I’ve resurrected my WoW interest, and managing (finally) to level my Hunter to 50.
In the meantime, my missus is asking whether we can play together. I’ve promised her that I would try looking for an answer, and despite my best (but mediocre) efforts at googling, I’ve not been able to find an answer.
I keep seeing posts on husband/wife WoW gaming here, so I was hoping someone could help me out. I’m presently on a single cable connection which both my wife and I share through a router. I have forwarded some ports as required by WoW to my computer (my router is an SMC Barricade 7004VBR).
I would love for my wife to game with me (I see that as an improvement over her sitting around knitting - really!), so can anyone clue me in on how to set up WoW for 2 computers over a single cable connection?
I don’t think you need to forward any ports except for the Blizzard downloader, but you can just copy the downloaded patch from your computer to hers and run it. Allowing traffic over TCP 3724 should do the trick.
Works fine. My wife and I have played all sorts of MMOs–City of Heroes, EQII, DAOC, WoW, Guild Wars, to name a few–over our wireless router/cable modem set up.
Yeah, my wife and I both play without any routing tricks whatsoever. I never use the Blizzard downloader anyway, put yourself in queue at file planet and get it when the line works down to 0, it’s quicker that way
For patching a fresh install, I’d recommend just grabbing the 1.6 full patch and the 1.6.1 incremental patch from Fileplanet rather than copying over the smaller files.
Plus if you burn it to a CD, it’s handy if you need to do another reinstall.
We use a router, and have as many as three wow accounts going at once. I nver did any port forwarding either. The blizzard updater suggests it, but it never caused any actual problems for me.
Just so it’s clear, though, you will each need your own account. She’ll have to buy her own $50 retail box and pay her own $15 a month to play. But other than that, it works fine. My girlfriend and I played tons of WoW together on the same connection, without even a router (I just used the WinXP connection sharing wizard).
As usual, you guys have been incredibly helpful. I will clear the port forwards and pick up a copy of WoW immediately for my wife. I will certainly look forward with spending time with her in Azeroth!
I will report on the success (or abject failure) of my venture in due course.
Like they said, a simple router should allow you to play off the same connection. I have to travel a lot for work, and it is nice to have something we can do together even when I am all over the place.
My wife and I play together on Greymane, because it isn’t PvP, and she doesn’t want to deal with being randomly killed, etc. You can, of course, choose to PvP later if you want…it’s just not always on. We use a cable router (wireless network) and it works great. We have had no problems and are really having a lot of fun with it (maybe too much! We play constantly!).
If you’re not planning to already, I also highly suggest creating a new character to play along with your wife. When I convinced my girlfriend to start playing, my rogue was in the mid-40s. I thought she’d be able to catch up fairly quickly, especially with my help, but that turned out not to be the case. She got her priest to around level 14 or so when she got frustrated so we both re-rolled. It’s much more fun to level up together. We now have a regular group consisting of the following:
42 Dwarf Warrior
42 Gnome Mage
38 Gnome Mage
37 Human Priest
33 Human Warlock
The group works amazingly well together, despite having four cloth-wearing classes. Our warrior is a great tank, we’ve got tons of dps, and our priest only very rarely needs to cast heal spells (she mainly uses shields and renew instead). The warlock is also handy for a little extra dps, healthstones, soulstones, off-tanking if needed (voidwalker), etc. The only thing that sucks is all the “wasted” leather drops, but since I’m our group’s enchanter, I get them all for disenchanting. :)
If you can, try to pick two classes that compliment each other well, such as priest + warrior or druid + anything else.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I don’t think my wife would like to play ‘catch-up’, and it’s probably more fun discovering a new zone together. I haven’t really seen much of the game from the Alliance side (especially as a Dwarf/Gnome).
Will be doing precisely as you suggest, once I get my wife’s copy. A pity I’m pretty swamped with work actually.
As Robert has suggested, I will be playing PvE. I think my wife will get frustrated by random strangers trying to kill us.
We went dwarf/gnome, because they start in the same place. I am a dwarf paladin, because I can protect her that way (including divine intervention type stuff where I can make her immune to harm for 6 seconds). I can also rez her if necessary. She played a gnome rogue, which is a relatively simple class to learn. If the game is new to your wife, that combo works pretty well. I can hold tank, while she goes behind and backstabs. She also really loves the crafting, so you might want to teach your wife how to do it. It gives her something to do that helps her character and makes looting more interesting. She skins things and makes leatherwork. I mine and do blacksmithing. As you know, any class is good though. I just chose to be the one that takes most of the damage and has to do the fast click to save our butts every now and then. She tends to panic if things go wrong, but she is getting much better as she learns the game (which is happening VERY quickly).
