[UP FOR DEBATE] A Four Box Combo

Hello everyone, I am a long-time lurker, and never-time poster. Please go easy on me. Furthermore, please understand that, while I realize many variations of my question may have been asked over time, I still find mine unique enough to post a new thread. If you do not agree, then I apologize in advance for wasting your click.

I recently quit FFXI. As recently as 6 months ago. I have since decided to start back up again fresh. Doing the quests and missions over again has been refreshing. But the main agitation that caused me to leave in the first place was not being able to find partners to do low-man content with...and also the fear of failing to perform adequately in a low man situation and being ostracized.

I was playing at a time where low man was already staunchly established as the status quo. It's hard to learn in that situation when it doesn't come at someone else's expense. Honestly answer this...how does GoV prepare a person to act intuitively in a typical Aby low-man group? Answer, it doesn't.

My solution to this, whether you agree or not, was to activate 4 accounts. I am a professional programmer and I am leaning heavily on the SpellCast plugin. Thus far I can easily support all 4 characters in a typical GoV alliance. One of the boxes is a WHM...I really do not care for this class nor have I ever...I have it set up to pretty much auto-pilot. One is a career WAR...I very actively play this box.

At this point the 2 other boxes are fairly immature.

The nature of my question for those that choose not to read further is fairly simple:

1)

Can anyone recommend an ideal setup for 4 boxes that will actually enable me to beat some content that I couldn't with just 2. i.e. Original Assault Missions for instance.

Or possibly beat it faster or easier?

Keep in mind that I'm starting fresh...so I won't have things like the best atma. Actually, I won't have any.

As an example, here is a party I came up with:

MNK/WAR
WAR/SAM
BRD/DNC
WHM/BLM

I figure the advantages of this setup is that I should be able to cap haste & actually cap delay on the warrior. I should also eventually be able to access all of the WS procs on the career WAR.

Before I go do all of that leveling though, I wanted to open it up to some experts to here if they had any suggestions on party balance.

Keep in mind I am 4-boxing, so what works for 4 skilled and competent players will not necessarily translate well here.

2)

I have a large amount of cruor that I would like to brew with.

My first goal is to 4 box every single Aby clears all by myself.

Before I quit I leaned heavily on others to help me...there is nothing to take the sense of accomplishment out of something than just having someone random add you to their party for 30 seconds while you get "the win."

News Flash: This game isn't fun without goals.

So I've set the goal for myself to beat every single Aby boss by myself.

Even if it means this:

BST/WHM
BST/WHM
BST/WHM
BST/WHM

Whatever it takes!

Can anyone recommend an ideal 4-box for beating the first 3 Aby bosses(Briareus,Glavoid,Kukulkan)?

Please keep in mind that I am a fairly new player who has never been particularly good, never had particularly good luck meeting friends, and doesn't have a lot of time in general.

Please also keep in mind I don't have a single atma to my name, so if that is along the path to completing my goal, please list the actual names of the atmas, the boss they are obtained from, and what conditions are necessary to get the atma. That way the thread can be productive to new players, rather than a cluster of abbreviations like RR/VV/GH.

Remember, I am trying to get Aby clears. That means I can't even set 3 atma.

I definitely would like to say thanks in advance for the great answers I know I will get. The amount of knowledge in this forum is truly overwhelming.

Looking forward to reading your responses!

Thanks for having a look.

Well... You honestly are going to have to ask yourself how far you want to delve into third party applications. Typically your efficiency will suffer tremendously with each character added beyond 2.

If you are wishing to go into the use of applications beyond spellcast, you will find yourself much more successful and overall a happier person. I am not advocating this and you will find few on this forum that will.

Setups all vary depending on what you choose.

Simply, no you cannot quad box your way through abyssea. You stretch yourself to thin and will fail more often than not. (I have access to 4 top geared characters with the best atmas. I know this)

If I were you. I would focus primarily on a dual box setup to begin with. Mnk/War with a Whm/Sch. Gear them both... Atmas help but in the long run your duo is only as strong as your weakest character and if you flounder your whm, you are floundering yourself.

After that, you're looking at adding a support. If you're farming papers / seals... Blm... if you're soloing empy weapons... War.

Curing yourself via multisend would be pretty easy.. I just dunno how you would control the WAR and MNK at the same time. If you Focused on the MNK, using multisend to keep cured and songs up, and only brought in the WAR when needed, it may work out.

