The Man Who Would Solo a 40 Man Raid

This is NOT the story of those who made this video; it's the story of a mad-genius who watched this video and his plan.

Xzin, a World of Warcraft player, is contemplating graduating from "epic" to "ledendary." He already regularly pvp's by controlling 5 characters at once: one priest and four mages. I've seen one of his videos and I'm impressed. Note that he leveled them all up by controlling all five in instanced dungeons. Note that he has no tank, just mages and a priest. Xzin his his priest and his mages are Azin, Bzin, Czin, and Dzin. His guild: Army of Zin.

Zin is now planning to scale up his efforts to take down Ragnaros, the boss of Molten Core, all by himself. He'll need to buy 40 copies of World of Warcraft, by 40 monthly subscription fees (about $600/month), have enough computers to run 40 instances of the game, and use 40 monitors (most of them will be 8.4" monitors). He'll need a physical space that can accomodate all the equipment, and by his estimates, he'll need at least the equivalent of two T1 internet connections for bandwith, which you can't really get from residential dsl or cable. I'm guessing that the hardware and software costs will be more than $20,000.

This is also quite an interface challenge and micromanagement challenge. I think he plans to use one keyboard to controll all this and an assortment of (legal) macros. Just planning and executing a UI setup to accomodate this task is probably a full time job, in my opinion. Of course, he's already proven himself in controlling 5 characters at once in pvp and in instances, so perhaps it's just a matter of scaling up what he's already been doing for a year.

His gameplan premise is to have 35 of his 40 characters be mages, lol. He hopes that with high enough dps (that's damage per second for the jargon-impaired), he will be able to end the fight against Rag before the 120 second mark, when it gets a lot more hairy.

Xzin, to me, sounds like some kind of Batman character. I'm sure right now he's building his super computer setup deep in the batcave, illuminated by the glow of 40 monitors. He's wealthy enough that he can spend time and money on hobbies without being bound by the drudergy of the common man. His entrepreneurial spirit gives him the will to believe that "it can be done" and to actually stick with it until it happens. I don't know why such a totally ridiculous and silly thing should be so inspiring, but somehow, I think it is.

Incidentally, since it's proven extremely difficult to find anyone much of a clue who wants to pvp with me on ysera (horde), maybe I'll try the Xzin route myself on a smaller scale, lol.

Ok, for reference, here's the link to Xzin's post (those posts aren't saved very long though)

The text of his first post on the subject is below.

--Sirlin

Xzin said:

I posted this a little while ago and I wanted to get the take of the WoW community at large.For those of you who don’t like to take the time to read anything - I want to solo 40 characters at once. Meaning - I want to play an entire raid - by myself. This is not a statement about WoW - this is a challenge and I like challenges.On to the background:

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Q u o t e:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9024435764919244981

Rag has about 1.1 mil hit points, give or take a few hundred thousand. 35 mages, with buffs and decent gear and a 76 second kill = 14,473.68 dps. That means each mage is doing 413.53 dps, including resists, crits, etc. Not out of the realm of possibility with every major buff (Oxy head, ZG, etc).I wonder if I could solo rag with enough mages……..

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A bit of background. I solo 5 characters right now. At the same time. 4 level 60 Mages and 1 60 Priest on a PvP server. I have been doing this since release and I have been pretty successful with my setup over the last year or so. I pretty much destroy Alterac Valley fights but the whole time invested factor being the primary reason people advance in PvP is a very poor game mechanic but that is aside the point right now. Anyway -

I had a thought. I looked around and seeing that I already have much of the hardware, I thought to myself - what if I took it a step further and bought 35 more accounts and connected the computers needed to run 35 more accounts and I leveled up 35 more accounts to 60? A bit of a tall order but nothing outlandish. I leveled up at the same time, soloing instances all the way to 60. I can solo DM North (full tribute) as well as UBRS, most of LBRS, etc….. without any tanks - just mages and a priest. So I know this can be done, atleast leveling up 5 at a time, seven more times to get 40 level 60s.

This begs the question -

Could I actually “solo” 40 players at once? Would I want to? When I get some time off, I will most likely do so. Aside from details like the $600 per month fee and the hardware and networking requirements needed to perform said feat - I wanted to hear from the community about what you thought about this.

Note: I do not bot, I will of course NOT be using any third party programs, I have no intentions of selling or farming (nor would I make any money doing that anyway - and trust me, my time is worth far more than that). I doubt I would even PvP with this setup - it would be basically me soloing raid instances…. mostly just because it is a pretty unique challenge that I believe I can accomplish. Very few people multibox on a level that I do already, let alone take things to this level. So what about it?

What do you as a community think? Do you think I will meet great success or fail miserably? Any particular problems that I am not thinking about? Vael, Domo might be a tough fight, etc. Brainstorm with me - positive or negative I am interested in hearing what you have to say.

Xzin, Azin, Bzin, Czin, Dzin