait, if I get round to it. For now, it’s off to load it up, so if I’m not seen online or in WoW for a few weeks just look for me on Xbox Live!

Now that everyone has hit 70 I’ve been able to slow down a lot and get round to doing the things I need to get finished before I start the grinding seriously, so I spent most of the long weekend doing that, and then logging out and ignoring WoW for the rest of the day to hopefully recharge my energy for the next push.

The first thing I did was decide to get Nuaaki up to 300 herbalism so as to get past needing to herb in Azeroth and be able to pick flowers in Outland so as to avoid wasting all those nodes in instances and the ability to skin bog lords for motes of life that are needed for primal mooncloth. Overall it took me about 5 hours to get from 1 to 320 and I made about 150g from selling the herbs such as gromsblood, dreamfoil, etc so it was a very worthwhile exercise and I believe infinately easier than the mining skillup is going to be for Smara next weekend.

After that I spent a few hours a day on getting quests done to try and finish off all the zones and leave myself with just dailies and instances to try and cut down on the number of decisions about what to do each day when I log in. The first thing I did was finish off Netherstorm quests..well not entirely, I still have to kill Nexus-King Salhadar since he kicked my ass the first two times I did him. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was I was having but I think I was tanking him too close to the casters and they kept getting caught in the aoe/frost nova he has and then once I got knocked back it was hard to get back in range and taunt him off whoever he had agro on before they were dead, but I think I have ideas for him again after one or two more upgrades.

Thinking about that, and then the times I had trouble in ramparts, I have noticed I really have trouble in fights now where the mob does a knockback and agro-wipe since after they knockback Smara they will go after the closest character and that will invariably be a caster who then gets their ass handed to them before I can get Smara back in range for a righteous defender cast…I think I need to be thinking a little faster and maybe frost-nova and back out with them which means I will need to re-add secondary movement keys for the casters and bind frost nova to a hotkey so guess I’ll take that into account when I redo my UI and get instance macros done this weekend.

After finishing up Neterstorm I headed to Shadowmoon Valley and dropped 4500g on 5 flying mounts for everyone and started off questing there, with the goal to get all those quests finished this week in between GTA4 sessions. I got a fair few of the Wildhammer Hold quests done so now it’s just finish off the ones left there that I haven’t done before such as Path of Conquest and Truncheon’s line (basically the ones that need a group for) and move on up to the Aldor camp for their quest lines for extra Shat’tar and Aldor rep before I need to worry about instances and fel armaments for faction with the groups. After that I will only have the Og’rila, Skyguard and SSO daily quests to do which should be about 200g per character for ~90 minutes work a night, which will mean around 30 days for enough gold to buy epic flight and the CE hypogriphs for all 5 characters (though this excludes money made from each instance run), so thing are looking reasonably good if I can keep up the grind.

Looking at instances and loot drops today, I can’t really see the point to doing instances below CoT level now as none of them really have loot drops that will be an upgrade for any of my characters and don’t give faction unless on heroic so I think after I run them once or twice to finish off the quests associated with them I’ll just not worry unless they are the normal mode daily. Even de’ing the drops only gives me a small prismatic shard so I’d need to run the entire instance to get one large prismatic shard while I’d get that from de’ing a single boss drop in a CoT+ level instance for the same time investment so there isn’t even really an incentive to do the lower instances for those which is a shame as I actually like some of the lower instances, but sadly this isn’t about doing what I like it’s about doing what improves my characters in preperation for WotLK so that has to take precedent.

I’m thinking about dropping blacksmithing as a skill from Smara and taking mining at the moment with him. I can’t currently see a benefit to blacksmithing for BoP items, and as I already have Jhentar up to 360 blacksmithing it just makes sense to me to drop it with the benefits of doing so being

• I don’t have to keep an eye over on another screens minimap to watch for nodes popping up, I can track them on the main character
• If blacksmithing doesn’t improve in WotLK I will have freed up a tradeskill from Ivana to allow her to grab inscription
• If blacksmithing does improve then I can drop mining, pick blacksmithing back up on Smara and have Ivan go back to mining and have a deathknight or other character grab inscription

The one thing that I will be doing though as I level mining up on Smara will be to make sure I keep enough mats in the bank as I go so I have all the mats ready to level him to 375 in about 3 hours in the situation that blacksmithing BoP’s become worthwhile enough for tanking that it makes sense for him to have it.

