TheFifthSock wrote on Jul 10
th, 2015 at 9:08am:
Which Boxer softwares have you tried?
Did you try ISBoxer? I'm a bit curious if it's any good for DDO and if it's worth trying it.
So far I've only dual and tripple boxed, but all manually. Will try to start with 6 accounts.
Yep IS Boxer a few years ago.
It works fine if you invest the time to set it up.
Triple boxing is doable without IS Boxer - depending on your setup.
The current DDO client makes Multi-boxing far easy to achieve.
The Akamai shit seems to chew up a lot of memory though, so I can only get 3 clients running on my main machine (8GB RAM) these days.
The key problem you will encounter - DOO does not have the /follow command like LOTRO. So even with toons with exactly matching speed, you will get out of sync (just different lag between client and server and lost packets). Stopping to resolve that takes time. Even in public places it can be annoying to have 1 or 2 members fall off walkways, get stuck in bushes etc.
As you get to higher levels, differences in gear, enhancements, class, buffs and feats will mean different movement speeds that are hard to align.
The second is coordination. You can actually setup a 6 man party to move, attack and work together. Using an overlay and a hotbar, you can put common abilities in the same spot on each account. For eg. you can put primary melee attack on slot 1 of hotbar, ranged on slot 2, self-heal on slot 3, key class ability on slot 4 etc.
You can transmit select target to each client and then have them all melee attack etc.
Ofc you can mix it up and have spellcasters cast spells instead of melee and have the healer use healing aura or group heals.
You only get 1 hotbar overlay of 8 (from memory) slots though.
I works ok for low level stuff like grinding Coin Lords favour on mule accounts.
So you can see that theoretically it can work, but it lacks nuance and tactics.
I found it hard to make work on Hard and Elite as the mobs that spawn are tougher and more numerous. It's easy to target one enemy at a time and focus damage, but this strategy doesn't always work in harder content where you're being attacked from multiple angles and different elevations.
Also, you can't realistically send your melee into melee, have your ranged hang back and have your spellcasters nuke other enemy casters. Too sophisticated to achieve.
At some point, I reached the realisation that is was not efficient to do this, nor was it convenient to have all the skills I needed in my party.
So you get to a point of parking 5 at entrance, but then you hit quests with artificial quest milestones requiring you to move the party.
Moving the party around really is a PITA.
I eventually landed on it being more effective to just run with a main, maybe have a secondary (Bard for me) and use hirelings as required for trapping etc. If I'm farming for something, I will run up to 3 clients just to get the extra chest pulls.
So your mileage may vary, so long as your expectations are realistic. It felt fun to do for awhile, but you aren't going to be steamrolling Elite content.