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: Pomplamoose (i.e. Jack Conte and his girlfriend Nataly Dawn) with a Single Ladies cover (originally by Beyonce). Although you've probably been able to guess by now, I'm a huge Jack Conte fan. This cover is short, but very intelligent.

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Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we should be following? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow!

Ah, the World of Warcraft user interface -- your screenshots are the vacation photo of a generation of gamers. We spend so much time tweaking and perfecting our user interface that we just have to share. And for those of us still in search of the perfect UI? Well, screenshots are better than an IKEA catalog. So what's in the offering today? A few bloggers and their UIs:

• Mystic Chicanery provides a State of the UI.
• Panzercow makes the obligatory UI post.
• Cranky Healer shows off an updated UI.


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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. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

Most of last week I was on a nice vacation to the Washington, DC area. Some very cool sights, one of which is pictured above. All I could think of?

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Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The time has come! Gul'dan, order your Warlocks to double their efforts! Moments from now, the gateway will open and your Horde will be unleashed on this ripe, unsuspecting world." ~ Medivh

You might think that you could always tell a demonology warlock on sight, it's minions being bigger and more powerful, to reflect his greater dominion of demons. This isn't really the case though, every warlock's minions look the same irrespective of build. If they are over level 50 then they become easier to spot as you'll find that they'll have a felguard following them about. To be fair, he is bigger and more powerful than all the other minions.

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Patch 3.3.3 - PTR Notes Update
The PTR 3.3.3 Notes. Blood Queen Lana'thel is getting slightly changed and most of the glyph changes reported last week here are now official. Nothing else really interesting in the patch as far as I can see.
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
Icecrown Citadel

• Blood-Queen Lana'thel: Pact of the Darkfallen now applies damage twice as often, but for half the damage. This change will make the removal of the spell a bit more responsive.
• Hellscream's Warsong and Strength of Wrynn now provide their bonuses to player pet health and damage, as well as the absorption amounts of Power Word: Shield and Sacred Shield.


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We have a nice update to the patch 3.3.3 PTR patch notes for you today, right from the mouth of Zarhym. Listed below is the update, and you can check out the complete patch notes and our patch 3.3.3 coverage to catch up on everything else.

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Realm maintenance for Tuesday, March 16th is scheduled from 5:00 a.m. PDT / 8:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT. There is no indication that patch 3.3.3 will drop this week.

The full announcement is:

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Gear is fairly easy to get at this point in the expansion life cycle of Wrath. That's not a flaw. That's actually how things should be: there shouldn't be too many artificial limitations keeping you from jumping into the newest content and getting a chance to at least see, if not down it. With the rise of 10 and 25 man versions of every raid and heroic modes, however, we are looking at something fairly unique to this expansion, a somewhat drastic power curve to gear scaling.

This isn't a new idea, and it's not one Blizzard themselves haven't commented on. It's one thing to be aware of it in a general way, however, and another to sit back and look at it. That's a comparison of itemization on select 2H weapons from the first crafted epic (equivalent to a Naxx 10 drop) up to hard mode Ulduar 25, which puts it squarely in the middle of the current expansion cycle. What you're looking at is a steady gain that leads to a nearly 60 DPS increase between the starting weapon (Titansteel Destroyer) and the last one compared (Voldrethar).

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Michael Gray is feeling a little under the weather, so I've kidnapped his column. He can have it back in exchange for his puppy. Moving on, we've got one of the winners of the Alienware Rise to Power contest who's name should be familiar -- Baron Soosdon, who's delightful works such as T for Thunderfury, No Point: Stretching Time, and Sex, Gnomes And Videotape: So I Went To France have been featured before here on WoW Moviewatch. World of Gnomecraft 2.0 is another solid addition to his stable of machinima videos, and honestly, it's no wonder it was a winner.

World of Gnomecraft 2.0 is presented as a movie trailer of sorts about... well, gnomes. Gnomes that have had enough. That's really all I am going to say so as not to give anything away. This is quite possibly the most gnomes I have ever, ever seen in a machinima. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I haven't decided yet -- but the whole piece had me cracking up about thirty seconds in. I could not stop giggling. There was no voice work to speak of, just the music and the text -- so let me point out, I love fonts. I collect fonts. I want whatever font he was using in this thing, and I am surprised I don't have it yet.

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World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

Out of all the delectable tidbits we've cooked up for our Well Fed Buff (now a part of the fun here in World of WarCrafts), can you believe we've never tossed together a batch of Barbecued Buzzard Wings?!? Appalling! After all, the opportunities for gathering Buzzard Wings are endless: Tanaris, Blasted Lands, Deadwind Pass, Western Plaguelands, Desolace, Badlands, Arathi Highlands ... Heck, you could even count Sharptalon in Ashenvale as a source of these mouth-watering inhalants. (Yeah, I called them inhalants. Isn't that what you do with barbecued wings?)

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We get quite a few screenshots of the Onyxia fight here at Around Azeroth, such as this fiery picture from Urths of Nagrand. And like this shot, many of these e-mails contain the notation "this is from a wipe" or "taken just before we died." Are people just taking screenshots after they've died and are lying on the ground, bored, while everyone else takes a break to get another Mountain Dew? Or are these action photographers in fact the cause of the wipes? Raid leaders beware!

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press.

Ah, the good, old-fashioned /random command -- where would WoW be without it? It fixes so many problems. It's utterly impartial. It can't be bribed, cajoled, or reasoned with. The /random command is the friend of every PUG raid leader.

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Some friends of mine in game have recently had the experience of having the rug pulled out from under them: their 25 man raiding guild, for whatever reason (I'm only privy to one side) has decided to go 10 man strict, leaving 15 or so people out in the cold. So now, this late in the expansion, they're forced to either seek new homes or try and start something up for themselves.

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Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

There's a lot of things that separate hunters from the plate classes, and it's not just that we attack from a safe distance. Spreadsheet models also suggest that we hunters are smarter, more charismatic, and across the board we are an uncommonly good-looking lot.

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Is Patch 3.3.3 this week?
Nop. The latest PvP PTR testing was made on the current build and developers were still looking for a couple of very annoying bugs. If you add it to a few random bugs like people disconnecting from the game as soon as they enter water and a few other things, I would definitely say that we will have to wait at least one more week before we see the patch on live servers.


Patch 3.3.3 Pet - Lil'XT and Celestial Dragon
One of the latest 3.3.3 PTR build added a new pet to the game: Lil' XT. We don't know what the drop location is for the moment but the name is very similar to Lil' KT from the Blizzard Store and the description mentions "Action Figure", it might be another pet that players can get out of the game. (But not necessarily)

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