Gathering as multiboxing

[Bubba]

I am finding the gathering professions are really difficult to monitor finding nodes when you have multiple toons to keep track of. Mining and herbs are hard when youre looking for the bnaddies in the area also. In addition steering w/o looking at what your mian toon is doing is equaly difficult especially if you have lag issues.

Anyone where have any tips?

[EaTCarbS]

I steer clear of the gathering professions.

[Ualaa]

When you don't have a whole lot of gold, gathering professions are an excellent resource to get you gold.

Once you have a fair bit of gold, in general you are better off with a production skill then a gathering skill. You'll always make more, buying the mats (once you can afford to, in larger scale) producing something and then selling it. The trick is to get in, while something is new or rare, ie before the market is flooded with them and the price crashes.

Anyway...




I like to have Enchanting, Herbalism, Mining, Skinning and Tailoring on each of my teams.

It doesn't take that long to gather some ore or pick a herb, while you are leveling or doing a daily. Both of these require mouse movement, you cannot macro either. So your solution is to either PiP swap to the window with that toon or to mouse broadcast, depending on the speed of the swap or the accuracy/ease of the broadcasting; use whichever works best for you. Currently toons can only track one resource, but in Cataclysm we'll be able to track everything we can gather. In the mean time, I'd go with an addon like Mappy, which lets you resize the minimap to whatever view, as well as make resource nodes strobe blue and yellow.

Skinning is easy. Have it on one of the slaves that you don't lead with. Have the slave assist the active toon and then Interact With Target. Simple and easy.

Tailoring is easy too. Have it on the toon who you usually drive the team with. It is not an entirely wasted profession, even on a tank. The cloak enchants are quite nice. The extra cloth (early Northrend training), adds up very fast... And bags are a good source of gold; anytime a stack of Netherweave is cheaper on the AH then a Netherweave bag, buy the stack covert it to Bolts, make the bag and list it at a profit.

Enchanting can be on any toon in the team. It gets you the option of disenchanting gear in instances, if no one is upgraded by the drop. Basically a huge money boost for current instances, where the disenchants can be worth triple the vendor value of an item. Also better towards the start of an expansion then the end; quite a few items vendor for more then their disenchant value these days.... only Abyss Crystals are clearly more valuable currently.... but at the start of Cataclysm, Dream Shares/Greater Cosmic Essences sold for 4x what they do now.