To start with I have played EQ (off and on) since 1999. A friend introduced me to it and we played together for 3-4 years. I got the idea to multibox from him. He had 6 PC's, 6 Mice and 6KB's. U shaped desk and a swivel office chair. Watching him play that way was ... eye opening to say the least. I tried it with just 2 PC's and had a hard time keeping up. In 2019 when the itch hit to try EQ again, I found Macroquest and a new world opened up to me. So I paid my dues here and to ISBoxer and spent hours getting KissAssist setup. The learning curve is quite steep, but I did learn and got my 6 box crew to where it could run on it's own if I wanted. Wonderful feeling, almost as good as the beginning of EQ. Well RL reached up and slapped me across the face and I had to quit playing games, period, for awhile. And when I finally had the time to get back to playing, I chose to play FFXIV. It is said that FFXIV has the best storyline of any of these MMO type games. And they were right. Very immersive, but alas, after you complete the story, then like all these games it just becomes a grind and I get bored with that part easily. So here I am, back to EQ and multiboxing.
I thought to make a journal about my adventure this time and this is it. I will discuss setup, groups, software and leveling here. My goal is to reach lvl 120 on this group since I have never done that in EQ before. And I figure that will take awhile to do.
So as to setup: I just upgraded my PC recently to a AMD Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb Ram, Radeon 6600 GPU, Veiwsonic XG270QC 27" for Display 1 and an old Acer H233H 23" for Display 2, I have another 23"monitor for browser and other stuff.
I use ISBoxer for Windows management and layouts and little bit for Mapped keys. I use MacroQuest for 6 boxing and Muleassist with Maui for controlling my group.
6 box group makeup: WAR CLR ENC MAG DRU RNG and I am seriously considering substituting a Bard for the RNG, but haven't yet.
So to start off, I ran each individual character through the tutorial to level 5. I used Tutorial.mac [Macro] Longest Tutorial Macro I've seen. to accomplish that. It did get stuck on the Spider Caves quest though. But it got me though all the mundane stuff in the tutorial. Then I spent a couple of hours setting up Muleassist and MAUI (GUI for Muleassist). A lot of reading and going through each character making little changes to the GUI. Had to go through each about 3 times to get everything the way I wanted it. Couple of tips I learned the hard way:
1. Use the Numeric keypad on your KB to make changes in GUI, it kinda drove me nuts trying to figure out why it wasn't accepting my "1" from the keys above the letters on the KB.
2. I use Dannet and there is a place to enable that under the General section 0=off, 1=on, by default it is set to off.
3. When you are setting up spells to use (in the DPS section) there are 3 boxes to fill in. First is the name of the spell but that is provided when you pick the spell from the menu. 2nd is Options box. And if you notice there is a little question mark next to it. Hover over this to see what is required. I had to look all this up, (in this post MuleAssist Instructions & Settings Info) which is why it took me so long to set it up. I would save you that pain. Also make sure you understand options here, like when you want to cast the spell and /assisting whom. An example of this would be:
Mage:
DPS1=Malosenia|99|debuffall|malo|always ... you need to understand what all this means. And debuffs like Snare require different settings. And you put those in the DPS section. Look for a check box labeled "Debuffs". And 3rd is the Conditions box, again it has a info for it. It defaults to FALSE a lot, and I found you need to set it to TRUE for certain spells to cast.
After setting everything up I was off to see the Wizard and no, this wasn't Kansas. Muleassist works great, I ran around torturing Gnolls for a couple of hours and having a blast. I found out real quick that the Mage is really overpowered at this point. Mobs were dying so fast I had hardly anytime to react at all. So I shut off any kind of DPS spell casting as I wanted to level up everyone's combat skills as much as possible. That was better but the mobs were still going down pretty fast.
