2020

A Gift

I don’t make friends easily. I’m quite introverted, and I’m hard to get along with. I’m opinionated, and I’m not good at just letting things go. When we moved to our isolated post I knew that these characteristics might work against me.

My neighbour is another RCMP family, and they’ve done everything within their power to make us feel welcome in the community. They’re finished their duration at the post, and are on their way to another – and I’ll miss them dearly. I decided to knit them a set of cotton wash cloths as a thank you for everything they’ve done. Cotton wash cloths are one of my favourite things. They last a good while, they’re super scrubby, and they’re just comforting. I hope they like them!

Multiboxing Goals Accomplished

As of this post, my team of 5 are level 35, and still doing random dungeons. The bonus you get for joining a dungeon queue is pretty nice, especially since there’s still 100% bonus. It could be a lot faster but I’m still learning – and man do I have a LOT to learn.

Yesterday I spent some time watching YouTube videos on how to set up VideoFX within ISBoxer. This is a pretty simple concept and it’s how most multiboxers fish, if you’ve ever seen that happen.

You set up one person (or multiple, if you wish) as a source, and then you create a little source area that covers a portion of their screen. In my dungeon case I’ve covered my grid area, where I’m using clique to heal. Basically just a rectangle with my group. When I mouse over the rectangle (while on my druid healer) and use a hotkey, she’ll heal. Left and right mouse and center are all bound to heals.

Then I set up a viewer window. In this case I’m using my main account on my main monitor, and 4 other accounts on my secondary monitor in a tile layout. Anyway, with a source, and a viewer, the rest is simple. It simply broadcasts that small portion of the healer onto the main window I’m playing on. Even if I swap characters. This is a feature in microsoft that ISBoxer makes use of, and it means I can be on my tank, tanking, and then mouse over that grid/clique area and use my hotkeys to heal without having to actually turn on broadcast, or swap to my healer.

It makes things a LOT easier. Of course my druid also only has a handful of heals at 35, so I’m still learning, and I haven’t hotkeyed everything – but I feel like I’m making some pretty good progress.

Aside from the levels, I also set everyone up with a guild so they have a place to stash goods, and I got everyone some engineering. I’m not convinced I need even more tailors at this time, I might set them up as tailors for now just for extra cloth and then we’ll see later on. I’m also planning on moving most of these characters to my main account once they’re leveled up. Blizzard makes it pretty simple for players to pay to transfer characters between their own bnet, so I’m not expecting any issues.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Multiboxing some Dungeons

I don’t really enjoy leveling up in World of Warcraft these days because I have done it so many times in the past (I have all classes at 120 for alliance, and most for horde). Thing is, if you want to unlock heritage armour (especially for allied races) you have to level up. Not boost.

That’s where the decision to create a dungeon team that I could level up with came from.

I made a vulpera monk, vulpera warrior (just because), a mag’har orc mage, a highmountain tauren druid, and an orc hunter (I haven’t unlocked all of the horde races yet). I multibox all on one PC thanks to some upgrades (5 is pretty easy, I typically do 8) and I use a few addons like EMA, Dejunk, GSE, and one 3rd party software called ISBoxer. ISBoxer has been around for ages, and before anyone asks, yes, it’s completely safe to use and doesn’t violate the TOS for Blizzard. In fact the ISBoxer community is some of the friendliest and dedicated bunch I’ve ever had the pleasure of talking with. Their discord is filled with multiboxers of all ranges, from beginners to those so well versed they’re running mythic+ with their teams. It’s a passion, just like gaming.

Anyway, I haven’t optimized ISBoxer yet because honestly even though I’ve been playing 5 accounts for a while I’ve just never taken the time to set it up properly. For dungeons, you REALLY want to set it up. You want hotkeys so your healers actually, you know, heal. At the beginning this isn’t a big deal. I have a very simple macro my healer spams to heal the tank. That’s it.

Later on I’ll want her to cycle through the group, and I might even swap my tank from the monk to the warrior and then have the monk do both dps & backup heal. You can get REALLY creative with things. I’ll probably want to get more heal addons like clique or healbot, and I need to keep learning ISBoxer because it is just amazing what you can do with profiles.

The team went from 20-24 last night with 2 dungeons. I didn’t bother doing any quests as I wanted to learn the ropes. I had an absolute blast though and finding little challenges like this to do always gets me so excited to play.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Hello? Is this thing On?

Welp. I haven’t written since the 1st of May – though I may go back and change that with backlogs, we’ll see. Why haven’t I written? There’s a number of reasons but the first one is because I simply haven’t had the brain power or the time.

We’re under lockdown with covid-19 and have been for some time. Complete lockdown. We can’t even go out of the community for groceries. At the same time that all of ‘that’ happened, we got the official diagnosis for my son – autistic, echolilalo, and learning disability.

At the same time as that, our basement flooded with sewage, the tire to the car was flat, and other every day things all happened. All the things. All at once. It has been too much for me. Wait, no, saying it has been too much for me is an understatement.

There’s no family or friends to help and there’s no escaping the stress because we’re not allowed to go anywhere, so I’ve been trying to maintain some semblance of normal by knitting, spinning, gardening, taking care of the family – but absolutely nothing is ‘normal’ these days, and I dislike everything about this new way of life we have.

Hopefully I get back to blogging soon.

Shadowlands Goals

Looking at the bigger long term picture there’s some definite things I want to get done before Shadowlands comes out. I’ve been trying to put them on paper so I have a little bit of direction, even if I don’t accomplish it all. It’s just meant to give me a bit of a ‘hey why not work on this’ feeling, not a strict rule or anything.

  1. Level all of the crafting professions on my main account (so far I only have tailoring, enchanting, inscription, and engineering finished, and only two of those are on my main account).
  2. Unlock the rest of the allied races (I’m very close on this one at least).
  3. Level up a warrior.
  4. Obtain the monk class mount (for some reason I’m struggling with this, I can’t seem to get the chain for it working properly since I swapped to and from alliance/horde a few times).
  5. Work on getting a few pets I still don’t have (some TCG, quested, etc).

There’s more that should be on the list, but I can’t think of it right now so I’m going to move forward with what I have and perhaps add on to it as time goes on. We’ll see. Hopefully I at least get the crafting portion done, because that is something I really want out of the way. I imagine once BFA is done I will have very little desire to ever craft that stuff again (especially not having Rk3).

Nomadic Gamer