I did not find an article on using two boxes to play WOW using the search feature of this site.

Can someone link to me an article or website or company that sells the peripherals to do this? I will take any advice as well.

Do people two box to solo or do they do instances/raid while two boxing?

If you have 2 actual computers with 2 monitors side by side I highly recommend the utility synergy that will allow you to use the same input devices to run both just by mousing over back and forth.

Google for "sourceforge synergy" and you will find it for sure. I used this on my wifes laptop to powerlevel some twinks using my Shaman as a heal bot and it worked very well.

I just alt tab and run WoW again. That just opens up a second instance of the game, and you can do just about anything with it other than log on to the same account. If your comp can handle it, thats all it takes. I have an AMD 3000, 1GB of RAM and an ATI X800 and I can have 2 WoWs open simultaneously in a raid enviroment (best double boxing I've done is 2 rogues on PW).

Google is a fantastic resource.

www.google.com

I used to, on my laptop. When I was leveling this hunter, my 3rd, my friend let me use his hunter, and I ran myself through every instance up to about Mara for quick gear. It's pretty easy if it's the same class.

On my server, there is the Zins, A, B, C, D, and Xzin, X is the Main. 4 Mages and a Priest all on seperate boxes. It's rather impressive, he got them all rank 1 last month. Our Battle Group hates him.

And, my last story, when I played FFXI, my link leader Chainspell played 6 different classes on 6 different machines using the macro system and /follow.

It can be done, legally, with seperate accounts. It is however a lot of work to get setup correctly and macro'd how you like. It's rather impressive when done well though.

Synergy works really well for this.

If you only intend on running two instances, set the monitors near each other, and use some UI mod that lets you move important ui elements (especially hotbars and party frames) near the edge of both monitors. Have both systems running WoW in full screen windowed mode, and just flick the cursor to the edge of the screen to hit a button on the other system. Very easy.

I did priest+rogue on Loltheb last night due to a lack of healers /flex

Its pretty easy to do if you use window mode.

for those using synergy, do you have a problem with mouselook - right clicking and trying to spin the view rotates the camera rapidly and fairly uselessly, kind of like an amusement park. i've played with the various synergy options, the only way to make it work is to scroll lock the 2nd PC when its active and then the mouse works ok. This is a bit annoying though, even with a extra mouse button bound to scroll lock it means I can't just seamlessly shift windows, press a few buttons, and shift back.

I use synergy here at work and it certainly does the job, but it's far from bug free. Might be because I'm using one W2K box and one KDE box. But I often have it crash, ctrl/alt/shift get stuck down, stops communicating, etc. Sometimes to the extent where I have to restart both boxes to get it going again.

Other than the glitches it certainly does the job.

That program looks great ... not only for twoboxing but for normal work.

Thanks
Walmar

Does any one using the same OS on both boxes have the same problem?

Thanks
Walmer

Here's a half decent article on it that I remember reading a while back

http://wow.gameamp.com/guide/viewGuides/136.php!orderBy=

I've actually got 3 WoW accounts, with 6 60s spread across them (all horde) but never practically 2boxed to do anything more than open DM North/West, or take a twink through Deadmines or WC, to be brutally honest, I'm not sure if I have the coordination.

Although people are, understandably, very sceptical of this sort of behaviour, I'm pretty impressed by anyone who manages to make it work seamlessly in an instance setting. I'm almost 100% sure that if I had the skills, 2 manning the whole of BRD with a druid & hunter combo would be very easy & very profitable.

Walmar

I two boxed a mage and priest from ~20 to 60 together, using two PCs side by side. I didn't use any software beyond WoW with a few mods (decursive and target's target)


The trick to effective twoboxing is macros and some basic ergonomics.
The 'main' character I have on the pc in front of me, and the 'support' character PC is to my left. For soloing, the mage is main and the priest support. In a group, this gets reversed.
For both characters, I have the needed abilities and macros mapped to the numeric keypad. I use the mouse and WASD on the main pc to move around. During a fight, I have my right hand on the main PC's numeric keypad, and my left on the support PC's keypad. Since the keyboards are next to each other, I only need to move my hand a few inches to get from the main keyboard to the second. I only rarely have to use the mouse on the 2nd PC (only for looting quest items and handing in quests really)

Levelling wasn't really any faster than levelling a single character, since you are splitting mob xp between two characters. Of course, you do have two level 60s at the end rather than just one.
Another advantage is that you can do all of the outdoor 'elite' quests by yourself. On my solo characters, it was often hard to find a group for these and I usually ended up doing them while they were green or even deleting them altogether. Since these quests often give very nice rewards, it's a nice bonus to be able to do them at the appropriate level.

I didn't really do any appropriate level instances, as multiple elites generally mean I run oom before I can kill all of them. This is probably just a weakness of my particular class combination (mage/priest), other combinations may do better.

