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.

David Byrne and The Talking Heads are a personal favorite. Miles Fisher seems to love them as well. His cover of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) is homage to one of the most beautiful, striking melodies I've ever heard, and as such, it will be your listening music for the day. (NSFW Warning: The video is a parody/reenactment of American Psycho, so view carefully.)

Last time, we went over the Will of the Forsaken nerf, 100% pet resilience, death knights, and druids. The patch looks to be a very interesting bag of surprises for arena enthusiasts, we're getting major changes to the way some races work, as well as nearly every class is getting a pretty substantial change or two which will probably help them in PvP. We don't normally see patches where most classes are buffed, but this could be one of them.

Read on to find out what's up with hunters, mages, and paladins in Patch 3.3!

Welcome back to the Scattered Shots, the weekly World of Warcraft Hunter class column. This week we continue our "So you want to be a hunter" leveling series as we look at Levels 60-70 and see why I really feel they're the best class in the game. So join me, Eddie Carrington, Brigwyn from The Hunting Lodge blog and podcast, as we explore what's in store for us hunters.

Maybe one day hunters being able to tame duids as their very own pet. Wouldn't that be awesome? I want to thank Dwarffinator and Lissana of Restokin.com for making this picture and sending it in for me to use.

This is part six of our, now eight part "So you want to be a hunter" leveling guide series. In what was originally to be our final guide, we will now instead cover 10 levels, 60-70, with levels 71 through 80 coming next week. Part of this change is in response to your feedback wanting a bit more information on the skills.

As we do in each, this week we'll review what skills you learn, suggest talent builds for both you and your pet as you level, we'll highlight some suggested dungeon quests that match your current level.

We've 6 previous installations in this series. Here's what we've talked about so far.

• Part 1: We reviewed racials and their impact on the hunter class. Reviewed each of the current races and what the benefits were of each racial.
• Part 2: We quickly talked about the first nine levels. We also went on to talk about each of the three hunter talent trees and their basic play style.
• Part 3: Last week we discussed what happened from levels 10 through 20. We also went over the quests to learn how to tame your first pet.
• Part 4: We covered some of the covered attacks, buffs and spells. We also began looking at how to teach your pet new skills by applying pet talents.
• Part 5: We covered levels 21 through 40. We ended up with you getting your epic riding mount and you now can wear mail. From now on completing quests and gaining levels will be much faster.
• Part 6: Is where we started to see that we were learning more new ranks than new spells as we leveled from 41 to 60. We ended our time in Outlands with our first flying mount.

That's where we've been. But where are we heading? This week we'll be levels 60 to 70. We'll wrap up Outlands, head out to Northrend. Next week we'll wrap it up by reaching level 80. Then we'll focus on gearing up join everyone having fun storming the castle to tackle the Sindragosa, the Lich King and his Scourge minions and anything else Blizzard can through our way as part of Patch 3.3.

I was listening in on the Twisted Nether Blogcast and heard Nibuca mention that the new Spirit Bear image we reported earlier this week had been identified. Sure enough, I head over to the one place I knew would have the answer, Mania's Arcania. Sure enough there it was, Mania had a long post giving all the details.

Mania's Arcania member safrienaer reported that they had found the new spirit beast on the PTR Patch 3.3 in Grizzly Hills, north of Amberpine Lodge. Along with some really cool screenshots, safrienaer went on to describe that at the moment Arcturis doesn't have any special sounds. However, Mania thinks, and I have to agree, that we'll probably see some polishing of the graphic with some special glowing effects and sounds before the completion of the testing of Patch 3.3 on the PTR.

On a final note, Mania noted that Jangalian did some research on Wikipedia and found that it seems our new Spirit Beast might be a reference to Arcturus Mengsk from StarCraft.

Anyways, I'm excited about the prospect of taming Arcturis. My only problem will be stable slots and having to pick a new Elvis related name that matches his personality.

(Edit: I owe Jangalian an apology for overlooking that she had originally provided Mania the information about the different possible references for Blizzard choosing Acturis as the name for this really cool Spirit Beast.)

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Welcome back to the Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter class column. This week we continue the "So you want to be a hunter" leveling series.So join me, Eddie Carrington, Brigwyn from The Hunting Lodge, as we explore what's in store for us hunters as we go through 20 levels of information, starting at 41 and ending at 60..

This is part six in our seven part leveling guide series. As we do in each, this week we'll review what skills you learn, suggest talent builds for both you and your pet, highlight some quests and instances that might be of interest, as well as show you which rare pets are tamable for your level.

As every week we'll recap what we have covered up to now.

• Part 1: We reviewed racials and their impact on the hunter class. Reviewed each of the current races and what the benefits were of each racial.
• Part 2: We quickly talked about the first nine levels. We also went on to talk about each of the three hunter talent trees and their basic play style.
• Part 3: Last week we discussed what happened from levels 10 through 20. We also went over the quests to learn how to tame your first pet.
• Part 4: We covered some of the covered attacks, buffs and spells. We also began looking at how to teach your pet new skills by applying pet talents.
• Part 5: We covered levels 21 through 40. We ended up with you getting your epic riding mount and you now can wear mail. From now on completing quests and gaining levels will be much faster.

