Enjoy the high-def video!

The hunters are 41, BM spec, and have 3 dps/pvp pets (wolf, fox, dog)  and 3 tank pets (bears).   We tore through this place pretty hard core.  The only big difficulty was on those undead mobs who, upon death, get back up and start walking towards you and then explode.  All in all, the instance was a breeze.  Enjoy the 1080/720/480 video!

… we obliterated it, hard core.

Here is the 1080p video below, have fun watching it!

Reddit Link:  http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/hykpt/multiboxing_wow_bg_arathi_basin_3x_hunters_level/

One multiboxing note for this instance is to be careful for all the stairs and twisty tunnels.  The biggest enemy of a multiboxer is the environment (stairs, doors, etc) as you can often get stuck.

Watch how we pwn it up in this 46 minute long youtube video in High Def 1080/720!!

Reddit link:  http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/hwx69/multiboxing_dire_maul_46_minutes_of_video/

Anyway, we obliterated this instance and had fun with our pets tanking some pretty high DPS mobs for the first time. Midway through the video you will see us tanking 2x of those rock giants, not to mention killing Rotgrip, all by ourselves.

Have fun watching this HD 1080/720 video!

Reddit link here!  Represent!

One of the keys to doing this instances, for us, was to group up large numbers of elites, then spam multishot several times, and feign death if we ever had aggro.    This video is in full HD including 720p and 1080p.

Reddit link here!  Represent!

I’ve learned that multiboxing with Multishot is intensely awesome.   Take a look at the HD video here:

Reddit link here!  Represent!

So I decided to see how far my Wrath-equipped, level 80 team could make it in Blackrock Caverns. I had started leveling in Mount Hyjal and ran across the NPC that grants entrance to the instance. I hopped into the teleporter and found myself in Blackrock Caverns.

Per Janus, below is a general breakdown of the encounters and my team composition. It is not the cleanest execution, as I was shooting this “as is”, with no to little preparation, and all these encounters were completely new to me

Team composition:
- Janus : protection pally
- Adonis: elemental shammy
- Bellenus: moonkin
- Aurora: Arcane mage
- Cymara: Holy priest

Team level: 80 (dinged 81 after completing this dungeon ! YAY! )
Gear: Full Wrath heroic dungeon gear
MBoxing software: PWNboxer

Strategy:
1- First Boss:
Make sure as you’re preparing to do the encounter, to clear all the mobs close to the boss, as once pulled, he “shouts out” to the closest adds and pulls them to the fight (as I discovered the hard way, like you can see in the movie)
It’s a simple tank and spank otherwise with a few twists:
- He does a quake, that erupts under your party’s feet, when you see the ground moving, it’s your queue to move your team out of harm’s way, otherwise big damage to everyone
- He pulls all the toons into chains of woe. When that happens, focus fire on the chains, then get out of his way, as he does some sort of cleave that deals major damage
- Rinse and repeat

2- Second Boss:
This is the most technically challenging in this dungeon, in my opinion. She has two adds, that once she is engaged, are targeted by “evolution beams”. Your job is to break the beam by moving your toons into its path, but there is a timer (around 20 sec), after which your toon will evolve into a dragonkin and wreak havoc to the party. This requires some micromanaging as you will need to grab a beam with your tank, and then one after the other, put your slaves into the path of the other. This way, only one dragonkin can evolve at a time and you can bring him down, then let the other one evolve and bring him down next. After both are down, focus fire on the boss and GG

3- Third Boss:
Interesting mechanic. You need to “heat him up” in the middle beam, otherwise he is invincible and does not take damage! As he does (he changes his color) he starts doing major AOE damage to the team. Mass heal and then get him out of the beam. I did 4-5 stacks and my healer was managing fine. Once the debuff expire, reposition him back into the beam and repeat. Make sure to stand inside as when the debuff expires lava surges from the mesh on the ground (see movie)

4- Fourth boss:
Tank and spank. It punts random team members. I had no clue it did that (LOL! as you can see 2 of my toons died in this fight, and my IWT was broken, forgot to rebind it ).
Two interesting things: first you don’t need to kill this boss to complete the dungeon in random LFD (power leveling FTW with 100k xp and justice points). Second if you kill the baby that is behind it, it turns REALLY mad and one-shoots your tank. So don’t kill her fourth baby !

