The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, Furious, 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 Frostwyrms. We're especially focused on the people who play these games, to further shed light on the world of the PvP player.

There have been no immediate changes to the Arena directly due to patch 3.3. Okay, well, that's not entirely true, but the changes to the Arena are mostly change by implication. Nonetheless, there's enough little things that will affect the gladiators that it's worth spending a little time examining.

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Are you ready for another dose of WoW-related comics? Some of these are particularly good this week, but I won't name names. You'll have to find out on your own:

• Scout is still pretty upset: #90.
• Teh Gladiators: Now You See (Cows), Now You Don't.
• Da!ly Quests: Grab The Light By The Horns.
• Dark Legacy Comics: Rush.
• NPC: The Overachiever.
• NPC: Downtime. Also, Perky. I adore the facial expressions!
• Beyond the Tree: Heeding the Call.
• Dungeons and Draenei: Rockin' Around the Christmas Druid.
• Looking For Group: #311. Don't miss this one, even if you don't normally read it! Then check out #312.
• Cru the Dwarf: Shoot That Poison Arrow....
• Cru the Dwarf: ...To My Void Heart.
• NoObz: Eighth Commandment.


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Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. We'll cover everything from what to use, how to use it, and why you should care.We'll also make brief stops along the way to talk about what's going on among the people who love the crafting aspect of World of Warcraft.

Well, patch 3.3 has hit the ground, and we're all busy profiting from the vast number of people cycling through new characters, the Dungeon Finder, and new instances. Of course, the big news for Engineers is that there's a very significant new pair of recipes: Iceblade Arrows and Shatter Rounds.

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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.

The hot topic at [1.Local]'s press time was an opinion piece from Adam Holisky mulling over the unfortunate high profile of inappropriate posts from disgruntled players on the Blizzard forums. "While it's obvious that trollish parts of the community value and participating in internet yelling matches, the majority of the community does not care to hear it," writes Adam. "We bring this issue up and to the forefront on popular WoW media because it's imperative for the health of the community that this vocal minority does not control or continue to influence the quiet majority."

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It's not technically an attunement, but there is a series of quests that guide you through the introductory 5 Player Dungeons surrounding Icecrown Citadel. You don't have to do these dungeons to get into the normal versions of Icecrown, but it sure brings a lot to the experience. I guess, in a sense, you can think of it as a simplified attunement.

Additionally, the gear that drops from these first three instances will go a long way towards catching up people to the ICC raid. In my raid, we call this "bootstrapping." There's a bunch of reasons you might need to bootstrap folks: a tank rotation, new people, meteor crashing into the planet, what have you.

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Roxzee of <Teen Moo Squad> on Dragonmaw wrote, "I recently discontinued my World of Warcraft account. Before I left the game I decided it would be fun to grant my level 71 Druid epic flight form. After training the spell, I had to get a bird's eye view of my favorite zone in the expansion (and probably in the game) - the Grizzly Hills. After flying around, I found a nice perch and took a few screen shots of Roxzee watching over the forest that I fell in love with not so long ago."

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I'm sure by now it's pretty much no secret whatsoever that half the team, myself included, spent a good part of the waning days of Patch 3.2 enamored with Dragon Age Origins. Maybe it's the innocent charm of the leading man, Alistair, the deep and involved game world, or the fact that Marilyn Manson totally warned us that this was gonna be big, but I'm in deep. Patch 3.3 is finally dragging me back to WoW with its pure awesomeness, but Dragon Age is still pretty fresh in my mind, and there's more DLC to come.

One thing I have been thinking about a lot as I play though, is comparing the game to WoW. Single player RPGs have a lot of things that MMOs haven't quite figured out how to duplicate yet. Storyline and lore is a big one. Blizzard's gotten a lot better at the whole idea with phased content and big events like the Wrathgate, but a single player RPG, with an audience of one, can shake up the status quo a lot easier.

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Welcome to another installment of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that is incredibly proud of mages. We are, after all, the only class in the game that can conjure our own 5-man group, as evidenced by the picture above. And though our mirror images may not be too bright, I'd still take them over about 3/4ths of the folks I PuGed with last night.

Holy crap. I'm not even kidding. It was like some kind of idiot convention, and I was the keynote speaker. I came in with some prepared remarks, like "Don't stand in the green stuff that looks like poison, because it is poison," "when he begins spinning his giant sword around like a whirlwind, it's because he's doing Whirlwind and you should get out of the way," and "Warlocks drink their own pee," but ended up just sighing and shaking my head a lot.

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This post is going to be very meta in some regards, and it's going to touch on a few things that deal with the WoW community's very existence. We've wrote this article in hopes that it might help calm the waters, or at least bring some will on the part of the multitudes of individuals not to jump on the wrong bandwagon.

If you've been paying attention to the role forums and the "Ghostcrawler drama" this past week, you know what I'm talking about. If not, we'll begin with a brief rundown.

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