Character Cloning - The New Cheat?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Toon is an old EQ/WoW term that should be left behind.

But .. but .. I still PLAY EQ!

I can't leave behind a term from a game I'm still playing!

On a less .. whimsical .. note, I should state that the situation the OP describes does NOT sound like a boxer, but it *could* be. I just don't know. It would depend upon the degree of automation (botting) that the boxer makes use of.

First, the point of boxing. You box because you cannot find groups, you do not want to find groups, or you simply would prefer to provide the group essentials yourself and maybe take along an incidental person or two along the way should one happen along, all while looking to actually do group, rather than just solo, content. That requires that you have characters that fill the various roles of a group : tank, healer, damage dealer, crowd control (only real CC in this game is Sleep/Repose, more a necessity in other MMO's). You rarely have multiple characters of the same class, unless that class literally can do it all (EQ's Magician, or FF14's Summoner) OR the class in question is the best combination of "high damage, low attention" damage dealing class the game offers.

Second, the economics of gearing. While bought gear (and, to a point, crafted) is relatively simple to obtain, higher levels of gear are not. Often, gearing up one character is at the expense of another, even if it is a simple question of which class can use the item that dropped from the boss this time. After you get out of the crafted or storebought gear (as opposed to gear bought from the market board or whatever version of a bazaar the game uses) you will never find two boxed characters of the same class geared identically while they are gearing up (unless the boxer is deliberately avoiding dropped upgrades). The upgrades that drop for one will not always drop for the other.

The OP reports three or four WHM's, all identically geared, in a mix of AF and other stuff. The gear level suggests that they are still gearing up in the range of storebought/crafted, so they are not necessarily into the realm of uneven drops (short of aetheryte drops from dungeons). That means that identical gear is a real possibility. The fact that they are all WHM's, however, is what makes it so suspect. WHM's .. don't tank. They can deal great PBAE damage, as long as the mana holds out, but Holy is SUCH a mana-intensive spell, you cannot get a great deal of casts out of it before needing to recharge. Could four WHM's plow through low level dungeons? Could four WHM's plow through level 50 dungeons? I don't know. Holy is quite an effective PBAE spell, it really puts WHM's on the map for group damage dealing.

My gut says that 4 WHM's would be horribly inefficient at running any level of dungeon other than Dzemael Darkhold and possibly Aurum Vale, simply due to the combination of mob HP and the costs of Holy ... but in theory it could be possible for them to run around all wily nilly Aero'ing and Stone'ing. That's just not boxed character behavior though. You lose too much efficacy controlling more than one character at a time.

In theory, I could see it possibly being a boxer ... but my gut says its something worse.