Oh and before I get too far into the adventure, there is some more setup to do. Got all your characters created? 6 accounts? Know which server your going to play on? BTW I chose Firiona Vie (sheesh all those years and I never knew there was an extra "i" in that name). Better write all this shit down too lol. Now there are some great ease of life MQ2 macros to get going right away (like right after you login on all your characters. Ok so might as well start from the beginning:
1. Get Redguides Launcher installed, do the login thang, make sure it is up to date, click on Settings and fill that info in, click on Very Vanilla button and over on the right side (towards the top) is a little magic button called Launch MQ, click that. (Btw there are guides to all this on this site). No you can't see what it does yet lol, just click it anyways.
2. Start Innerspace and then ISBoxer...if you don't know what this is, then don't worry about it and skip to #3.
3. Look on your Task Bar lower right hand corner. See the /\ icon, left click that. See the MQ icon? RIGHT click on that and it brings up a menu. Now I am not going into detail here. There a couple guides here that tell you how to setup MQ2 Autologin. Like this one MQ2 Autologin (Sic has a great video on this) that shows you how to make a profile and that is how you can get all 6 of your accounts logged in all the way to their respective places where they were last logged out or the beginning of the tutorial, whichever applies. This is where you run that tutorial macro I mentioned above.
4. So did you watch Sic's other videos? You should.. 3 Quality of life macros. Get those setup. Be sure to use Sic's super slick AutoAccept script it's awesome (but be sure to convert the command lie to Dannet, you studied up on Dannet right?). This will auto invite your groupies and they will accept the invites. This way you don't have to swap to every character and click on "Follow", like Sic said. quality of life.
5. Pick your poison errr...your main software to run your characters. You probably should have done this already. I have used Kissassist before and got pretty proficient with it and it ran well. This time I am using Muleassist and they are very close in function, so I felt comfortable with it. Also it has a in game GUI called MAUI. Just makes things easier. Everyone here says to just "try it and see if you like it". I am recommending either of these 2 for any beginners out there. It is still a steep learning curve as it is.
6. Now go and have some fun slaughtering Gnolls lol.
I leveled my team up to lvl 10 and still have a few quests to go to finish. Poor Gnolls, anyone remember the Gnoll trains in Blackburrow? Yeah I feel real sorry for those little bastards. Then it is off to PoK and run that tutorial macro. And I need to make a really big decision. Details upcoming.
Now this is getting a lot more involved that I anticipated, so I'll break it off here. Consider it Chapter 1, to be continued and all that jazz. Next time I will discuss in game socials (macros) that do all sorts of stuff for you. Until then, enjoy yourselves.
Vrak
I thought to make a journal about my adventure this time and this is it. I will discuss setup, groups, software and leveling here. My goal is to reach lvl 120 on this group since I have never done that in EQ before. And I figure that will take awhile to do.
So as to setup: I just upgraded my PC recently to a AMD Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb Ram, Radeon 6600 GPU, Veiwsonic XG270QC 27" for Display 1 and an old Acer H233H 23" for Display 2, I have another 23"monitor for browser and other stuff.
I use ISBoxer for Windows management and layouts and little bit for Mapped keys. I use MacroQuest for 6 boxing and Muleassist with Maui for controlling my group.
6 box group makeup: WAR CLR ENC MAG DRU RNG and I am seriously considering substituting a Bard for the RNG, but haven't yet.
So to start off, I ran each individual character through the tutorial to level 5. I used Tutorial.mac [Macro] Longest Tutorial Macro I've seen. to accomplish that. It did get stuck on the Spider Caves quest though. But it got me though all the mundane stuff in the tutorial. Then I spent a couple of hours setting up Muleassist and MAUI (GUI for Muleassist). A lot of reading and going through each character making little changes to the GUI. Had to go through each about 3 times to get everything the way I wanted it. Couple of tips I learned the hard way:
1. Use the Numeric keypad on your KB to make changes in GUI, it kinda drove me nuts trying to figure out why it wasn't accepting my "1" from the keys above the letters on the KB.