I regularly play three characters, and occasionally deal with four if I'm really bored when my friend is offline and I'm generally using the following job combinations:

• NIN/WAR (main), WHM/BLM (or SCH if I'm procing around Darksday), BLM/BRD, BLU/THF

• MNK (main), WHM/BLM, THF, WAR or NIN if I need to trigger red intermittently

Those two sets will get you far, but if you don't need to proc grellow, you can modify the first set to just be NIN, WAR (this covers all procs), WHM, [Whatever helps you kill, maybe BRD or RDM without Atma]

MNK/WAR/NIN WHM BRD BLM is an effective setup that's fairly hands-free as far as your secondary characters go, and it covers nearly everything proc-wise for Abyssea.

Rank 10 in Windurst unlocks a 5/tic refresh atma that also has a small amount of INT and MAB. That'll make life easier to start with. Alternatively, A Shantotto Ascension addon also offers a 5/tic refresh atma that has 5% Fast Cast and 12% movement speed as well.

Briareus should be pretty easily doable without atmas given that setup, particularly with a MNK tank. Alternatively, you could kill Cirein-croin in Misareaux Coast as he's also extremely easy. You'll definitely want to hold off on killing Glavoid until you have atmas... Kukulkan can be a pain too with his constant terror gaze unless you have an effective job to back-tank him (BLU, NIN) or are willing to manage two melees (you'd want good mage atmas for that). Priority atmas are Razed Ruins from Ironclad Pulverizer (best melee atma available) and Minikin Monstrosity from Dvalinn (best mage atma available). Both are killable without good atmas, though Pulverizer may get annoying at low HP in a 4-box setup.

Beyond that, for Kukulkan you're going to want two melee unless you want to nuke and kite it. With his gaze attack, one person generally ends up having to zombie it.

For Glavoid, if you don't have the capability to on-event Stun, you'll either need to go NIN or bring a BRD with Scherzo with you.

Briareus is nothing special. If it happens to hit a 1111 Strike, don't run that Colossal Slams into your mules. :S

I'd start with Sobek, to be honest, so you have at least a semi-decent atma.

A friend and I dual boxed our own characters and we were able to do everything in aby, including duoing both of our emps with the following jobs.

WHM/BLM (stun is a powerful tool....also D2 :3), WAR/whatever, NIN/WAR, THF/NIN sometimes /dnc

This would work great for abyssea. You have all red procs if that is what your looking for.

As for Yellow procs change the WAR to BLM.
As for Blue procs obviously MNK

For outside abyssea idk. Just a suggestion.

Yellow proc farming
NIN/WAR or MNK/War(nin) depending on NM
BLM/BRD
WHM/RDM
BLU/RDM (or /blm if more stun is needed)

Red Prco farming
NIN/WAR
WAR/SAM
WHM/RDM
RDM/BLM (stun ***)

Blue Proc farming (Always in blunt time)
MNK/WAR
WHM/SAM (Meditate incase its hexa)
RDM/BLM
SAM (To give Tp to whm on a miss or dirty)

Thats what i try to grab anyway when i lowman most things. Some NMs are different but this fits most situations.

I don't know much about 4 boxing or how the hell you'd program it, but I'd do a couple of things...

first, grab some atmas like people are saying, like RR for your melee and MM for mages. It's imperative, as the content is scaled to them. ***is only going to get easier as you get better, which is the whole basis for everyone's obsession with character improvement... you can't pass up on the biggest boost available.

second, maybe think about replacing your bard with a RDM and grab phalanx. It will keep your tank alive, which when your solo with multiple characters is the difference between success and failure because it's hard to recover.

third, learn to love your WHM. Even dual boxing I've noticed that the more you let your DD/Tank autoattack and manage your fights from the WHM perspective, the better you can manage appropriate healing measures and keep their *** alive. Every wipe starts with a tank dying.

Start with Briareus... he's *** cake.

Or carrabosse, that thing at 99 can be killed by a good whm and an auto attack drk, its accuracy is just that poor. Also teaches how to stun magic, stay out of range, the importance of solace, and well basically its a whm 101 crash course.

I had hoped the FF team would translate the gambit system from 12 to 11 to allow one to hire mercenary NPCs for EXP/NM purposes.


If you can create a program that allows you to translate the gambit system to a third party app to control your boxes, through a set of custom prioritised defined rules, you would be laughing.
In theory, Spellcast already handles the required gear/spell macros. Being able to read various game inputs such as HP/MP/TP%ages and chat log parsing are already achieved also (though thinking about it, this would be a mess if they are all using the same memory space). Being able to output keystrokes to 3 minimised boxes is the bit I'm uncertain about but I'm sure it is doable, I know rudimentary basics at best.
Integrate the above, set rules, job done. If your planning this as a source forge project or something I am sure many people would enjoy the challenge (sounds like fun to me and would surely teach me much about programming)

Of course this probably equates to a "bot" and would likely get you banned for life.