Now that we know where we have been, let's focus on where we are going. This week we'll be covering 20 levels as we work our way from level 41 though 60. We'll also take our first tentative steps off Azeroth as we head into Outlands.

Ghostcrawler has put a significant sticky up on the forums about what he calls the "hybrid tax" in terms of PvE play -- there's been some back and forth lately on the forums about hybrid classes and what they should and shouldn't be able to do, and GC wants to put any confusion about what Blizzard intends "hybrids" to be to rest. Very basically, he says that there are three roles in the game (tanking, healing, and DPS), and if a class can respec to perform a different role, it's considered a hybrid class. Otherwise, it's a "pure" class. This means a few things: pure classes, he says, should have slightly higher DPS ("all things being equal," and when does that ever happen?), because they don't have the option to switch out. There's no rule as to how much better that is, but as a tradeoff of rerolling being the only way for "pures" to switch, they get to be a little better. That's the "hybrid tax," and mages, hunters, rogues, and warlocks don't have to pay it.

Hybrids, however, do, and that means that paladins, druids, priests, shamans, and to a certain extent, warriors and death knights, will in Blizzard's view never be able to equal "pure" classes in terms of DPS output, with everything else being equal. You may love your ret pally, and he may be in uber gear, but he should never be able to pour out as much damage as an equally specced and geared hunter, because you can switch to healing, and the hunter can't.

Welcome back to the Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter class column. This week we review all of the changes in Patch 3.3. and see what effect they'll have on the best class in the game. So join me, Eddie Carrington, Brigwyn from The Hunting Lodge, as we explore what's in store for us hunters.

We've been living with Patch 3.3 on the PTR for a few of weeks now. During that time we've been able to see first hand that the Blizzard development team has been busy working on ways to improve World of Warcraft. Not only have they introduced new 5-man instances and the new Ice Crown Citadel raid, they're even showing us some hints at what might be in store us Hunters in the hopefully near future.

I'm sure if you were like me and when the initial changes for Patch 3.3 were announced we all kinda knew that there was more in the works. But I'll have to admit, I'm shocked at the amount of stuff that has been released so far on the PTR.

We have everything from reducing cooldowns on Call Stabled Pet and buffing Deterrence for the hunter, to buffing and changing our pet's talents by removing Avoidance and making Resilience work on both hunter and pet. Heck, they even found a nifty way to fix the nasty Cower bug that was still cropping up. (I'll be honest, I had just come to expect it was always going to be there. You know like that creepy cousin at every family get together?)

Blizzard has even been working on the Tier-10 set bonuses and actually made them look, well, different? Yeah, that's it, different. There's so much to discuss, it's probably better to just get on with it and discuss all of the changes.

I love this, as I seem to love most of the things that Mania does. She's just posted that she's put together a whole guild of hunters, all with XP turned off at different levels, for one purpose: testing pets as they move up the leveling ranks. She says she cheated a little bit to do it -- transferred alts from other realms, and it's Alliance-only -- but just having the idea to put something like this together is super creative. We've talked about people who've leveled up one of every class before, but I never considered just how much the XP-off option changes the game in terms of what Mania calls "special purpose characters."

Of course, raiding at level 60 is one way to use it, but you can go even lower than that -- want to farm Runecloth without it getting too boring? Roll up a death knight, and leave him in Felwood to grind on Furbolgs. Really love running, really running, Scarlet Monastery with your friends? You can all roll characters to 39 (or lower, if you're looking for a regular challenge), turn XP off, and leave them camped outside the instance. Turning XP off means you can create characters for almost any purpose, and having heirloom items (especially if you buy cloth, which any alt can wear, even if it means they take an armor hit in some cases) means that leveling them up doesn't take more than a few days of free time. Lots of interesting ideas to play around with there for sure.

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I don't care for a lot of music that was made in the last decade. The Killers are something of a breather for me. They're one of those bands I'm glad exist. When I'm forced to listen to a terrible radio station, and hear change your mind sandwiched in between auto-tuned, unoriginal dross -- I'm satisfied there is still music being made that can intrigue. (Brandon Flowers has some epic bard tier 10 shoulders there too)

This is part two of part two of a three part article. Confusing? Join the fun! Surprising Patch 3.3 timing, i.e. wrenches in cogs, is a blast!

In our first installment, we covered pillars changing shape in great detail, and also mentioned a few other tweaks. Our second article dealt with five classes -- paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, and warrior. Warlocks were left out of the 3.2.2 patch notes. This article is going to talk about the other four classes - death knight, druid, hunter, and mage.