Well, I was off work sick the last two days and decided to take the time to get the last 3 levels I needed to hit 70. Managed to do it around 7:30 last night and immediately created a 5v5 team for them and played my 10 games, just managing to sneak them in before the points rollover. I went 0-11 and dropped to around 1380 rating but still ended up with 308 points for the effort. I learnt a bit about the arenas and can’t see myself really spending any time to get better in them with my current group as I don’t think I have the dps yet to have a chance even if I do so for now it’s just get in and get my games and points for the week and ignore the arena until the next week. The current goal I have for them is only to get around 4k points for main weapon and off-hand for each char anyway, so hopefully I can stay around the 250 points a week mark and have season 4 not start until I get the points, though worst comes to worst I’d be happy just getting even 2.3k points to get the main-hand weapons as they are still the best item I’d see in quite a while and will make the most impact as a long-term upgrade to each character compared to any one peice of armour.

Now I start the grind of finishing off leveling my tradeskills, have to start herbalism (though hoping it will only take a day or so to get to 300ish) and get mining, jewelcrafting, engineering and blacksmithing all up past 125 though the last three of those will be done in conjunction with the leveling of mining (ie won’t leave a farming location until I get all the mats I need for the three tradeskills from those nodes) so while the mats farming will take longer it means the skills leveling will be quicker and less expensive than AH’ing what I need.

After that I have to start grinding out the instances to gear up to start heroics, then grinding those for gear, faction and badges with the ultimate goal being to have all characters speced out in the sunwell vendor loot (or equiv/better from drops/crafted) before WotLK drops. I’m going on the assumption of a november release for it (though have heard little voices saying january) and an average of 3 badges per heroic and 2 hours per heroic as a conservative estimate, which means I should average about 10 badges per day if I include more runs on weekends or the dailies, so I’d be looking at 100 days of grinding to get 1k badges per character. If I get into heroics by the end of july I’d be on track then to hit my goal by november and be fully geared to push through WotLK at a good clip without worrying about upgrades until around level 76 (if I can use BC and T3 as an indicator) so I think that’s fairly doable depending on getting into the heroics when I plan and not getting burnt out on them once there.

The other advantage I can see to the instance grind now is that I’ll see quite a few khorium and adamantite nodes in them as I go that I won’t have to worry about competition or ninja’s so that will speed up the post 300 tradeskilling, the BoE drops will be able to be spread to who needs them or sold with funds going into the guild bank to help with the 28k cost of 5 x Epic Flying + CE mounts and my collection of large prismatic shard will keep me in enchants quite easily as any boss drops that can’t be used will be able to be de’d straight away. The only concern I have about any item right now is the whitemend pants recipe since it drops off fire bitch in Botanica and don’t think that is a fight that a multi-boxer can do (or at least my group couldn’t do it) so I might have to run some instances of it in a PuG with Calliori to try to get it.

One of the really big things I have never seen mentioned regarding multiboxing, and one that made me really happy as it took me by surprise, is just how many quests you can do as a matter of course that you may have skipped over when solo leveling purely because the time investment to find a group to do them is too significant. Over the last week or so I’ve done maybe 10 quest lines that I have never done before for just that reason, such as the Altuis quest line in Nagrand or the 2 gnome fel reaver quests near area 52 (and damn, Fel Reaver, but with a heart was one of the most intense fights I’ve done yet…finished it with everyone on around 10% mana and 15-20% health then followed up with Manaforge Ara that was just as intense but with a timer on it too) which has led to me getting gear I have never had before, and it being some of the best available at the time or currently outside instance loot, but more importantly it has led to storylines and plot development that I’d never seen or heard of before and that has added more to the enjoyment of the game now than any peice of loot could.

As an example, last night I found a group of 3 quest-givers just near the bridge to Manaforge Ara that I’d never seen before because I’d never been there before while solo. One of them is a draenai named Kaylan who is trying to resurect fallen comrades but failing, and once you finish the quest he wants you to return a message to an aldor questgiver in area52 that he is no longer a member of the aldor, that the light has failed him. Now that was cool because it gives some indication that even in a world filled with abilities such as resurection, people can lose their way and their faith and so it made me start to wonder if it would be possible for things to happen in the future to other characters in the game…it opened up possibilities that while they may never happen always leave the seeds of doubt in your mind. The kicker to this was that a quest line flowing off from that has you questing along to complete a key for a teleportation device to send you to the lair of a demon that’s off in the twisting nether and typicially inaccessible to you apart from this teleport. Once you get to the final quest you find the demon, and Kaylan has completed his turn away from the light and is now a demonic henchman for the demon you are after. That to me is a great reason to play the game and do the quests but it makes me sad that in all the time I’ve been playing the game, I have never seen it until now and gets me wondering how many others have also missed out on such great little side-items in our rush to level and stay insulated (either as soloers or multi-boxers).

Having said that, my hypocrisy will show through once WotLK drops and I rush to make my team the first to level 80….