All good points. Like your wife, my girlfriend also really enjoys crafting (and fishing). Whereas I get the most enjoyment from running instances and getting loot, I think she’d be content if she could do nothing but pick herbs and make potions. Destarius, make sure your wife starts her two professions as early as possible…and make sure she stays away from enchanting.
Contrary to Robert’s situation, my gf chose to play a priest, which is perhaps one of the most difficult classes to learn (as a dps class you only have to worry about a single target, but a healer is constantly monitoring the whole party). The learning curve for her was quite tough and very frustrating at times, but now she’s a master healer. Last night we ran SM with four of our regulars and a random pick-up priest. We were absolutely shocked at how poor the other priest played…he was constantly overhealing, casting a full heal spell when only a renew was necessary, pulling aggro off the tank, etc. And even though this other priest had several points in Shadow (enough to get Mind Flay), my Discipline-specced gf (using only SW:Pain and her wand) was even out damaging him by a 3:1 margin.
While we’re on the subject, here’s the best advice I can give to new Priests based on my gf’s experience:
Your three most imporatant spells are 1) Power Word: Shield, 2) Renew, 3) Fade. Notice the lack of any healing spells in that list (Flash Heal, Lesser Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, Prayer of Healing); those are certainly necessary spells in some fights, but 90% of the time Shield+Renew is all that is needed, and you’re very likely to not draw aggro using only those. I also highly suggest spending your first eight talent points in Disipline in order to get Improved PW:S.
If your wife wants an “easy” class to play, I’d suggest either Hunter or Rogue (or to a lesser extent Mage), but ultimately she should choose whichever she finds the most interesting. My gf played almost every class to about level 10 or so (which only takes a few hours) before she decided that Priest (which was her first choice to begin with) really was what she wanted to play.
Did they change the game? When I played, shield was considerably less mana efficient than healing, and also drew fairly heavy aggro (since to use it the way you are suggesting, you need to cast it a bit early than a heal, or double it up with another heal like renew. PW:S is useful for soloing, but other than preventing a death when someone is down to 10% XP (or a caster draws aggro), I’ve found it is far worse than healing.
Fade is quite important, but important when you cast a large heal (after waiting until the appropriate damage level of the tank) and then casting fade and immediately casting another heal (or just wanding things to death if everyone is at appropriate health levels). I used renew occassional, but more on the people that were not main tanks but took occassional damage, or to slow down the health loss on an overmatched main tank.
Did they change the game? When I played, shield was considerably less mana efficient than healing, and also drew fairly heavy aggro (since to use it the way you are suggesting, you need to cast it a bit early than a heal, or double it up with another heal like renew. PW:S is useful for soloing, but other than preventing a death when someone is down to 10% XP (or a caster draws aggro), I’ve found it is far worse than healing.
Fade is quite important, but important when you cast a large heal (after waiting until the appropriate damage level of the tank) and then casting fade and immediately casting another heal (or just wanding things to death if everyone is at appropriate health levels). I used renew occassional, but more on the people that were not main tanks but took occassional damage, or to slow down the health loss on an overmatched main tank.[/quote]
I’m certain this changes when running high-end content like MC or whatever, but so far my group has successfully run every instance up to SM using the above healing strategy and our tank rarely drops below 75% health and the priest never draws aggro. You’re correct that using full heals is more mana efficient, but with the exception of some of the more drawn-out boss fights (where full heals are used), our Priest is never short on mana anyway, barring unforeseen situations where we get one or more adds. In terms of keeping the party alive, our method works very, very well. So what if the Priest has to drink between fights…the other casters have to anyway, so it’s not like it’s causing the group unnecessary downtime. PW:S is also incredibly handy for keeping a party member alive while the Priest casts the 3-5 second full heal.
Eh, my priest is only lvl 12 but PW:S tends to draw a fair amount of aggro, tho not as long as you’re only putting it on one person I guess. As for healing, I favor the same method as MarchHare’s group. I use rejuv. over the others and keeping my tanks above 75% because too many regrowths/HTs draw aggro that I don’t need. Thus I usually only draw aggro when things go sideways and I’m dropping heals like mad on 2-3 group members. :D
We play using a NAT router and haven’t had issues with any MMO. Really the only things I need to tweak are things that use DirectPlay like RTS games (luckily I’m the only one who enjoys those, so I just point the ports to my machine).
Of course it helps that we never, ever, ever group, since this comic describes our WoW relationship perfectly. On the bright side, I have never wanted for money in WoW ever.
That was one of my favourite Penny Arcade strips! I am deathly afraid that my wife will be doing a lot of gaming behind my back, so I will suggest that she start a Horde Alt to play when I’m not around.
