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.

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Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. Having some difficulty with Mimiron? Let me help!

Mimiron. He is the bane of all healers. Even the most seasoned of raiding healers struggled initially with this gnome and his toys. Perhaps the class and spec that has the a difficulty adjusting to the challenges is the Discipline Priest. Let me help you get through it with a systematic breakdown of the four boss phases and how you can cope no matter which spec you are.

Phase 1

The first phase of Mimiron is going to involve Priests using their saves. Guardian Spirit and Pain Suppression will play key roles in helping your tanks stay alive.

As Holy

Napalm Shell onto players are always a threat to the raid. I like to keep a hasted Greater Heal on standby (with Serendipity). If I'm lucky with Surge of Light procs, I'll try to stand by and delay until the last possible moment for a target that's hit by Napalm before the effect is consumed. I want to save the instant Flash Heal for a napalmed victim.

The emphasis here is on speed.

The raid itself will not be taking an enormous amount of damage. Instead, what ends up happening is specific players will be taking a large amount of damage quickly within a small window of time. Even though it goes against what I wrote about last week, this is not the time for Disc and Holy Priests to get into a territorial spat. If you see the opportunity to shield a victim, then do it. Tap Circle of Healing if you have to even though only one player is being affected by Napalm.

As Discipline

Chances are, you'll be assigned to one of your tanks. But it doesn't mean you should remain idle either. A Shield and Penance combination should be able to take and cover anyone nailed by pesky Napalms. If you've configured your addons to do it, they can highlight the debuff on your frames. Most of the time, your attention will be locked on to the tanks. I personally keep a visual eye on Napalms as they fly out so I can click on the player itself when it lands. 9 times out of 10, I'll hit the player who is getting doused by it. Sometimes I'll get unlucky and hit something else (like a Mirror Image).

Together on the tanks

If you read my Raid Rx column a few weeks ago, I wrote about different save abilities that some of the classes could use to help. This is the perfect time to practice working on that with your tanks. Here's an example of how phase 1 saves can be handled on the main tank.

Before you ask, the purpose is to negate the effects of Plasma Burst.

• Plasma Burst 1: Holy Priest casts Guardian Spirit on the Druid tank
• Plasma Burst 2: Druid tank uses Survival Instincts
• *Warrior tank taunts phase 1 boss*
• Plasma Burst 3: Discipline Priest casts Pain Suppression on Warrior tank
• Plasma Burst 4: Warrior tank uses Shield Wall
• Plasma Burst 5: Warrior tank uses Last Stand


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This installment of All the World's a Stage diverges from the series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay your race, class, and professions, in order to have a closer look at different layers of social interaction in roleplaying, and see in which ways you can tailor your character for each one.

So there you are -- you've got the coolest, funniest, most heartbreaking character idea on your whole RP server. You login, create your new masterpiece, and start leveling up... But as time goes by, you realize you have a problem. No one seems interested in you! You may be having trouble meeting people who actually roleplay on a roleplaying server, or the roleplayers you run into may not realize how truly awesome your character is. Let's say you even join an RP guild and try to impress your guildmates with your witty "/guild" chatter, only to discover that they're seem mildly interested at best.

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Funny Money is a weekly column published at the end of the week with the intent to have a little fun with the world of finance. Every weekend we’ll bring you a financial quote, a song relating to money, something interesting from the real world of business and a quick WoW gold making tip. Read on and have some fun…

Money Quote

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Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.

This mod is dedicated to listing all recipes in your tradeskills that you have not yet learned. But it doesn't stop there. It also tells you where to find them, even putting waypoints on your world map and minimap for vendors if you want it to. ARL also supports sophisticated filtering of recipes, so if I want to see all the Death Knight glyphs of skill level less than 400 that drop from mobs (although I don't think there are any), I can do that.

The interface is also pretty nice, given the amount of complexity it contains. There's a button to scan your tradeskills on your tradeskill window, which also allows access to the ARL frame once you've scanned. /arl will bring up more, including in-game documentation, which I especially appreciate - I haven't seen that in many mods before.