Yeah, any 3rd party tool is a risk. You'll never get caught doing something like 4-boxing with a program though. There's no way to prove it, and GM's are pretty much non-existent in the game anymore. Some guy was shouting the N-word in port jeuno for a while recently and didn't even get jailed.

As far as the logistics of it, the limiting factor you're going to face is going to be time. If you started 4 characters and leveled any type of complimentary jobs on them, and gradually geared them out, got atmas, etc... you could pretty much do whatever you wanted once you had it all figured out. Even relic & empy weapon building is all about the time you're willing to spend. The hardest part is finding an empty dyna camp or a key item NM that some douchebag BST hasn't been soloing for an hour, and then doing it over and over again without getting bored.

Wow, thanks for the amazing responses already everyone!

Let me chime in on a couple of points you guys have brought up so far.

1) Briareus it is. A pink NIN and boxed WHM duoed this for me, so I think this is sound advice for a new player such as myself.

I will be certain to post here once I finally attempt this.

2) I play on a quad-monitor PC and can control each individual box independently, however I am relying heavily on some of the more advanced features of SpellCast as well as dualsend.

Right now I can easily play any 3 heavy melees effectively with 1 WHM that can easily handle keeping them alive.

However, my activity thus far has been restricted to things like worm parties, farming, and GoV. For that I used 3 warriors which is pretty basic.

Since I am rather new, would anyone mind articulating why taking a NIN/WAR and a WAR/SAM would be better than taking 2x WAR/SAM?

Is NIN taken in that situation because it makes a better tank?

I know SpellCast has tons of features built in that make blink tanking a breeze, so if I will need NIN to tank on that setup I will definitely look into it.

3) I totally understand the importance of stun though I have not mastered all of the details of it, from what I understand it will be fairly straightforward to incorporate tools into my SpellCast scripts that will stun the moves I am trying to avoid.

That is why I listed the WHM as /BLM.

It sounds like people largely agree with that piece of the setup.

4) At this point I am more focused on the "WHAT" rather than the "HOW," if that makes sense. I don't expect to have issues with the logistics of setting things up, I'm more concerned with leveling synergistic jobs and understanding "WHY" they work well together and are the most efficient use of 4 spots.

Awesome answers so far, thanks so much guys!

I am taking notes furiously!

and I thought I was crazy for tri-boxing...

Red weakness procs for key items/atmas. WAR/NIN alone can technically cover them all with the right gear and merits, but you'd lack that at this point. Better then to bring both WAR and NIN, and they're both good DDs in Abyssea anyway.

nin is a good tank, but the main reason to have nin + war is for red procs. technically you could get all procs on war but you need things like bushi and that ring so it's more reasonable to have nin for dagger, gkt and katana.

edit: beaten :(

Kukulkan is very very easy if you have a nuke build on NIN:RDM can also do it the same way, but it's a little bit more difficult to keep shadows up/not get hit by the nasty en-poison.
If you are 4-boxing it with either of the 2 jobs it should be just as much of a joke as Briareus. You just REALLY need to be ready if you think shadows are going down to try to start curing.

I know you are just starting out and your jobs probably won't have the same gear/atmas as in the videos, but it shouldn't be really any harder, just might take a little longer.

Nin+whm kills just about everything in abyssea. Where that fails mnk+whm generally succeeds.

War
Nin
Blm/brd
Whm/rdm

Would cover you for Every red proc and very nearly every yellow, which is what I imagine you'd need mostly in the beginning.

Mnk
Whm

Can cover all blue procs during blunt time if you needed blue.

Probably lvl your mnk on your Nin. I dunno.
Not bad to have a Thf in the mix either if doing empyreans so maybe lvl Thf on the war? Or wherever.

Also, I just gotta throw it out there, I don't personally like programs like spell cast that automate things in the game. Just my opinion.

I know I might get attacked for this, but whatever.

If 4 boxing FFXI is the only way you can think of to play it, you might wanna try another MMO.

There are tons of MMOs out there and it sounds like you are really trying to stretch to like and play FFXI.

But hey, if you really really really like FFXI for whatever reason and want to keep trying, more power to ya.

I appreciate the sentiment, believe me, I really do!

