Sunday, February 22, 2009

Special Dual Boxing by Keelhaul

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by Keelhaul

*Here's a little guide a wrote up a while back for my guildies*

A couple of people have asked me about dual boxing so I decided to write up a simple guide of sorts. In this guide you're basically going to be running around mostly on one toon with the other on auto follow. We have all seen the movies with people multiboxing 5 mages or shammys at one time, all casting and wtfpwning in AV… This is not a guide for that.
By no means is this the comprehensive end all dual boxing guide or anything, this is more for the folks that want a down and dirty guide to the basics. Two accounts running on one machine and one monitor.

The Recruit a Friend (RaF) program that Blizzard has going on is amazing for leveling alts. The XP bonus if you are grouped with and NEAR, like 20 yards or so, for killing mobs and handing in quests is X3 the XP. Yeah let me repeat that. Three times the xp for killing mobs and handing in quests.

First thing you want to do is make a second account and tie it to your main account so you can take advantage of the RaF bonus. Go to the main page https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml and click on the Recruit-A-Friend link. You will need to sign in under your main account and follow the instructions.

A couple of things to note:
1. You can send the RaF to yourself, IE the same email address as your main account.
2. You do not need to buy a second account to do this, but it is limited to level 20 on the trial account and you are limited to pre-BC races & zones.

After you send the RaF email to yourself, go check your email and make yourself a second account, a trial one is fine for our purposes here. Use the code that was sent to you when you make the trial account, this will link your main account with your new trial one so you can get the XP bonus.

Now that most of the red tape is out of the way, we can start to think about the actual game play of dual boxing. There are a few mods out there that will help. But I am only going to focus on one for the time being.

Two Box Toolkit, which you can get here: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/i ... olkit.html

Install the mod as you normally would any other in your interface directory. This mod will be running on our /follow toon. It makes accepting quests and so forth on your second toon a whole lot easier.

Now as far as what two toons to make, it’s really up to you. I like to have a good soloing toon as my main and a caster or whatever as my second. Hunter/Pally is a great combo. Rogue/Druid combos are pretty good as well.


Launch wow and make a new toon, window out and launch a second version of wow and log into your new trail account and make yourself a second toon. The cool thing is you don’t have to be in the same starting area so make a tauren and an undead if you want, you can just summon each other with the summon friend feature. Note with the trial account you won’t be able to do Blood Elves because it’s only a trial for WoW and not the TBC or WotLK expansions.

To summon each other you must add each character to your friend list /friend *character name* and again on the second toon. Now click on your friend list and you will see a new button next to the name that says summon. You do have to be in a group as well. You can summon once an hour with each toon, so set those hearth stones up in different areas so you can getto port around and just summon each other.

Set up two box toolkit on your /follow toon. The website above has a walk thru for the mod but the big thing to do is set up a master toon. Open the mod, it should have put a little icon on your minimap, and click set master. Type in your main toons name and you're good to go, now just click auto follow after combat and tab back to your main account.

You only need the mod running on your /follow account, not on your main.

Start questing. As you collect quests, share them with your second toon, he should auto accept any quests. I believe it’s defaulted to do this. If not, click back on the mod icon and click auto accept quests.

You will be tabbing in and out of each account a lot to hand in quests and so forth. Also for some reason the /follow toon doesn’t path great and on occasion you will need to tab back and run back into range and /follow again. Another reason I like the two box toolkit mod is if you get out of /follow range, it will whisper you an alert.

That’s pretty much it. Like I said this is basic just to see if you like it or not. A couple of things to keep in mind on the trial account is you cannot trade, AH or mail so you are out of luck for cash on your second toon.
You will level like a madman so I highly suggest rolling these toons on a server you have a high level toon on already so you can sugar daddy yourself some bags/cash/gear ect…

I have done this a couple of times now, it can be annoying at times but it also has some benefits as well. Your trial account is only good until level 20. You can also grant levels to a lower level character from your trial account. Its 1 level for every two you earn so once your trial toon hits level 20, you can grant 10 levels to a low level toon on your main account. Your account will be linked for 90 days, but the trial account is only good for 10 days. Your toons MUST BE GROUPED AND CLOSE TO EACH OTHER TO GET THE XP BONUS. Make sure they are standing next to each other when you hand it quests and so forth. Lastly the two toons have to be with-in 4 levels of each other for the XP bonus.

Well enough of the wall of text. I hope this helps those that were thinking about giving dual boxing a try. If you really like it you can just make your trial account into a second account and buy a time card. You will then be able to level to 60 on both toons and receive the XP bonus, not to mention a cool looking mount from the RaF program. Let me know if I forgot to mention something, I’m doing this from memory..

PS my best dual boxing time to get both toons from level 1 – 20 is just over 6 hours RL time.
A friend of mine had to turn down his graphics for it to run smooth, I didnt need to myslef, just thought I would mention that if anyone has lag issues.

Thanks Keelhaul, excellent info.

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