Just a short announcement to let our readers know that WoWenomics is now a regular feature on the WoWFix site. If you’re not familiar with WoWFix, you really should be. It is a WoW news aggregate site, pulling together the most informative articles from a wide array of WoW news and information websites in a single, centralized, location.

A few of our favorite WoWFix features:

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The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

One of the challenges in analyzing classes and specs for the Colosseum is that characters can respec. Since it's relatively cheap to switch your specs and glyphs around -- and it's about to get cheaper! -- a snapshot of a character's gear and talents doesn't necessarily reflect what they're doing right now. Our Arena fighter for today is an example of that. While Abusive of Twisting Nether shows up (Saturday morning) as Enhancement, he usually heals in the Arena.

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I wanted to do an April Fool's column. The fact that this column is being posted three days after April Fool's isn't the reason I decided not to do it, though. No, I ended up not doing it because I couldn't think of anything particularly funny to say about the class. Not that it isn't a funny class at times, because it is. Any class where you spend a lot of time trying to get trolls to give you teeth, elementals to give you lucky charms (they weren't Marshmallowy Delicious, either) and finally get a fine 2h weapon just in time for everyone to get mad that you're not a tank is comedy, of a kind.

Anyone who remembers when warriors were rage starved due to us being bugged so that we were being given way too many misses, or when a missed execute ate all of your rage, can attest to the warrior class being really funny sometimes. My wife used to laugh and say that Blizzard had done a wonderful job of transferring the sensation of building rage to the player. Your character might be rage starved, but you? Oh, you'd be screaming at the computer as if you could yell your rage bar into red.

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Oh yes, the official podcast of WoW Insider is back on the air today at 3:30pm Eastern (which is March 28, 2009 3:30 PM EDT var date_span = document.getElementById("date"); var date = new Date(date_span.innerHTML); var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"); var weekday=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); var year = date.getFullYear(); var day_of_month = date.getDate(); var month = monthname[date.getMonth()]; var day = weekday[date.getDay()]; var hour = date.getHours(); if (hour > 11) { if (hour > 12) {hour -= 12} am_pm = "PM"; } else { am_pm = "AM"; } var minute = date.getMinutes(); if (minute < 10) { minute = "0"+minute; } date_string = day + ", " + month + " " + day_of_month; date_string += " at " + hour + ":" + minute + " " + am_pm; offset = -date.getTimezoneOffset()/60; if (offset >= 0) { offset = "+"+offset; } date_string += " in your time zone (GMT"+offset+")"; date_span.innerHTML = (date_string); -- like what we did there?), and it's going to be a blast. Not only will Turpster be on with us, and I believe Michael "Belfaire" Sacco should also be in attendance, but we're welcoming one of the newest writers on WoW Insider, Mr. Nick Whelan. Nick originally wrote about Warlocks at his blog, Curse of Senility (and still does), but we've recently recruited him to start writing our Blood Pact column, and so today on the show we'll be talking Warlocks: where they are now, where they'll be in 3.1, and where they want to be in general. And we'll also talk about all the most popular posts for the past week, including the April Fools news, the latest on the next big content patch, and where 25-man gear should sit in relation to the 10-man loot.

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"Judgements?" I hear you scoffing. "We've been using Judgements since we were level 4! We know everything there is to know about Judgements!"

I know, I know. We've all been using Judgements since we were wee little Paladins with only the strength to equip mail armor. Perhaps we all really do know everything there is to know about these Paladin perks. And yet... while they're pretty straightforward when you're soloing or in a small group, the more people you're playing with, the more important it is to know who should be using what when.

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This may be another one of those things everyone knows about but me, but what the hey. While using Farsight to scan the highest peak north of Thunder Bluff, Eggers of Scilla discovered this message carved into mountaintop, presumably written by a Blizzard employee locked in the offices over a weekend. It's on the two-peaked mountain visible from the northern part of Thunder Bluff, and it's only about three chain Farsights away with your view distance turned up to maximum. Eggers even made a handy guide on how to see it, available to all and sundry on YouTube.

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But here's the problem: I have never needed to use it. Not even once.

Yeah, I mean, in theory, it's useful. But in practice, not so much. In Northrend and Outland, I don't really need a right click slow fall to jump from high places, I can just fly my mount down. If I accidentally fall off my mount or a high place for some reason, the cape has to get through usual 30 second "I just equipped this" cooldown, so even if I equipped it right away, I'd be a pancake before I could use it. In theory, it would be useful if I equipped it ahead of time while flying, but all of my flight capable characters have epic flight and can easily outfly or otherwise dodge anything that's a real threat, so chances are I wouldn't need in that case either.

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Patch 3.1 Background Downloader Updated
A new part of the Patch 3.1 is available for download from the Background Downloader. As a reminder, Patch 3.1 will be very big (close to 1gb) and it might be a good idea to start downloading it now.



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