And I plan on carefully considering your advice.

As of right now though, I've always loved the FF lore and feel they did a great job of it in this game.

I'm loving playing the storylines, but it's just too darn hard to find people that want to do the same things as I do on the same timeline.

Thus far having several accounts available has only been a boon in that regard.

If that changes I will report back in this thread.

Great information! I'm so used to seeing posts about "WAR has all these covered" I never realized it would not be a reasonable assumption for a new player. I see where I can benefit from adding NIN from a proc perspective. Thank you.




Thank you for the response anyway!



I like the explanations you gave of why I'd be picking certain things. It does seem like the combination you listed offers a huge amount of versatility.

I suspect I would have the most issues with boxing the BLM portion of it, but I'm willing to try anything.

Disadvantages I see are that it's a rather expensive job to get all the spells for and leveling the skills up will be time intensive. Nevertheless, I see that I would gain a lot of utility for doing so.

Blm is easier than you might think if only using to proc yellow in abyssea.

Study the list of spells used for yellow procs and literally only buy those to start if your strapped for cash. Can always add more utility spells later, or not if you don't intend to use it for anything beyond procs. Also you don't need to bother skilling elemental magic if only for procs. They can't miss so you could start right away and skill later. (songs would need skill to land though).

Controlling is also rather easy once you get the hint abyssite from shinryu. If you know the weakness is fire, it doesn't take much to run through the 4 spells and 1 song in the fire category. Can even turn your tank away to limit TP gain.

P.S. I know you don't have the hint abyssite yet, but one could argue yellow procs aren't so important on a direct path to shinryu anyway. Maybe.. If pink mnks and blu whms can beat shinryu at 99 I'd say make a beeline for it.

P.P.S. I say all this under the premise that you are only using the blm to support your own solo play and not putting it into events where others would be depending on it/you to play like a real blm.

Great point.

The only players I will be grouped with would be on the off occasions I can convince real life friends to log into these alts.

Although I am open to adding the occasional friend who knows the score, people on my server have not been terribly receptive to the whole multi-boxing thing (not that I blame them one bit).

The goal is to clear Shinryu on these 4 accts as quickly as possible.

At that point I have over 9M cruor available to brew with, and I hope to be much less concerned about many of the topics discussed thus far.

Am I wrong about that though? How much of this will still be relevant in a situation where I am brewing?

Very relevant I'd say. Abyssea is more about hitting weaknesses than killing.

Even if you kill something with a brew it will drop 1/4 or less than what it would with proc. Atmas and some gear is also less than 5% drop rate w/o proc. you may think, "oh we'll I'll just brew 4x as many mobs or more til I get the drops anyway", but I'd really advise against.

Making empyrean gear requires killing a certain NM multiple tines, even under the best drop conditions (3~5 time for one piece of armour, 25~35 times for a weapon). The sheer act of popping a lot of these mobs in abyssea is heavily dependent on killing (and red triggering) a series of lower NMs before you can even begin the fight. Some have only 1nm, others as many as 3 or 4. After building a few of these "pop sets" you will quickly see the value of getting as many drops as you can per fight from your target NM. Especially if any of the lower tier NMs are contested.

In short: doesn't matter if you kill stuff with brews if they don't drop anything when they die.

Also, nobody mentioned it... a good reason to go NIN vs. WAR would be the evasion. When you get your natural evasion capped at 99, things won't hit you very often. Add in normal shadows, +2 feet, and a evasion katana, and you'll essentially never get hit by melee attacks. With 2k+ HP in Abyssea after buffs, your healer can wait for big TP moves or big magic spells to hit you and just drop a Cure V, and you're back to full health.

It eventually gets annoying, because you realize that with NIN's evasion, it almost takes a mob with a gimmick to kill you. Ketea's or that Blazing Eruca NM's spikes are a good example. I'm still new to dual boxing so I'm still improving on when to stop meleeing, but for me it's almost impossible to dual box that *** because the f'ing spikes are dropping 100-150 points on you each time you swing. Add in a random mistake like poor positioning and a knockback, and all of a sudden your mage is in range of a -ga spell or sleepga, and you're dead. It's not that the mob is stronger than you or that you suck, it's just that the odds are stacked too heavy against you winning, and with the fights lasting 15 minutes or more, eventually you're just going to lose sometimes.

Maybe with 4 characters you could do better though. In fact, you really should.

