DrainingSouls.net

The accompanying guide to this post is finally up. Check it out here.

Last week, as I was getting bored waiting on my copy of WotLK to get here in the mail, I decided to play around with multi-boxing and the Recruit-A-Friend deal. Besides my new Pally, the other class that I’d really like to raid with in Wrath is a mage. I’ve dabbled with mages in the past, but I’ve never had one at a really high level, and I think I would enjoy having one at 70+.

Recruit-A-Friend

If you aren’t familiar with the RAF program, it allows you to start a new account that is linked to your current account, and when characters from the two accounts are partied up and questing together, you receive triple the normal XP, which applies to both kills and quest turn-ins. The extra XP on kills is nice, but not anything spectacular. Due to the way that WoW penalizes group XP*, the bonus XP on kills turns out to be just slightly more than having constant rested XP.

However, the triple bonus on quest turn-ins is absolutely fantastic. Handing in four or five quests is nearly always enough to ding, and it also allows you to pick and choose the quests that you like (or can complete more easily) with more ease.

You can also use a ten day free trial account as the new linked account - you don’t have to go out and buy another copy of WoW or pay for another subscription just yet. More on this later.

*If you weren’t aware of this, this is a pretty interesting fact. WoW penalizes the kill XP in groups by around 30%. If you are killing mobs that are giving you 100XP per, and you group up with someone else, your XP per kill will drop to about 70. I guess the rationalization is that in a group you can kill them more quickly to offset the XP penalty.

A Priest And A Mage Walk Into A Bar…

I decided to make my two multi-boxed characters a Mage (obviously) and a Priest. I choose Priest mostly because it’s the one other class that I don’t have a high-level of, and although a melee class would have more synergy questing with a Mage, I didn’t really want to re-level a class that I already had.

So I had my Mage, Odiana, and my Priest, Fidelias. Both were Undead, just for simplicity’s sake, and an extra 10 points if you know where those names come from. =)

Trial Account Restrictions

One of the many things that I learned about multi-boxing is that there are several restrictions placed on trial accounts. You can read about all of them here, but I’ll cover the important ones that relate to multi-boxing.

Trial accounts:

Cannot trade with other accounts.

Cannot send or receive mail from other accounts.

Cannot invite other players to a group.

Are capped at level 20.

The first two restrictions make it impossible to give any gold or items to your new character to help them get started. So no extra bags, no gold for training skills, no weapons or armor, nothing. That was mildly annoying - the weapons/armor didn’t turn out to be too big of a deal, since the monsters were dying quickly enough anyway, but not having any extra bags, and not enough gold to train skills or buy water for drinking was a major pain.

I understand why Blizzard put those restrictions in place, but I think it would be just as effective in fighting spam to limit the restrictions so that trial accounts cannot initiate trades or send mail. If another account wants to trade with a trial account or send something in the mail to them, it’s probably something legit, like someone wanting to give his friend some gold.

Not being able to invite other people to a group wasn’t really a big deal. I was doing all of the directing from my regular account anyway, and I just made a macro to invite the Priest to a group.

I was also unaware that trial accounts are capped at 20 when I first decided to do this multi-boxing experiment. I was originally planning on playing these two characters as much as I could for 10 days to see how high I could get them before the trial ran out, but I realized that wouldn’t work soon after they both hit 20.

But The XP Continues…

Once I realized that the Priest wasn’t going to get any more XP without me coughing up some cash for another full account, I decided to just park him in an inn, and quest solo on the Mage. This actually worked very well - I was able to quest nearly as quickly with just the Mage, and when I was ready to turn in quests I would log the Priest in, summon him to me (with the linked account summon feature) and then turn in the quests for the triple XP.

As you can see in the screenshot, my Mage is level 26, my Priest is 20, and I’m still getting the triple XP for quests. I thought that I had read that the XP bonus would not apply if the players were not within 4 levels of each other, but apparently that was incorrect or has been changed.

The XP bonus did stop though, shortly after that screenshot above, when the Mage was still level 26.

Although the Priest isn’t in that screenshot, he was there when I turned in the quests, and I got the bonus with one quest, and then 20 seconds later didn’t get the bonus. So perhaps the cutoff is 6.5 levels of difference? I’m not sure.

Thoughts on Multi-Boxing

I’m going to post a guide later in the week telling how I went about multi-boxing, but I wanted to share some general thoughts on the experience here. Overall it was an enjoyable experience, and an much improved method of getting two characters to 20. Having leveled many, many toons through the teens, I’m usually pretty bored with them until they hit the mid-20s or 30, but having this new wrinkle to figure out (and being able to do two toons at once) made the low level experience much more enjoyable.

It was also pretty easy to set up macros to make both characters fight at the same time. It would have also worked to just have the Priest /follow me around, and do all of the questing and killing with the Mage, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having two characters going at the same time.

My standard spell rotation on my Mage is Frostbolt, Fireball, Fire Blast, so I set up some macros so that the Priest would cast Power Word: Shield (on me), and then Smite and Mind Blast on my target as I went through my rotation in combat. This led to very easy killing, and very little downtime as well.

The most common problems I ran into were trying to get the Priest positioned correctly so that he could see both me and the target (usually not a problem, but if I backed up he would turn to face me so that his back was to the mob, stopping him from casting on it) and having the Priest run out of mana. He didn’t have enough gold to keep buying water, and I couldn’t give any of mine to him, so he would go OOM fairly frequently and wouldn’t be much use until he recharged some.

Overall multi-boxing was a lot of fun. I understand why some people do it seriously and, although I’m not tempted to five-box my own arena team, I can appreciate the skill and dedication of those people who do. I’ll post more thoughts on this later when I get my guide up.

 Subscribe to DrainingSouls.net.

Related Posts

• MultiBoxing Guide: Part Two
• Multiboxing Guide
• OK, So That Was Odd…
• C’mon Blizzard…
• First Look At WotLK Gear