2. I use Dannet and there is a place to enable that under the General section 0=off, 1=on, by default it is set to off.
3. When you are setting up spells to use (in the DPS section) there are 3 boxes to fill in. First is the name of the spell but that is provided when you pick the spell from the menu. 2nd is Options box. And if you notice there is a little question mark next to it. Hover over this to see what is required. I had to look all this up, (in this post MuleAssist Instructions & Settings Info) which is why it took me so long to set it up. I would save you that pain. Also make sure you understand options here, like when you want to cast the spell and /assisting whom. An example of this would be:
Mage:
DPS1=Malosenia|99|debuffall|malo|always ... you need to understand what all this means. And debuffs like Snare require different settings. And you put those in the DPS section. Look for a check box labeled "Debuffs". And 3rd is the Conditions box, again it has a info for it. It defaults to FALSE a lot, and I found you need to set it to TRUE for certain spells to cast.
After setting everything up I was off to see the Wizard and no, this wasn't Kansas. Muleassist works great, I ran around torturing Gnolls for a couple of hours and having a blast. I found out real quick that the Mage is really overpowered at this point. Mobs were dying so fast I had hardly anytime to react at all. So I shut off any kind of DPS spell casting as I wanted to level up everyone's combat skills as much as possible. That was better but the mobs were still going down pretty fast.
Oh and before I get too far into the adventure, there is some more setup to do. Got all your characters created? 6 accounts? Know which server your going to play on? BTW I chose Firiona Vie (sheesh all those years and I never knew there was an extra "i" in that name). Better write all this shit down too lol. Now there are some great ease of life MQ2 macros to get going right away (like right after you login on all your characters. Ok so might as well start from the beginning:
1. Get Redguides Launcher installed, do the login thang, make sure it is up to date, click on Settings and fill that info in, click on Very Vanilla button and over on the right side (towards the top) is a little magic button called Launch MQ, click that. (Btw there are guides to all this on this site). No you can't see what it does yet lol, just click it anyways.
2. Start Innerspace and then ISBoxer...if you don't know what this is, then don't worry about it and skip to #3.
3. Look on your Task Bar lower right hand corner. See the /\ icon, left click that. See the MQ icon? RIGHT click on that and it brings up a menu. Now I am not going into detail here. There a couple guides here that tell you how to setup MQ2 Autologin. Like this one MQ2 Autologin (Sic has a great video on this) that shows you how to make a profile and that is how you can get all 6 of your accounts logged in all the way to their respective places where they were last logged out or the beginning of the tutorial, whichever applies. This is where you run that tutorial macro I mentioned above.
4. So did you watch Sic's other videos? You should.. 3 Quality of life macros. Get those setup. Be sure to use Sic's super slick AutoAccept script it's awesome (but be sure to convert the command lie to Dannet, you studied up on Dannet right?). This will auto invite your groupies and they will accept the invites. This way you don't have to swap to every character and click on "Follow", like Sic said. quality of life.
5. Pick your poison errr...your main software to run your characters. You probably should have done this already. I have used Kissassist before and got pretty proficient with it and it ran well. This time I am using Muleassist and they are very close in function, so I felt comfortable with it. Also it has a in game GUI called MAUI. Just makes things easier. Everyone here says to just "try it and see if you like it". I am recommending either of these 2 for any beginners out there. It is still a steep learning curve as it is.
6. Now go and have some fun slaughtering Gnolls lol.
I leveled my team up to lvl 10 and still have a few quests to go to finish. Poor Gnolls, anyone remember the Gnoll trains in Blackburrow? Yeah I feel real sorry for those little bastards. Then it is off to PoK and run that tutorial macro. And I need to make a really big decision. Details upcoming.
Now this is getting a lot more involved that I anticipated, so I'll break it off here. Consider it Chapter 1, to be continued and all that jazz. Next time I will discuss in game socials (macros) that do all sorts of stuff for you. Until then, enjoy yourselves.
Vrak