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We, along with many of you, have been monitoring the curious case surrounding one of the most prominent Paladin bloggers, Ferarro. We originally did a 15 Minutes of Fame with Ferarro on May 26th. The article was about her life as a blogger, a paladin, and a game tester for Blizzard.

After the article was written, a few things happened.

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I don't PvP, so I'm going off the reports of others here, but apparently Warlock and Hunter pets are often proving ineffective and short-lived in PvP. Until recently, this was often the case in PvE as well, but pets have much more avoidance now in a PvE environment.

It looks like an improvement will be coming in PvP as well: Ghostcrawler said last night that they "think it's probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen." In fact, he says they have a new pet scaling system, and "assuming it works" (which seems like something they ought to be able to make work), they should be able to make the pet scale off of "all relevant stats" of the master.

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Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

I titled this week's [1.Local] on Saturday, in a fit of frustration. At the time, it seemed more than appropriate: "BlizzCon ticket status" (sold out) was still at the top of the WoW.com posts, the comments were seething with queue rage, and I was still smarting from an epic fail at click-refresh for the concert tickets I really, really wanted to score for my vacation week this summer. Gah.

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Algalon Videos - Apathy and Gentlemen's Club
I'm sure a lot of people want to take a close look at Algalon, especially with Patch 3.1.3 going live in the upcoming weeks/days with a few changes to Mimiron's encounters. The first video is the kill by Apathy (EU-Vek'nilash).

Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staffPet scaling
We think it's probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen.

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Another Sunday arrives, and now it is almost June! This means less than a month until servers flood with children, Barrens chat takes on new life, and we're all being asked for "golds" and dungeon runs. Savor the next couple of weeks.

• Check out the latest from Cru and the one before that! After all, I can't have you all missing the drunken bar scenes.
• The latest from Dark Legacy Comics, Whitecraft, touches on one of the limitations of WoW's character creation service.
• Experience Points features another Dear Diary, and discusses, in its own way, Ulduar trash mobs.
• Check out the latest from Flintlocke vs. the Horde.
• Check out the latest from LFG.
• NoObz: Serborusski.
• NPC: Critter Tease.
• Check out the latest Teh Gladiators.
• The latest from The Adventures of Disgraph T. Dwarf, Form of... a Druid!, is all about the new Druid forms.
• It Slices, It Dices from World of Warcraft, eh? shows the kitteh unleashed!


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Resurgmal of Dread Pirates on Blackrock writes, "I was indulging in the old-time sport of climbing, along with some of the rest of the raid, in some down time previous to another Yogg attempt. (We finally downed him. YAY!) A Death Knight left this dramatic backdrop of pure evil, so naturally I had to grab a screenshot or two." Quick, Yogg, attack him while he's frozen for massive damage! Why, no, I haven't been playing the Crystal Chronicles games all weekend. Why do you ask?

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As someone who's done all three in raids a fair bit, I feel pretty confident saying DPSing is hands-down easier than the other two roles. Of course, it varies fight-by-fight, but typically the most that's asked of DPS is "don't stand in the fire" and sometimes "switch DPS to X." It does take some research and work to get the optimal rotation down, and some classes (like Death Knights) have it harder than others (cough Ret Pallies), but the raid just doesn't rely on your split-second reflexes the way it does for tanks and healers. Heck, last night I caused a wipe by just saying the wrong thing while tanking.

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This installment of All the World's a Stage diverges from the series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay your race, class, and professions, in order to have a closer look at different layers of social interaction in roleplaying, and see in which ways you can tailor your character for each one.

So there you are -- you've got the coolest, funniest, most heartbreaking character idea on your whole RP server. You login, create your new masterpiece, and start leveling up... But as time goes by, you realize you have a problem. No one seems interested in you! You may be having trouble meeting people who actually roleplay on a roleplaying server, or the roleplayers you run into may not realize how truly awesome your character is. Let's say you even join an RP guild and try to impress your guildmates with your witty "/guild" chatter, only to discover that they're seem mildly interested at best.

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The Loot Council is regular column highlighting interesting and informative posts from around the WoW finance blogosphere.

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