5- Fifth boss:
Tank and spank. Reminds me of the arcane boss in the Nexus, as he “transfers his powers to one of his shadows” just switch targets and beware of the aggro wipe (also discovered this the hard way, as you can see)

That’s it !

This time he is Multiboxing Noth the Plaguebringer which allows him to accomplish the weekly raid boss quest. So he gave it a shot with his team, and guess what?  Naxx on farm?  10 man Naxx is Plaguebringer VS a 5 man team.  Enjoy!

Check out his Youtube channel here!

Tim – 2x Priests, currently both Holy spec

Rob – 3x Hunters, currently both BM spec

The reasoning behind the team composition is that the BM pets should easily be able to tank with the hunters contributing the bulk of the groups DPS, while at the same time healing the pets through pet and hunter talents.  The dual priests will float around spamming Holy Nova, contributing nicely to group DPS while at the same time keeping huge heals up on the entire group including the pets.

Below is a video of doing Stockades with this team make up.  Enjoy!

Thanks for the pic Mooter, and happy holidays.

You can show your thanks to Mooter: http://multiboxing.com/forums/f2/multiboxing-holidays-1871.html

• 1x Druid Tank
• 3x Elemental Shaman
• 1x Restoration Shaman

Halls of Reflection (HoR) is essentially a single room with multiple waves of mobs before fighting 2 bosses, and ends with a run from the Lich King himself.

The fight starts out with Lady Sylvanas and yourselves in the very room with the Lich King’s sword, Frostmourne.  Uther the Lightbringer appears to still be bound to the sword and he warns Sylvanas to quickly exit before the Lich King comes.  There appears to be some foreshadowing when Uther mentions that there must always be a Lich King, and that the current Lich King is actually helping the people of world.  “Without the control of the Lich King, the scourge of the world would overrun…”

Multiple waves of elites will come at your team at once which, if killed quickly enough, will offer you about 5 seconds to drink between fights to regain mana.  My strategy was to put all my guys in the original tunnel that you came in from and simply tank and spank the waves of elites.  Be careful to always have aggro on all the mobs or they will punk you caster/healers.

Boss Falric

The fight against the dead captain is mostly about quick dispelling of magic debuffs. Impending Despair will stun its target after 3 seconds if not removed, and Quivering Strike will frequently drop the tank’s dodge by 20%. In addition, Defiling Horror will send the entire party fleeing in horror for 4 seconds, while taking damage, and Falric’s Hopelessness aura will reduce all players’ damage and healing done by 20% (Heroic: 25%), stacking up to 3 times.

Tank and spank for the most part with careful attention to regrouping after his Horror/Fear.

Boss Marwyn

As Falric is more of a warrior-type of boss, Marwyn is similar to a death knight. He uses Obliterate frequently, and focuses on corruption attacks. He will occasionally spawn Well of Corruption underneath a player, which causes Corrupted Flesh, inflicting a Corrupted Touch DoT on its target. He will also cast a dangerous debuff called Shared Suffering which deals damage to a single player, though if dispelled the damage will be dealt to all players.

Again, tank and spank, and you really don’t need to put much effort into his DoT.

After the fight

Basically just follow the tunnel down to where Sylvanas is getting pwned by the Lich King.  It is amazing that she actually got him down as far as she did.  From here, you need to talk to her then run as fast as you can away from the former Arthas until a wall of ice will appear.  Immediately turn around and then dish out some pwn to the mobs that the LK summons.  Rinse and repeat until the 4th and final wall.  From there, blow all your cooldowns once the multiple fat men appear, otherwise you may have trouble.  From there simply run away and watch the forthcoming short cinematic.

Below is an entire, unedited video of the run.

• 1x Druid Tank
• 3x Elemental Shaman
• 1x Restoration Shaman

Our gear isn’t too sophisticated, I’d say our average item level is somewhere around item level 219 average, maybe a bit lower.