I have 4 accounts that I run on a regular basis by purely tabbing around. I have two screens and run all 4 on the same PC. I find my limitations are met when attempting to maintain all of the characters for a duration. Instead, I find while I can manage 3 just fine, I will leave the fourth either auto-swinging (tab to ws) or standing around on a job to proc.

I find it helps to be prepared enough that you are not constantly struggling with the characters. For example, I may toss on a few extra evasion items onto the NIN to avoid having to spend as much time on his screen.

In general, the prime use for multiple characters for me is for covering all the procs required. If I am in a separate situation, I tend to sit on 2 whms (or one of these whm on brd), war to swing, and the fourth to be open to needs. Capping out Nightingale and Troubadour merits can buy you a few minutes away from a bard and reduce that stress that comes from keeping up.

I personally find the biggest issue is that I want to prepare all of the characters as best as I can and in doing so, deter from the goals I had in their creation.

I know its already been touched on before, but the exact details of how to get the various Red Procs on various job combos hasn't been explained. I figured i'd bite the bullet and list it out. I've only listed the WS's that need special weapons, merits or gear to gain access to. Hope someone finds this info useful.

NIN/WAR:
--Sunburst (Staff Skill 150): NIN gets 144 Staff Skill natively, need 3 merits, or the temperance torque
--Raiden Thrust: Only problem with getting this WS is finding a Polearm that a NIN can equip. Currently the only two in game is the Pitchfork and Pitchfork +1 from the Halloween event. If you don't have it yet, put it on your todo list for this coming halloween.

NIN/WAR is unable to get Freezebite (Great Sword) and Shadow of Death (Scythe), not because of a lack of skill, but simply because of a lack of weapon that NIN can equip. Should a "All Jobs" Scythe and Great Sword get added to the game, NIN will have 100% of red procs.

WAR/SAM:
--Tachi: Jinpu (Great Katana Skill 150): Skill isn't the issue, but like Raiden Thrust, just need a great katana that WAR can equip. The Hardwood Katana/Wooden Katana/Shinai/Lotus Katana are the only 4 in the game, and all come from the Feast of Swords event.
--Tachi: Koki (Great Katana Skill 175): WAR/SAM at 99 has 150 GTK skill, and needs to make up the 25 skill difference. You can do this with any combination of Merits (+16), Bushinomimi (+5), Justice Torque (+7), Kengo Hachimaki (+5) and the Fazheluo Helm (+5).

WAR/SAM is unable to get Blade: Ei (Katana, no skill), Cyclone (Dagger, Not allowed for WAR/SAM) and Energy Drain (Dagger, Not allowed for WAR/SAM).

WAR/NIN:
--Blade: Ei (Katana Skill 175): WAR/NIN at 99 has 150 Katana skill, and needs to make up the 25 skill difference. You can do this with a minimum of 7 merits (+14), Hope Torque (+7) and Kanja Hachimaki (+5). Also the Training Burin is also the only katana in the game that WAR can equip.
--Tachi: Jinpu (Great Katana Skill 150): WAR/NIN at 99 has 139 GTK Skill, and needs to make up the 11 skill difference. You can do this with a combination of merits(+16), Bushinomimi (+5), Justice Torque (+7), Kengo Hachimaki (+5) and the Fazheluo Helm (+5).
--Tachi: Koki (Great Katana Skill 175): With a base of 139 GTK skill, you need to make up the 36 skill difference. To do this, you MUST have a minimum of 7 Merits (+14), Bushinomimi (+5), Justice Torque (+7), Kengo Hachimaki (+5) and the Fazheluo Helm (+5).

So to bring the conversation back to the OP's questions and comments about dual/trio/quad boxing... While WAR/NIN can have all of the Red Procs... it can be a major pain in the *** to get the equipment to make it work. When I trio box, 99% of the time I find NIN/WAR plenty for my Red Procs. With quad boxing, simply bringing one of your other three characters as WAR shouldn't be to hard to make happen.

Spellcast and Autoexec are both specifically designed so you can't automate stunning. You would need something further for that.

If you haven't been using Autoexec, I'd recommend getting it and using it. Lightluggage would also be useful, I'd imagine, because it's probably annoying to have 4 characters with 3 beetle shells and jaws each.

I'd recommend u take a look at 20XD6 over at the widower forums,
its a voice recognition program that passes commands to XI. I've found it VERY helpful for dual boxing.

Being able to just say, thundaga three and having it cast is amazing, saves from alt-tabing (or in my controller case hit my ffxi switch monitor button[also at widower forums]).

Be warned tho, you WILL sound HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE shouting "cure five alpha" into your headset .