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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com’s arena column. Listening Music: Modeselektor’s Tetrispack. Allison Robert offered a challenge to our most beloved columnist last week. Ms. Roberts has chosen a clever and palatable piece with Richard Shindell’s On-A-Sea-Of-Fleur-De-Lis. And now we come to my retaliation. My wife recommended our musical selection today — it just happened to be on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum. How fitting. We love this song, albeit mostly for the intro. Upon your first listen, if you correctly predict the timing and type of shift in the first thirty seconds, serious e-props to you. To wit, Robert: pan flute > no pan flute. Your move. Last Week: part two of our beginner’s arena guide. We featured the cute ukulele kid who pretty much controls the internet right now. After that, we discussed frequently asked questions from new arena players. We talked about how to spec and what team composition to choose, with two different types of answers (easy and long). Today, we’ll be talking some very basic class strategy. If you know your class inside and out, you’ll know what I’m going to say when it comes to your class and

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Two Bosses Enter … but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com’s series of fantasy death matches. This season’s combatants come from the original five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King. Could the Chrono-Lord not kite? Xevozz moved through the Two Bosses Thunderdome with ease this week, overcoming Chrono-Lord Epoch with 62% of the spectators’ roaring approval. Just how one-sided was this match? “This fight is so one-sided, it should instead be a vote to see if Xevozz makes it past Epoch fast enough to get a drake as well,” smirks Stone_Rhino. Of course, not everyone agreed. “Come on, guys!” protests mtwcmarsh. “You’re talking about a gangster thug who got himself locked away in the Violet Hold fighting a freakin’ Chrono-Lord! You seriously think his little ethereal balls mean squat to someone who can stop time?” Adds Clydtsdk-Rivendare: “Time travel > all (except, of course, LOLDRAIN). Also, nobody said bosses can’t kite — that’s a game play mechanic (threat), not lore. MG kited Arthas the whole flippin’ way to Northrend, so to speak. (Okay, that one’s a joke, but srsly …) Xevozz hardly stands a chance, with that in mind.” More fodder from the stands: Undra: Smooth-talking Xevozz sells Epoch on the idea that the Chrono-Lord should die. For a nominal fee, the Ethereal includes a life insurance policy payable to … oh, don’t worry about that.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Michael Sacco will be your host today. Editor’s Note: The above image has now been fixed to include its original participants. What a great week for dungeon running. Got my shaman his full tier 9 set, my rogue her 2-piece, and a myriad of other badges and loot for my other alts. Soon I’ll start pawning off my alt’s Emblems of Frost for Primordial Saronite and finance some epic flying. Plus I’ve gathered enough mats to get my rogue berserking on both of her weapons. Not bad, Patch 3.3. Not bad indeed. But wait! The Queue is about you. Let’s get some you in here. Squirr3llywrath9 asked… What’s the deal with the Scarlet Crusade? I thought they were against anything that is against the teachings of the Light, particularly the scourge. But in Dragonblight there are shadow priests and death knights in the various bases the crusade has in Northrend. Was wondering if I missed anything that explains their change in ideals. At face value, it is a little weird seeing those types of units running around Scarlet camps, but the answer to their change in ideology is actually very simple. The Scarlet Crusade has been run by demons for several years now. First Balnazzar and then Mal’Ganis. From what I can gather from quests and lore, the Scarlets are the worst kind of brainwashed, and while their zeal

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Our friend Kevin Kelly over at the Joystiq mothership got a chance to talk to Frank Pearce at Blizzard about the Warcraft anniversary, and he did us proud. Not only did Frank Pearce do some nice reminiscing about Blizzard, where they’ve come from, and how the massive World of Warcraft undertaking has changed them as a company (they’ve gone from 500 employees to about 4,000 in just the last five years), but he also touched on some issues we’ve really been wondering about over here at WoW.com as well. Like, say, the reason we haven’t seen a girl in the ads yet. Pearce says they’re open to it, and he wants some names submitted, so we’ll offer up Felicia Day as a no-brainer, and if you guys have other ideas, share away below. He also talks about server capacity, and says that at nearly every step, Blizzard has been surprised by their success. He attributes race and faction changes to thinking that realms were big enough on day one to bring everybody together who wanted to come together, but they later realized that wasn’t what was happening. He mentions China and NetEase and says they wish the process there was faster. And finally, he talks, surprisingly, about the BlizzCon Vegas that wasn’t, and seems to confirm that Blizzard was considering a Vegas show. Interesting. Where else did they consider holding the convention, we wonder?

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers’ Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. A few weeks ago I wrote a column about husband/wife guild leaders who were using the old double-roll scam in a new way now that loot doesn’t bind to a character for two hours. I also mentioned in that column the new trend in raids, particularly PUG raids, of offering gold for an item that someone else has fairly won. This week I received an e-mail from a player feeling guilt for selling an item. I’d like to address his situation first. Then I’ll talk about what you as an officer should consider when this situation arises in your guild. Dear Scott, I wasn’t entirely sure who to ask for this, and seeing as how the Officer’s Quarters column you write seems to be the most “Dear Abby” esque that I can find, well, I figured you might be able to help me out. With the recent implementation of being able to give “mislooted” items to other qualified members of a raid upon a bosses completion, there has obviously been a lot of abuse to this new change. Abuse which, until very recently, I had been abhorrently against. However, I was put into such a situation recently, and well, suffice it to say, I am a bumbling hypocrite. The story: After one shotting 25 man Onyxia, the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade dropped. I currently have Reckoning, so the sword was definitely an upgrade, but nothing major. To my amazement, I