The Strategy

The trash is really easy, but not if you aren’t paying enough attention.  You will see that we started out bad at the beginning by losing our tank due to pulling multiple groups at once.  Thanks to 4x Earth Elementals we ended up surviving.

Forgemaster Garfrost

This guy was an absolute piece of cake.  The strategy is basically to run all your guys directly in as far as you can and simply tank and spank.  He will bounce your guys away at first but ideally you are still within casting range on 1-3 of your guys and can tank and spank him down with ease.  Very easy.

Krick and Ick

The key to this fight is this:  Do not DPS when he is doing his zone bomb thingys.  Just move around and have your multiboxing crew following your main controlled guy (tank) until this finishes.  While he is channeling this, focus only on your instant DPS and have your healer use their instant heals to keep your party full.  While you are stationary and fighting him, group your guys up together so you can easily move out of his poison AOE spits.

Scourgelord Tyrannus

This guy was extremely easy as well.  He does do an attack called Overlord’s Brand of which will mirror damage/heals on 1 party member.  Basically stop all DPS while he is doing this, and restart when he is done.  Tank and spank and you win.

Enjoy the 60 minute video below of the entire run with ZERO edits!

What is Dockable Clickmapping?

This is an in-game grid that you can click with your mouse to perform 1-to-1 (1 mouse click = 1 keystroke) mouse-to-key mapping to all of your game windows.  This allows you to turn any mouse click on the in-game interface into an in-game keystroke sent to all your game windows.   It is extremely easy to use yet extremely powerful.  Tim, the author of Pwnboxer, has been testing this on various characters so far, including multiboxing up to 10 characters in World of Warcraft (9 Shaman and 1 Druid) at a single time, and can attest for the power of this new functionality.

For example, see the in-game interface below:

Whenever you mouseover a square, it will highlight. Once clicked, it will perform the single keystroke action you have set in the interface.

Take a look at the interface in Pwnboxer below.

So any time I click the Chain Heal, it will send my keystroke to all my game windows, which is for my Chain Heal.

This will compliment and potentially even eliminate the need for expensive after-market keyboard modifications, or programmable keyboard hardware addons.

Here is a screenshot of Pwnboxer’s interface and what the new in-game clickmapping looks like. Also, we are showing off the transparent affect of the web browser built into Pwnboxer as well.

This new feature will be undergoing a lot of changes in the near future to expand Dockable Clickmapping even more, including creating multiple movable grids, “docking” them to specific areas of your screen, etc.

In addition to this new feature, Pwnboxer has been updated to fix various bugs, including the in-game Panel sometimes not showing up, cleaning up the Battle.net support, making the mouse cursors more efficient to multibox, as well as some additional minor items.

Head on over to the Pwnboxer.com download page for the free update!

DIGG:  http://digg.com/pc_games/Major_update_to_Pwnboxer_dual_boxing_software

Now, WoW does the heavy lifting for you. Itll slap together a viable group (assuming no one lied about their role) that is geared enough to run the content. Not only that, but the player pool is expanded to the battlegroup. Youll even get bonus loot from joining random dungeons.

Its a good time to PVE.

This is a step-by-step how-to of how to access the revamped LFG system in 3.3. Complete with pictures.

Rewards for doing random dungeons

At 80:

Random Heroic:
1st of the day: 2x Emblems of Frost + 26g
Each additional: 2x Emblems of Triumph + 13g

Random Normal:
1st of the day: 2x Emblems of Tirumph, 20g
Each additional: 10g

For Classic and TBC dungeons:
Satchel of Helpful Goods containing very good blue-quality gear of the highest armor type the character can wear.

How to get into the dungeon queue

1. Open your Dungeon Finder interface.

Now, learn all the tips and tricks and rules for getting in on this PVE smorgasborg – http://multiboxing.com/forums/f38/wow-guide-dungeon-finder-system-1733.html

Totem Talk is the column for shamans,. Matthew Rossi ran ICC twice this week and will probably run it on 10 man twice more, and yet managed to take possibly the worst screenshot of all time, which he shares with you above,. Can you find the three shamans, including himself, in it? He sure as heck couldn’t. But it’s got a skunk bear up front. That’s nice.