I play the zins, 5 undead females. Xzin (Priest) and A-Dzin (Mages). 5 boxes. 6 17" LCD monitors - 3 wide 2 high. Hardware keyboard multiplexers and clever keybinds/macros plus a ton of practice. I solo instances - I can solo every 5 man and about half of UBRS. I never have a tank - so to those who think you have to have the holy trinity to do fights - you are wrong. I can do a full baron run in about 30 minutes, with full warlord gear and tier 2/3 healing gear on the Priest. It would still be doable in greens/blues but not as easy. In short, not only is duo boxing quite doable in WoW, even 5 boxing is quite possible. I also spent quite a bit of time figuring out the complexities behind 40 boxxing MC but eventually decided the massive efffort was not worth the tier 1 rewards.

I recently obtained Warlord with all of the 5 at the same time (within 1% of each other) but declined to make the last 1600 games of WSG push to HWL, given the expansion is so near. 4 Pyros to the face at the same time is pretty deadly.

I have come across several other multiboxers in WoW but they seem to be far and few between. Ellay 3 boxes alliance mages (sometimes throws in a priest). Team Wizzy multiboxes in DAoC (http://www.teamwizzy.com) and Sam Da Man controls some 10+ characters in EQ (although his personal life is.... quite odd). Tinmar also multiboxed EQ (http://www.tinmar.de/madboxing.jpg). Duo boxing any instance is cake in WoW, once you get the learning curve down and assuming you start with the right equipment and UI mods/keybinds. I leveled up all of my characters at the same time, grinding instances and I have 5 boxed everything from Ragnaros to Nef - no Naxx yet mostly because some of the fights would be next to impossible to 5 box (thad?) but also because we always have to sit people as it is.

Synergy is a nice application but far too buggy for anything beyond simple tasks. The way the mouse is handled makes it spin far too rapidly, among other problems like progressive lag and the requirement to reboot it fairly often. KVM switches usually have a 1-2 second lag, which is too much for most fast paced combat. The best way I have found is to setup a wireless KB set to the same frequency (if cost is an issue) or investing in a keyboard multiplexer (which can run $200+) and identical hardware. This of course requires you to practice with the setup, etc. Some also find luck with the N52 USB controllers - although they are USB and generally limited to single cpu use at a time. The Ergodex DX1 also has some promise but also is USB only and as such is much harder to send to 2 separate machines. I suppose one could also rig up a dedicated USB box that would accept signals sent to it and simply translate those signals to the appropriate machine through a PS/2 port.... but one would assume that to be beyond the reach of most casual players.

Also, take a look at X-keys (www.xkeys.com). They also sell the Y-Mouse and some other neat gadgets for splitting or custom mapping keyboards. They even sell custom keyboard controllers - so if you are so inclined you could make your own programmable keyboard in whatever shape you wanted. Some people use their boards for cockpit simulators or model railroad controllers, among other things.

As for the "legality" - Bliz has stated multiple times that as long as you avoid using third party programs and you are actually there controlling the characters then there is absolutely nothing wrong with what I do, despite the various levels of fustration that has been voiced my way when I was pvping.

It is also possible to dual box on a single (somewhat beefy) machine with tons of ram (ideally 2 gigs) and a decent video card with reasonable settings. Just run both WoWs in windowed mode and make sure you have multiple monitors - that way you can eliminate synergy completely. You will still have to switch back often though and you can only send 1 command to a single WoW at a time but for MOST PvE encounters, that should be quite workable.

I play a hunter/priest combo on my workstation and a laptop.

I chose that combo since I am somewhat lazy and those classes can kill most stuff with a minimum of effort (autoshot+wand) but if need be it is also a very powerful combo. BM + Healer spec makes it possible for to do quite a bit of the 5 man content with a bit of patience and I have often brought them both along for groups aswell.

I use a Nostromo™ SpeedPad n52 for some of the repetitive stuff.

My mages are 30 fire 21 arcane, so no ice block there. I prefer a liberal application of DPS (Pyro+Pom/Pyro+Fire Blast as an opener) and no reaction time chain flash heals. Surprisingly enough, it works really well on most fights. I have been able to take the ZG berserkers down to about 6% health through the enrage but still working on how to down them solo.... they hit REALLY hard - but it is a 20 man dungeon afterall.

I can MC, 4x sheep and fear but mostly it boils down to kill the boss before I am killed. Each boss is a little different and requires a different strategy but most trash is aoe + aoe heal = loot. I have downed every boss of every 5 player dungeon as I was leveling up and am still working on UBRS solo runs. I guess I just really hate waiting to get a group together. Plus, when I have a group that I can rely on - things work out A LOT better. Oh - and getting all of the loot isnt half bad either :)

Wow. Is that still gaming or is it sports?

Seeing as I don't get paid a dime.... most likely not sports :)

I have to say, one of the [most frustrating] things I've come across in WoW is a driveby quadruple pom pyro. :\
Coordinated AE worked pretty well too, especially in AV. Having 4 mages run into a group of people doing 1200+ dps to everyone is pretty destructive.

oh let's keep the slurs to a minimum, if we can. Xzin, is there any chance there's a video of your playing out there? Either an in-game video of what your screens are outputting to you, or a real life video of what your hands are doing? Such a thing would be extremely interesting to people, i think. If you wanted the extra popularity, of course.

Seconding this. I'm interested in triple boxing TBC, and trying all this. Would love to see it in action.