11 December 2007

Adventures in Dual Boxing

My first character to level 70 was my Feral Druid. After that I was going to level either the Balance or the Restoration, but I could not decide which. These two characters are not on the same account, so I thought I would try pseudo-dual boxing, by that I mean run two Warcraft Applications on the one computer and just alt tab between the two. I figured I would just have my Rest Druid follow and heal my Balance Druid. This worked Ok, since my UI's are identical if I needed to heal, I would just Alt-Tab and heal then Alt-Tab back again. It was rather clunky and I would get rather confused when the pressure was on. It was also very annoying when it came to collection quests.
This was my first foray into running Dual accounts.
Now that my 3 Druids were level 70, there was very little need to run both accounts at the same time, the alt tabbing was just too annoying. That is until I stumbled across http://www.dual-boxing.com/. I loved it. I think with my Feral Druid sitting in T4 gear, and my rest slowly getting there as well, I would be able to Two-man some instances, either just for kicks or to farm for rare drops.
Last night I took the plunge. I downloaded Keyclone and started planning. Keyclone basically allows you to share the Keyboard between two Wow applications either on the same PC or separate PC's.
Firstly I had to decide how I wanted to control the 2 characters. I decided on using the Keypad and Insert-Page Down keys. This is what I came up with.
1 Target Self
2 Target Party 1
3 Target Party 2
4 Target Party 3
5 Target Party 4
6 Swiftmend
7 Life Bloom
8 Rejuvenation
9 Regrowth
0 Follow Target
. Innervate Target
+ Natures Swiftness
- Rebirth
* Tree
/ Flight
Page Up Fly Up
Page Down Fly Down

Firstly I had to tell Keyclone not to send all the keys on the Keyboard, except those mentioned above, to the second application. I then unbound the keypad on the main Application and bound the keys on the keypad for my second application.
Now for the test. I started out with Normal Ramparts. This is pretty much solo-able anyway. After a bit of practice I quickly got used to it. I am looking forward to more experiments of this nature.
I also have most of the bits for a second PC so I think I will make one up and try full dual boxing. Sort of makes me want to transfer my Balance Druid to its own account as well.....

Razor

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