World Of Warcraft - 5Boxing

I started playing WOW (World of Warcraft) back when it first started years ago. I remember 40 main raids wiping in MC (Molten Core) because our assigned (insert class here) forgot to "kill the adds" popping out from the Fire Elementals. Then, our guild progressed as Blizzard intended through MC and BWL. It was fine until I decided that I would give up all my epics for better internet connection (playing at red latency was no fun anymore). Just then Blizzard announced that they were going to officially have TWOW (Taiwan Wow) , I gave up my GM position back on U.S. Bonechewer/Horde and jumped onto a local Taiwan Server and started my new WOW life there.



And it was different... From the trading in orgrimmar to guild raids of AQ40... it was apparent that I was an outcast. An outcast because I was using a US interfaced UI of WOW so all my links popped up in english (imagine trying to LFG or WTB), cultural differences,  Chinese typing, and most definitely the age group on this server seemed quite young compared to my guildies back in the States.

So I decided to give 5Boxing a try. What is 5Boxing? It's referring to a gamer that controls 5 characters at the same time.

So first I did my research, it seems that for PVE (which was what I was into mostly), a paladin with 4 shamans would be the easiest to box. So, while my Twow guild was trying to down C'thun in AQ40, I gave up my T2lock and spent most of my WOW time leveling the pally+4shammies to level 60. Then to 70 during TBC. The Heroics were fun and good learning experiences.  Some boss encounters required movements, macro adjustments, and or a variation in typical strategy just to down by 5Boxing (unless you had enough dps). I would call myself a "casual" 5boxer now and even though my toons are all level 80s, I no longer raid with Guilds and just do 5man content casually on weekend nights. I've been able to do most of the WoTLK 5man heroic content except for halls of stone (event) and occulus (too lazy to really reconfigure all the macros for the drakes). Here's my Twow Armory. The entire guild is myself so feel free to browse the characters, I found it easier to manage inventory with a Guild Bank when 5boxing. http://tw.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Dreadmist+Peak&n=Kaiyo

I've made some friends online and some told me that they are interested in following what I've done so I created this page. I dare not bore all my other friends by flooding my facebook with too much Wowtalk.

There are many ways one can 5Box, I think I've read on dual-boxing.com that now there are people even courageous enough to 40box (or was it 36?).

5 Boxing for me is more of a challenge/hobby than a necessity. I've tested with various setups (oh please don't remind me of things that didn't work, my KVMs and mice are still sitting idle in some box) and this seems to work best for me. There are many ways out there, I haven't tried out all the newer ways so I can't say which is the best, but this works for me.

1. Keyclone (software) for key duplication. I remap the keys in wow to work with the software a bit, also the round robin feature is very useful for a software repeater.

2. I have 6 monitors on a monitor arm. Yes, I've tried to do it on 1 or 2 monitors and I didn't enjoy the experience and didn't like the hard drive access wait time. So I splurged. 6 computers and 6 monitors. Here's some photo links.

 



 



3. Multiplicity (Pro Version - support 6 machines). My all time favorite. I was having problems with synergy and using Multiplicty eliminated those headaches with moving from screen to screen with one mouse.

Summary: So I'm down to 1 keyboard and 2 mice (1 mouse for main screen, 1 for 4 shamans mostly quest clicking - very rarely used) and 6 screens (5 screens for boxing with one spare for thottbot or  another box, yes I do six sometimes). It's a pretty clean setup now compared to the 3 keyboards 3 mice I had a year ago.)

My Play: Mostly, I use /castsequence macros and cut the normal fight down to 2 buttons and a heal button. It's actually rather easy.

I'll find time to record a clip of how easy it really is once it's set-up. I've seen and recorded/frapped game-play but I rarely see actual video footage of gamers operating their "Boxes".

I'll also send in screencaps and my experiences of 5Boxing the WoTLK Dungeons to share. If you are interested in older content, during TBC I frapped some clips onto Youtube for those dungeon bosses on Heroic but it's outdated Level 70 stuff. Here's the link to my Youtube Page:

http://www.youtube.com/5boxhk

Happy Boxing!