Im waiting for EQ to download now and never played before but a quick scan of the thread titles here on the forum and a few of them caught my eye because they mention "boxing". I'm a boxing fan (the sport of boxing) so I just wanted to check if that's what you mean by "boxing" or is it something entirely different?
Hey mate, I'm leaning about 70/30 this is a joke, but on the off chance you're actually brand new to MMO's, I'll give a serious answer! Boxing means playing multiple characters at once using multiple accounts. On most servers, you can load up as many accounts as your PC and attention span can handle. 2-6 boxing (playing 2-6 characters yourself) is extremely common on standard ruleset servers. A few people box quite a few more. On a few servers (namely Agnarr TLP, Phinigel TLP, and maybe some nonsense event server nobody plays anymore) EQ uses a 'Truebox' code. This limits each device to loading only one EQ account on that server. The idea is to cut down on single player box armies and promote grouping and community. Most players on these servers think it works pretty well. On the subject of actual boxing (with punching and gloves and shiny colored trunks and stuff) maybe you could dress your monk up in some fancy Hero's Forge ornaments and go around challenging people or something. Not exactly commonplace though!
Thanks for the explanation mate, no i really wasn't sure. I just tried a MMORPG called Mabinogi and my character class was Kung fu, so I didn't think it completely unlikely that there could be a boxing skill in the game since the last one I tried had hand-to-hand combat kung fu where you throwing fists and doing all sorts of kicks and flips. But now i understand what it means here. Why would you want to do "boxing" here, just to kill quicker and for higher group gains or something? I mean I heard of having simultaneous characters before in UO, but that was usually just to swap one item that you found and give it to your other character. I had two characters in that game and I would login as one, take some item I had out of my bag, drop it on floor, login other char and pick it up. It was best to do it in a secluded area though!
I dunno how UO is today. I played it in beta and couple years post-launch. But without a class system, in those times the prevalent 'class' were tank mages. 100 sword/tactics/magic in full plate able to take damage, dish it out and self-heal as needed, making most players self-sufficient. EQ has always been a group game. You have tank classes with large hp pools and mitigations but not good on damage and little to no heals. Then you got healers. Mobs are often bunched up and you need ways to "crowd control". Some classes do that. Typical EQ group core usually was tank, heal, control. Rest is filled with damage dealers. There are also other utility abilities. While some classes are fairly solo capable or can do quite well with just a merc ("molo"), running even two toons with mercs expands your range immensely. EQ used to allow only one instance per PC, so early boxing setups involved multiple CPU units (boxes) connected to single monitor/keyboard/mouse via a fast KVM switch - hence the term.
I run a six box team. There's a few reasons why boxing works so well in EQ: 1. It's a group-centric game with strongly-defined roles. A solid group needs a tank, healer, utility and DPS. Boxing allows you to provide all that yourself without bringing in other players (for better or worse). 2. Most characters bring buffs to other characters, so when you stack them together sensibly, they make each other super strong. 3. EQ is largely command line driven, with the ability to create hotkeys that send commands, and these commands allow you to do everything from follow a character, target a mob, use any of your abilities etc. So as long as you can send key commands to your boxes you can do just about anything. Running a large box crew is super fun in EQ because it's so complex and there are so many ways to improve your setup, skills and crew.
Monk or Beastlord might be up your alley. Monk is a pure melee class; Beastlord is a hybrid class with its parent classes being Monk and Shaman. These are the only two classes which can use hand to hand weapons. Sub 40s or even sub-50s, they can do decent damage barehanded but defiant drops will typically out perform barehands because of delay differences being so significant.