It’s been an interesting week all told. The new five mans and new raid are out (well, first four bosses of new raid, anyway… having both tanked and been melee DPS on Deathbringer Saurfang, I have to say, it’s an interesting mechanic but I’m already heartily sick of Blood Power, and I don’t look forward to healing it) and we’re seeing a couple of new mechanics and a new set of shorter cooldowns. I have to say, so far I really like the reduced cooldowns on our elemental totems. Now all they need is a pet bar, and not to die in two hits from any mob in sight. (I exaggerate slightly. Very slightly.)

There’s a lot to cover (I plan on going back to discussing shaman itemization and design in the future, especially since I’ll be on the WoW Insider podcast this week with Sacco and Holisky so it’ll be three dudes who love shamans going back and forth… you should listen… I think Totem of Wrath and its issues compared to Warlock debuffs might come up) so let’s just get to it, shall we?

We’ll look at the patch notes first.

Shamans

• Earth Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Fire Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.
• Reincarnation: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 60 minutes down to 30 minutes.
• Talents

• Elemental Combat

• Elemental Mastery: This talent now increases spell haste by 15% instead of critical strike chance while active.
• Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

• Enhancement

• Earth’s Grasp: This talent now also reduces the cooldown of the Stoneclaw and Earthbind totems by 15/30%.

• Restoration

• Improved Reincarnation: This talent now reduces the cooldown of Reincarnation by 7/15 minutes, down from 10/20 minutes. Reincarnation cannot be used in Arenas.

I’ve already stated that I like the shorter cooldowns on the elementals… I’m generally always in favor of shorter cooldowns on abilities when I get to use them and against them for classes I don’t play, because I’m selfish and horrible and make no apologies for it. I’m okay with the totems not being usable in arenas because, frankly, they wouldn’t even be a speed bump in an arena setting anyway. How long is it going to take any DPS to kill a totem? Heck, I think I could ignore the totem itself and just two shot the elemental on some characters.

Fire Nova is a fun new ability. I haven’t gotten much use out of it playing elemental in BG’s yet, but when I go enhancement for five/ten man action it’s a lot of fun and does reasonable damage. You can play around with positioning by running up, dropping a fire totem, then running back out to range (I’ve actually done this a few times when healing just for kicks) as long as you’ll be within 30 yards of the totem. It’s not enormous damage but it’s reasonable and is very useful on big trash pulls or when running an instance with lots of adds spawning. Or if you have a DK tank who chain pulls like a lunatic and invites all the AoE you can muster. I’m just saying.

The Reincarnation/Improved Reincarnation changes can get it down to 15 minutes. On the one hand, this is longer than abilities like a druid’s battle rez or a soulstone, both of which have more flexibility.Still, Reincarnation has its strengths (unlike a druid battle res, you don’t lose Reincarnation just because, well, you died the way the druid will if he dies before casting it… we’ve all seen those ridiculous “Okay, Druidking res Druidcat, and Druidcat, you rest Druiddude as soon as you can… Druiddude, I’m going to need you to res Druidboy once you have mana” calls) and having it available every fifteen minutes is hardly a bad change, even if it seems underwhelming compared to other abilities.

It’s kind of funny how often you end up saying that as a shaman sometimes. “X seems underwhelming compared to Y and Z.” Perhaps the secret to being happy as a shaman player is never noticing what other classes can do. (This is both sardonic and unfair of me. I loves my chain heal.)

Since I only really play as Elemental in BG’s now (and I admit, I only do it so I can Thunderstorm people off of bridges) the Elemental Mastery change was one I noticed, thought was good, and moved on. But the past week the elemental shamans in my raid group (Dasi, you’re simply a beast) could not stop talking about how much better the talent is now. This makes me happy just because I’ve always found elemental combat to be a tree with a lot of potential that I utterly fail at utilizing, and yet even I knew the crit on the talent wasn’t very compelling.

I hadn’t really even noticed the change to Earth’s Grasp. I’m going to leave this one up to the comments, frankly. I mean, I always like a cooldown reduction. Am I forgetting something that would make this a bad change?

We’ll take a quick look at the bug fixes next. One of them makes me slightly happy.

