'Tis the Busy Season

Sorry for the lack of updates on my adventures. I've recently expanded my team a little by having the option of swapping my Warlock or Druid into the 4th and 5th slot replacing Slatzc or Slatzd if I choose too. This has been great for generating extra Emblems of Frost which I'm using to deck out my tank in the new crafted gear which is VERY expensive.

Absolutely loving Patch 3.3. The new random dungeon system is incredible. I had a few interesting bugs the first few days where I had dungeons with 1 or 3 bosses out of 5 availible but I've geared up quite a bit on my Shamans and I probably have another 70 or so badges before I'm done with Triumph PvE gear.

After reading alot of Team Skekraft's blog and decided I loved the idea of multiple Retribution Paladins. I already have a large amount of weapons and armour on my main Slatters but I really never play Retribution. I've always loved tanking and thats how I gear him. With my shamans getting very close to being as geared as they can from badges I think I will be focusing on collecting up some BoA Gear and making myself a DK + 4 Ret Team. If I decide I find 5 Paladins easier to play dropping in my main will be quite easy thanks to ISBoxer.

I've decided I'm not going to use RAF I'm simple going to stick to BoA Items. Using the DK for PvE/PvP might work out very well or it might just end up being too complex as I've never really done melee classes. At either rate I have another month or so before I get back to work so have plenty of time to experiment.

My new routine in WoW (and to-do list) should look something like this:

1x Prot Pally/4x Shamans. Do one Random Dungeon for Frost Badges.
1x Prot Pally/2x Shaman, Warlock Druid: Do one random dungeon for frost badges.
JC/Mining x 2/Alchemy/Tailor x2/Inscription - do daily/weekly x-mutes if can be bothered.
Do weekly Wintergrasp Quests on Paladin/Shaman. I love Wintergrasp!
Do weekly Karazhan Speed Clear for Mount if I can be bothered.

Focus on levelling my Ret / DK Team. Take it nice and slow and enjoy the levelling process before it all changes in Cataclysm.

This should give me plenty of options for things to do and maybe a new focus in Cataclysm. I know that my 'main' will never change - he simple has too much time/blood/sweat/tears invested into him.

So Slatsdk/Slatspa/Slatspb/Slatspc/Slatspd are born. Horrible names. Perhaps I should rethink a new naming convention?

A safe and merry Christmas to everyone.

A new server and a new faction

So after having alot of my friends decide to try out Aion or simple just take a break from World Of Warcraft it was pretty clear that things where no longer going to work out all that well on the server I was on. After finding out who was still interested in playing and who was moving on, I decided it was time to find a new home.

After a bit of research on the WoW Realm Forums and some discussion in the multi-boxing community over at d-b I decided that the Guild Southern Armada and the server Caelestraez would be a good fit. The guild seemed very casual and relaxed and consisted of mature gamers. They still did 10 man and 25 man raiding but there was no pressure and after having a chat with a few people it definetly seemed like the right fit for me.

Two other boxers where also on the server - Ooga and Astrid/Simulacra. This was a huge bonus as well as playing with other boxers is always great fun, especially in PvP.

So a large amount of money later and I am now Slatters the Blood Elf Paladin, and Slatza - d Orc Shamans. I must say I have really missed horde and have loved revisting the capital citieis and the atmosphere that is the Horde faction.

To top it all off, my Nvidia GTX 280 started having pink screens upon booting which gradually got worse and worse. I ended up grabbing a Powercolor ATI Radeon 5870 which is a very impressive card and I have noticed a very large performance increase over the 280.

I steered clear of the 295 simple because its a dual-gpu solution on one card and this doesn't really give any performance boost in WoW.

A new journey

So after hardware multiboxing for quite some time in TBC then taking a long break and dabbling in Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, I've come full circle.

A few things have changed however, I no longer have 5 PC's and look like I could command NASA in my study. This has appeased my fiance greatly. I also dont have an insane power bill - nor require the AC on in the middle of winter as my room got so warm.

After playing around with a few different software options like Innerspace and Keyclone - I have settled on using Keyclone. The support the author gives over at dual-boxing.com has always been excellent. So before I could seriously get started I needed to make a few upgrades to my machine and ended up picking up some solid state disks and another 4GB of RAM.

This puts my system at the following specs:
Intel Q9550
Asus P5Q Motherboard
8GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 8500
Asus GTX280 1GB
120GB OCZ Summit SSD (for OS/Applications)
60GB OCZ Summit SSD (for WoW)
320G WD HDD (For Movies/Music/Photos)
Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio PCI-Ex

I am using a Dell 27" Display as my main monitor and a Dell 24" Display as my secondary. Both have a native resolution of 1920x1200.

I reformatted my PC and loaded up Windows 7 RC 7100. I am extremely impressed. It is rock solid stable - all my drivers loaded correctly. Initially I had a few crashes but I worked out that I needed to load the X-Fi drivers and not just use the default MS ones and the crashing went away.

I also discovered that my sound defaulted to 7.1 Surround Sound which made for some interesting in-game sound at first as I only have a standard 2 speaker system.

So now I had a decent system, I had my software picked out and my OS installed with all my drivers up to date - I just needed to setup and get started.