Rising

Welcome to Rising, a level 25 Alliance guild on The Venture Co. We are the de-facto home for all those refugees escaping from Cross Realm Zones. 

We're still growing, with a lot of people leveling up. We're having fun on our way to the level cap, setting our sights on eventual 10m raiding.

If you're a current member, I think all you need to do is create an account here and link your Rising character. 

I recommend using a throwaway email address for this purpose... Or at least not the same email address as your WoW account is on.. Just in case.

The Venture Co. maintains a Ventrillo server, which until we want or need our own will do for when we group up:

Server: vent.theventureco.org
Port: 4310
Password: none! 

http://www.wowhead.com/guide=1423/challenge-mode-written-and-in-depth-guide

Check that out for more information than you ever wanted on Challenge Mode dungeons.  Focus on Scarlet Halls for our first one (even though that's one of the harder ones).  I'll brew us up some potions and whatnot - herb contributions are welcome!  Keep the Golden Lotus though, I have hundreds.

Update: Blizzard has also posted their own guide to catching up, also a pretty solid read.

Several of you have hit 90 in the last week or so, and may be a bit lost what to do next. Reddit to the rescue!

This thread (along with its comments) details great ways to get geared up for Looking for Raid (and by extension, guild raids). 

Copypasta of the highlights:

As I reviewed the 5.1 paths for gear progression, I've come to the conclusion they are mostly skippable. This is the fastest path for gearing up in 5.2 that I know of:

To 476 ilevel:

1. [Quests] Do the Arena of Annihilation scenario for a 450 weapon. Kill Sha and loot him for 476 boots. Start the legendary quest at the inn near the BMAH.

2. [Gold] (Optional) Buy/ have crafted whatever 476+ BOE weapons/ trinkets or 496+ BOE armor you can afford on the AH. (Darkmoon Card trinkets are excellent and comparable to anything from T14 LFRs). Use the Ghost Iron Dragonling trinket if you don't have better. Also craft the eng helm/ alchemy trinket if you have those profs.

3. [Honor] Convert all your JP to honor (350 JP for 250 honor) (Alliance). Buy honor gear (Alliance) --all armor is 476. Weapons are 470 and require that you have earned 2k honor this season. Spam dungeons and keep converting JP to honor/ kill the 3 Krasarang rares for honor, and buy honor gear until all your gear is 470 up. (Exception being PVP trinkets--use PVE ones.)

4. [VP] Even though you're not grinding VP, you'll still have racked it up from the dungeon runs. You can use VP to buy a 522 neck from the Shado-Pan Assault at neutral reputation.

To 483 ilevel:

1. [Troves of the Thunder King Solo Scenario]

   a. Get a key: Go to the Isle of Thunder and kill rares until you get the epic key for the solo scenario . (You can only get it from rares once a week.) If you can find a cache (a treasure chest) anywhere on the island to loot, it can randomly give you another key.

   b. Use the key: Run the solo scenario and loot as many chests as you can to accumulate Elder Charms. Staying in the first room is quite fine for this.

2. [Tier 14 LFR: MV requires 460 ilvl, HOV and TOES require 470 ilvl]: You can guess what's coming. Spam LFR and use your many, many Elder Charms on bonus rolls. MV drops 476 gear, while HOF and TOES drop 483 gear. Remember that you can run any boss multiple times and use your bonus roll on him as many times as you like if you particularly want an item from him (such as a sha-touched weapon or a trinket).

3. [Sha and Galleon] They drop 496 gear. Lower than LFR TOT, but still quite decent. Use charms on them, too.

   MV: Mogu'shan Vaults

   HOF: Heart of Fear

   TOES: Terrace of Endless Spring

To 504 ilevel:

1. [Tier 15 LFR: TOT requires 480 ilvl]: No secret here. Run TOT LFR. Have fun!

   TOT: Throne of Thunder

To 522 ilevel and beyond:

1. [ToT Jinrokh Normal Mode] Blizzard has stated that the first boss of TOT was tuned for players in 496 gear, while the succeeding bosses were tuned for much better gear. They intended for this first boss to be farmed for a while by people who needed to gear up, and this can be seen by the boss's extremely wide and varied loot table. Get all the loot you can from this guy. If your raid wants to go further, why not? But try to get this guy done every week.

2. [Oondasta and Nalak] The new Galleons. Kill them every week. (Nalak will only be available if your realm has unlocked him via Isle of Thunder dailies)

3. [VP Capping] (Optional)

   I know, I know, I said no VP grinding. This is entirely optional; recommended for those who want to go beyond. Eventually you'll hit a point where you're all geared out in 504 LFR gear, and say, now what? Then you'll notice that all those TOT LFR runs had been raising your rep with the Shado-Pan Assault, and they've got all this lovely 522 gear. And you have.. uh.. 1000 VP.