• Shamans

• Glyph of Earthliving Weapon: Now updates the tooltip for Earthliving Weapon.
• Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave: Tooltip and functionality corrected to ensure this glyph will cause extra healing from Lesser Healing Wave regardless of which shaman cast Earth Shield on the target.
• Hex: Players are no longer able to use Battlemaster trinkets while under the effects of this spell.
• Mana Tide Totem: The tooltip on this spell will now be modified properly by the Glyph of Mana Tide Totem.
• Thunderstorm: It is no longer possible to use this ability while under the effects of the Druid spell Cyclone.

A tooltip update for Earthliving is all well and good, but the Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave change is nice and the Hex change is very nice indeed. Sure, Hex is still basically a glorified silence/disarm, but at least now when you’re trying to kill someone under its effects they can’t get more health on you. Losing Thunderstorm when Cycloned is unfortunate but most likely necessary. I still hate it, but I can’t honestly complain about it.

In general, while shamans still have some issues with totems comparing poorly to other classes’ buffs or debuffs (which we will be discussing in depth soon) this was a pretty nice little set of changes for the class. Coming up next week, a look at patch 3.3’s itemization and if it suits or hinders shaman play.

And now a look a paladin tanking.

The 96969 macro, is essentially three abilities with 9 second cooldowns, combined with two abilities with 6 second cooldowns.

By weaving them together, each “9″ ability is used every 9 seconds, while each “6″ ability is used every 6 seconds.

Each of our “9″ abilities lasts 8 to 9 seconds, while each of our “6″ abilities is on a six second cooldown.

This is almost perfect; we need to add 1 point to “Improved Judgements” in the retribution tree, and Holy Shield lasts 8 seconds not 9.

We then mash a single macro, a castsequence, casting each spell in order. Because each ability is an instant cast, our client does not need to wait on the server to acknowledge the completion of each spell; this means, the GCD is the only limitation on our macro.

Our “9″ second abilities are: Holy Shield, Judgement, and Consecrate.

Our “6″ second abilities are: Hammer of the Righteous and Shield of Righteousness.

The macro uses 255 of the 255 characters, if you judge both Wisdom and Light or 254 of the 255 characters, if you judge Light twice. There aren’t enough characters to judge Wisdom twice, unless you use an addon.

I like to use a “Click” macro, to call my 96969 macro because I would like to include “start attack” and the option for my DPS to attack without my Paladin joining in (ranged mob which will die before it closes to melee).

My 96969 macro prioritizes: Holy Shield > Judgement > Consecrate. I like this, because I have the option to manually Consecrate as the mobs arrive, and it will have refreshed by the time my sequence gets to it. Many people prioritize Judgement over Holy Shield, both because of the initial threat and because the Paladin will take more damage this way, and if healing is not an issue, this means more mana to the Paladin via Spiritual Attunement.

My “Click” is simple:

#show Holy Shield
/stopmacro [mod]
/startattack
/Click MultiBarRightButton12

Naturally, change the “click” to point to where your 96969 macro actually resides. If you had trinkets, which you want to automatically execute whenever the cooldown allows, include them in this macro.

And my 96969 is:

/castsequence reset=9 Holy Shield,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness

And then we got more looks.  Check it out: http://multiboxing.com/forums/f4/guide-paladin-96969-macro-1711.html

We have topics ranging from creating your accounts for your first multiboxing team all the way to overcoming the challenges of heroics when your team reaches it’s pinnacle.  From buying to selling to just plain making boatloads of gold.  It all here in our forums.  And thats where you come in!

We have a lot incredible guides, but we know there’s still far more to do.  We want to let people have a guide on most anything that gives them trouble in their journey through multiboxing.  Such as:

Square One – A Beginners Multiboxer Guide to World of Warcraft – Zzyzxx71 takes us on a trip through the concepts of multiboxing and how to get started.

Alliance Daily Route – Ualaa gives us a how-to guide to daily quests out in Icecrown and how you, too, can make boatloads of gold.

Now, we need some ideas.

Have an unusual accomplishment?  Did something different that just works well for how you play?  Build a guide for us.

Having trouble with an instance or a quest? Not sure how to set something up?  Looking for some great tips? Suggest a guide.