Playing Around With Dual Boxing

Awhile back, shortly after I created my premium account, I had read up on how to play two different accounts for DDO on one computer at the same time, better known as dual boxing.  I wanted to try to get involved in this to help level the characters on my premium account and to quickly gain experience.  At the time, to be able to do this, you had to have two different directories set up with two different DDO launchers pointing at the respective directories.  So, I went ahead and set up the directories/folders and started to dual box and kept up with it for awhile but for one reason or another I just stopped.

Well relatively recently, DDOGamer mentioned on how he accidentally stumbled on the ability to have multiple launchers of DDO running without having to worry about the multiple directory/folders.  It was mentioned in the comments that developers had allowed this ability in one of the updates awhile back and this refreshed my interest in working with dual boxing once again.  So, starting this week, I began dual boxing once again.  I actually started with my Monday morning slayer run.  I was scheduled to log in with my cleric Containment (Level 7) who is a character on my premium account.  So after I got him loaded in, I then started another instance of the DDO client and then logged in on my VIP account and brought my character Cannock (Level 7 Druid) on.  I then used Containment to send an invite to Cannock (which I accepted) and then I took them both out to Tangleroot Gorge.  I essentially parked Cannock at the beginning of the slayer zone and took Containment through the area collecting slayers and rares.  By doing this, I was able to collect those slayers counts for both characters.  Whenever I came across a rare encounter, I would park Containment and then move Cannock to the chest to get the loot.  The only issue with doing this is type of dual boxing is not being able to move both characters at the same time but that is a real minor issue.

Containment waiting for Cannock to loot the chest.

I then did some more dual boxing that night.  I logged in with another character from my premium account, Crawlller (Level 7 Ranger) and then brought Cannock back on.  Ironically, both Crawlller and Cannock were at the exact some point in the Catacombs Story Arc.  Crawlller had already run the quests on normal and hard and was working on closing out the chain on elite and Cannock had just started the chain on Sunday.  In either case, I created a party with Crawlller as the leader and took both characters into the Catacombs and completed the rest of the story arc.  Whenever I encountered a chest, I would move Cannock up to it so that he could loot it but I really completed the quests with Crawlller.

Crawlller finishing up the Catacombs story arc and draggoing Cannock along with him (back at the door).

By dual boxing, I was able to save some time in getting some quests completed.  Now the next time I log in with Cannock I won’t have to worry about completing the Catacombs story arc and I can move forward in my list of quests.  Not to mention, I was also able to gain more guild renown than normal because I was getting renown across two characters instead of just one, and that was nice.  Dual boxing also allowed me some more chances to get loot because I was playing two characters.  One downside to dual boxing though is that I didn’t really play the second character.  This could be a problem because one of my main concepts for having a bunch of characters it to get a feel for how each class works.  However, I think this will be minor overall.  I could also divide the “play” time between the dual boxed characters if I need to.

Crawlller waiting on Cannock to get to the chest…what a slacker..

In either case, I have had fun so far dual boxing.  I find it interesting and I hope I can continue to keep up with it.  I have had some issues running two instances of DDO however.  This is primarily telling me I need to upgrade my computer!!  We’ll see how that progress.  Thanks for reading everybody and happy hunting and dual boxing in DDO!!