   Run around on Isle of Thunder killing rares for 15 VP each. Or run a daily dungeon for 90 VP, and a daily scenario for 50 VP. You'll thank me later.

4. [Dailies for Lesser Charms] (Optional)

   Again, optional. But if you can get lesser charms to turn in for Mogu Runes, and thus have bonus rolls to use in ToT, you get double the chance of loot!

Last Saturday we made the final push to 80 with the RAF team. We ended up dinging 80 at Loken's throne...

I've collected all the screenshots, taken every ten levels. View the album!

This was a blast, and I'm glad we were able to finish it before time ran out!

This is an older post, but I imagine a lot of us haven't had time to do it.

Here's a route to get Exalted with the Lorewalkers (and the flying disc mount) in an hour or less.

We didn't know we were going to be featured today, so welcome!

If you're looking for a new home to escape CRZ, or reroll for other reasons, we'd love to have you!

We're level 25, and are on at virtually all hours of the day and night. We have active crafters of nearly every profession, and we're very helpful to folks learning new classes (or factions!)

Most of our members have invite permissions, so just /who Rising and someone can probably help you.

Uneaque is the Guild Leader, and plays practically every dwarf character on the server. We think.

Thera (that's me!) or Zayev will be your recruiting officer... 

With Murphee finally back among us, we took on two behemoth dungeons of Old Azeroth: Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire. (Oh, with a little Sunken Temple in between)

I hadn't been in Sunken Temple since Deathwing's arrival, apparently. I was pleasantly surprised that it was no longer a maze of stairways and narrow corridors. Well done, Blizzard; Sunken Temple no longer sucks.

We cleared most of Blackrock Depths, but we were out leveling it fast so we kept mostly to our quest logs. Hats were obtained, including the elusive Circle of Flame! 

With only an hour left to play, we hit up Blackrock Spire Lower and Upper. We hit 60 turning in the quests for Lower BRS, and proceeded directly to the Quartermaster outside to start on our attunement to Blackwing Lair.

30 minutes later, General Drakkisath was dead, we were attuned, and Murphee had a new sword.

Time played: 4 hours
Levels gained: 10
Epics in hand: 2
Scotsman's pulls: ~3240 

Tune in next time! 

This is a great tutorial on leveling up a pet battle team quickly. If you haven't spent much time on Pet Battles, and are a little bored... Try it out!

Complete Idiot's Guide to Pet Battles

WoW Insider has a good article today about setting up WeakAuras, an addon that many use to alert them to procs, cooldowns and various other game information.

I've been meaning to try this out, but it's an addon that requires a lot of tweaking which is something I usually avoid.

However, if you like the "heads up" very visual cues when spells proc, buffs are running out, etc. it's a very powerful addon if you spend the time to configure it.

We've had two sessions of RAF madness since the last post. We've now pushed our way to level 50! The level gains are noticibly slowing down, but we soldier on.

Next time, we make our way through Blackrock Depths and our next round of class quests. We've been taking a group photo every ten levels, which I'll post as an album when we get to level 80.

Here are the Armory profiles of the current group, if you want to follow our progress!

Murphee (Protection Warrior)
Anasa (Discipline Priest)
Ogee (Shadow Priest)
Lineen (Fire Mage)
Timebender (Arcane Mage) 

Tune in next time, wherein we decide if at level 55 we'll be "raised" as Death Knights!

Despite Panzer being MIA, the RAF Dungeoneers achieved level 20 on Saturday! It took us about 3 hours to grind up to level 15 (we're in no-quest mode!), and then we entered the Deadmines. Less than an hour later, we all dinged level 20.

Timebender has caught up to us now, so our next outing should see a full group of silly gnomes tearing through the dungeons of Azeroth.

Screenshots were taken, laughs were had. Poor Ogee couldn't get his mail, so we were without heirlooms for the inaugural run.

Tune in next time, wherein we pull an entire dungeon all at once, survive, and gain 10 levels in a single fight... Or so it seems.

There are a couple UI addons that I've tested out and used lately.

My favorite one right now is SpartanUI. (You can see screenshots of it at the Curse page linked)

The other I have liked in the past is the RothUI. It replaces nearly every aspect of the standard UI with very Diablo-esque art.

Because these are both total UI replacements, I recommend backing up and removing everything in your AddOns folder (other than the Blizzard ones) and then adding back what's missing.