Concept question - setting up WoW characters

I'm playing my first team. Really enjoying multiboxing - makes a new game of WoW Classic for me, I've played the standard game for many years.

I have it working pretty well. Hat's off to MiRai for a massive amount of helpful content on this - well done dude. I used his VFX for healers, mostly sending keystrokes to WoW action bars. I have 2 characters doing heals, and his videos were critical in getting it working.

But I think I am doing the standard noob thing here. All kinds of hacks that work, but probably aren't very robust. So my question is, what is the 'best' way to set up ISBoxer for WoW characters?

I get that 'best' is subjective. For me, it means 'how do I keep ISBoxer in it's box?" That means setting up ISBoxer so that it could run on a set of 5 raid toons, all individually set up to play solo, with their own macros and keybinds and whatnot.

It seems like you can use ISBoxer's WoW macro system and key map system to just call every in-game command from an ISBoxer created macro, using vacant keybinds. The team of WoW characters don't need a single bind or ability placement anywhere, only to run the ISBoxer addon. I feel like I am making a mistake by using (for example) castsequence macros created in WoW, bound to keys in WoW, and calling them via ISBoxer broadcast keys. Should I do it all in ISBoxer instead?

Is that the better way? My current team is working pretty well (to level 30 or so with 5 different characters), but I know if I tried to join a real group of players with any of the characters it would be a total mess.

For those of you who know this software well, do you "play the multibox game completely in ISBoxer"? Or do you mix it all together and keep your characters exclusively together?

This can't be the first time this question has been asked, and so I apologise for failing at searching. Appreciate any help.

[Wizeowel]

I started off like you, with having to compromise between solo actionbars and multiboxing actionbars.

Now I have 90% in macros and it feels better that way. The mapped keys are easier to debug when the actions read like 'Sunder', 'Shield Block', 'Charge' instead of 4, 3, 1 and then not knowing why at some point I added 9 which I think might have been battle shout until I moved it to U.

Nice one, thankyou.

So, can I create 'Consecrate" in ISBoxer and have it just call that ability in the game? What I am trying to conceptualise is if I make ISBoxer basically self-contained for any multiboxing I do.

While I likely won't get this extreme, it seems like you could create a Paladin profile in ISBoxer and have it drive a WoW Paladin by calling the named abilities via Named WoW macros that are virtualised in the ISBoxer in-game addon.

If you did that fully, then it seems you wouldn't need to bind any in-game keys at all (outside the ISBoxer controls) and you could just plug in any Paladin character to your team and it would just work (no matter what it's in-game button setup was, assuming no conflicts). If I use mostly RCtrl+RAlt type keybinds, the risk of conflict is pretty remote.

Do I have this right? If so, I can see myself basically creating an ISBoxer team profile for WoW that I can use on any set of characters that match the profiles, and don't have to worry about their in-game key bindings at all. For example, I should be able to create a Horde side version of my current team (keeping only the composition, and let's forget for a minute about my pally tank) and play it right out of the box, without faffing around with in-game keybinds, or remembering where I put the buttons on the other team set.

[Wizeowel]

That's right.

Especially using the "Pro" setup, with virtualised Key Maps and your own well-defined Advanced Target Groups, you can certainly create generic key maps so that new characters can be added with minimum hassle.

Be aware though, that your levelling rotations might change over time. For example, I made a button that switches my paladin healer's melee rotation from Seal of Light to Seal of Wisdom. At the moment it uses a key map with 2 steps, and I disable one or the other step to switch spell. Of course if I made a new paladin s/he wouldn't have either spell until level 30/38. So I'd have to think of something to compartmentalise such abilities that are learned or a talent tree choice. Luckily ISBoxer facilitates dynamic macros, where each line can be optional based on character name or ATG, see https://isboxer.com/wiki/WoW:Macro

Thank you. I really appreciate the guidance.

I think I will try to progressively move my team's instructions from WoW into ISBoxer. It's all working fine and I know I'll break stuff, so it's one of those jobs you do after getting tired of playing WoW for the day and that you do in steps so you can revert the screwups. But this way I'll learn the ISB software and decrease the customisation of WoW itself.

I'll be happy if I get to the stage where I tweak the ISB profile for each change of spells. I do that now quite a bit with castsequence macros on the characters, but I'm just doing it by changing a WoW macro called by a simple common keybind. I have blank spots in the WoW action bar where I want characters to do nothing. It works, but it doesn't feel right.

The jump to putting it all on the ISBoxer side and just calling WoW abilities from ISB seems the key step here.

Thanks again for the responses. Really helpful.

[Wizeowel]

No problem, glad to help.

For me, the key step was virtualisation using the Pro setup, although gladly I found that early on. Have you done that? Or were you using the regular setup in the wizard and letting it bind all 1-0 keys?

If not, I suggest you make a completely fresh setup and follow this excellent video series from Mirai https://youtu.be/iqHaH4gbrmo

You can keep your current setup for playing until the new one is ready. Just remember to re-export whichever setup you are planning to use.

Exactly what I plan to do.

For anyone reading this, what I was trying to get in my head turned out to be the Pro setup. When you move from "hey this is neat, I can get my team to do stuff" to the point where you say "this is getting messy, is there a way to get the whole system done in ISBoxer" - do what Wizeowl suggested to me.

Being able to build it alongside a working setup is great. Excellent advice - which I'm taking right now. Thanks again for the help.