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We had a great time as always on last weekend’s podcast — Kelly “Cadistra” Aarons and C. Christian Moore (a.k.a. Colby, a.k.a. C-money) joined us on the podcast to talk about comics and PvP, respectively, and we hit on the most popular posts of the past week as well, including wrapping up Pilgrim’s Bounty, our favorite memories of the game for the fifth anniversary, and how GDKP works — both in terms of mechanics and as a loot system. Additionally, we talked again about the Dungeon Finder system and how it will affect the game, as well as why Blizzard probably won’t provide any more character slots per realm, even in Cataclysm. And we hear some more great fan-made intros — if you’d like to send us one (or anything else, really), the address as always is theshow@wow.com. Thanks for listening and enjoy!

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Blizzard has done a lot of press regarding the fifth anniversary of the game (and there’s probably more to come), but Curse has done one of the more interesting pieces so far. Instead of just chatting with Cory Stockton about his experiences, they had him sit down and explain just how Blizzard puts an instance together. They specifically talked about Ulduar, but the process Stockton reveals works for all of the instances Blizzard has created for the game. A few interesting things — they “block out” the instances first, create lower-res versions of them to play around in and create the mechanics for the fights. They also do some boss testing outside of the environments — Razorscale, specifically, says Stockton, was actually tested down in the Stranglethorn Arena. Finally, once the encounter team works out the basics of the encounters, the art and item teams move in, and create art and loot, sometimes with the two of them collaborating (the art team will make a cool item for a boss, and then the item team, with the help of Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, will give the item stats and balance). Interesting just how collaborative the whole process is — even the Ironbound Proto-drake mount came from the team seeing Razorscale and wanting to put him in mount form. It’s nice and all hearing Blizzard remember the Fry’s launch, but it’s nicer getting an inside look at their process.

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Simple true statement of the day: Patch 3.3 will not be released Tuesday November 24th, 2009. Zarhym hopped on the fourms earlier this evening and said that the patch will not be dropping tomorrow, and that they don’t consider dropping a patch before a long holiday weekend something they want to do. We agree. Zarhym goes on to say that he doesn’t prefer his day-after-thanksgiving turkey with cranberry sauce on it. That, ladies and gentleman, is a travesty. A total slap in the face to all us cranberry loving mortals out there. Is Zarhym really against cranberries because one day he ate too many cranberries, abused them, and then went on a cranberry induced rampage killing off entire swaths of AV players with his Martin Fury, only to laugh at and teabag everyone who tried to stop him? I’m not saying he did, I’m just asking a question. Zarhym hasn’t given an answer, and without one, well… well, what can consider to be the truth then? I think you know the truth my beautiful Azeroth. I think you do. /tear. Update: We’ve placed a red phone in the WoW.com HQ. It’s sitting right here. We’ve given the number to your chief of staff, Zarhym. You can call it and refute your Martin Fury incident anytime you want. Azeroth is waiting.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. The Queue is a bit short today, and rather than giving you reasons why, I’m going to leave it up to you guys to create wild and zany reasons for it. Was Alex writing The Queue while on fire and ran out of burnable flesh? Was Alex hard at work, but was suddenly interrupted by the president recruiting him for a top secret mission to Mars? Was he watching cartoons while writing, and the cartoons came to life and pulled him into the internet? It’s up to you to decide! Tanglebones asked… “I’ve read that in 3.3 Blizz is making it possible to track uncompleted quests (for Loremaster) via addons. So my question is, are there any addons in the works that do this? Can you highlight it/them sometime before 3.3 goes live?” Already done. Alanid asked… “How many Old Gods does it take to screw in a light bulb?” I’ll leave this one to the experts. Wilmsgame: None, they destroy the lightbulb and everything else in a solar system radius. SnapDragon: I would answer, but the true number cannot be read by mortals without driving them irreparably insane. Mognet T: None. It’s the Titans’ job to screw in light bulbs. The Old Gods spend the rest of eternity trying to screw them back out. devilsei: Easy, none. Old Gods have tentacles, and lightbulbs

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We heard a little while back from Ghostcrawler that haste would soon affect Heal-over-Time (HoT) and Damage-over-Time (DoT) spells, and sure enough, soon after that, Shadow Priests — who use DoTs all the time — saw a nice buff. But of course this is the PTR, and everything is subject to change, and so last weekend, Blizzard removed Shadow Word: Pain from that equation — right now, it’s not affected by haste at all. GC says that sure enough, Blizzard thought shadow priest DPS was too high with all of their DoTs given a boost, so SW:P got the boot (for now — remember, this is all still on PTR). Misery, my go-to shadow priest, has some good insight on the change, and says that sure, if shadow priest DPS was too high, it was too high. But it’s too bad that Shadow Word: Pain had to take the nerf, especially since you get it so early on in the class and it’s such an iconic spell for the spec. The reason these guys are so happy about the hasted DoTs is that DoTs as cast don’t really scale with your gear — they just sort of do their damage on their own. When haste got put into the equation, shadow priests became happy that they could go after more haste to increase the DoT part of the damage. They could tailor the spec and spells the way they wanted to use them.

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