Being "TheArenaGuy" here at WoW.com lends to forcing myself to a very balanced perspective on classes. It makes me feel guilty if I understand armor penetration less than spell penetration. Well, actually, it doesn't because ArP is confusing. The main thing I'm trying to say here is that I don't want to write anything that is opinionated without being grounded in something. I don't want to make any mistakes when it comes to reporting to our viewers what changes will impact arena games (and how).

I'm satisfied to critique changes instead of having the responsibility to make them. The developers have very difficult decisions to make with regard to arena balance and we should applaud them for making decisions in the name of equity, even if some of them might be unpopular.

With that, let's get into the juicy, juicy 3.2.2 patch notes.

The area-of-effect damage cap is something that doesn't get talked about a whole lot. The first time I noticed it having a real effect on gameplay was in Mount Hyjal ("Hey, warlock! Wake up and throw us another Seed of Corruption!"). So what is it and what is patch 3.3 doing with it?

When you hit a single mob or player with a spell, or some kind of crude inertia-based impact utensil, the game will work out how much damage that target takes. This is based on the various offensive properties of you and the spell or utensil, as well as the defensive properties of your target. The same is true for area-of-effect (or AoE) abilities, though these tend to do less damage to a single target. Add in some more targets and, while it's still fun to do lots of damage to one of them (with the casting and the poking with sticks), you may have a chance to do damage to all of them at once. Let's say that you can do 2500 damage to a single target with one spell or stab, but can only do 1000 damage to a single target with your AoE ability. If you have five targets that you can hit with your AoE, then that will do a total of 5000 damage. Already we're having more fun than just beating on the one target.

Tonight, after Trials of the Grand Crusader (four down, bug to go) we decided to hop onto some alts, which led to back to back TotC 10 on my DK and Shaman. Then back to back Ony 10, also on the DK and Shaman. And because I'd spent hours in TotGC 25 on my warrior before that, by the end of the night, I had no idea what class abilities I had anymore. Between popping Army of the Dead when they called for Heroism (it's bound to the same key) to trying desperately to use Chains of Ice when asked to Frost Shock the Ret Pally, I was in rare form. And it wasn't just me, either: the druid healer is usually a mage, the warlock raids as a priest, and the holy paladin healing the second Ony attempt has something like 10 alts at 80. I'm surprised he even knows where he is. We got it all done, mind you, but you can really tell the difference in smoothness between our mains and our alts, even as well geared as the alts often are.

So now I put it to you, gentle readers. Do you ever suffer from class bleedover? Are you ever on your druid finding yourself mashing the Consecration button, or on your Mage trying to use Hymn of Hope? Or do you find it easy to keep it all straight?

Blizzard continues to leak out the official information about Icecrown (the raid, as you know, coming in patch 3.3), this time updating their Under Development site with official bios for Jaina Proudmoore and Sylvanas Windrunner, two ladies (one living, one not-so-much) that will likely have a large role in the fight against Arthas Menethil, better known as The Lich King.

Sylvanas, you'll remember, featured in the Lament of the Highborne video early on in BC, where the story of her death and resurrection at Arthas' hands made it clear she's got unfinished business with the onetime-paladin turned Lord of the Scourge. And Jaina... well, Jaina's had a front row seat to Arthas' undoing -- they were childhood friends who looked like they were headed towards being more than friends, until Arthas found a big bad sword that turned him into a big baddie. It's going to be awesome seeing all of these storylines start meeting up together in The Frozen Halls and the raid beyond -- we can't wait.

As you've probably heard, the latest build just hit the Patch 3.3 PTR. With it comes a ton of great stuff, including the Tier 10 set bonuses! The usual warning accompanies them, they might change, they're not necessarily final, they could be place holders, et cetera. They look pretty flipping good right now, though. Chase Christian seemed quite shocked at the staggering upgrade the Rogue bonus is from what they had previously.

All set bonuses are listed below, classes arranged in alphabetical order.

Death Knight

• Death Knight T10 Tank 2P Bonus - Increases the damage done by your Death and Decay ability by 20%.
• Death Knight T10 Tank 4P Bonus - When you activate Blood Tap, you gain 12% damage reduction from all attacks for 10 sec.
• Death Knight T10 Melee 2P Bonus - Your Obliterate, Scourge Strike, and Death Strike abilities deal 10% increased damage.
• Death Knight T10 Melee 4P Bonus - Whenever all your runes are on cooldown, you gain 3% increased damage done with weapons, spells, and abilities for the next 15 sec.

Welcome back to the Scattered Shots. Instead of continuing the So You Want to be a Hunter series, this week I thought it would be good to take a break and review the changes in Patch 3.3. So join me, Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from the Hunting Lodge as we explore the ins and out of what's instore for us hunters.

Patch 3.3 is on the PTR and as we download the patch we've been busily reviewing the patch notes along with the unofficial information from posted up over on MMO-Champion. Without giving everything away in the first paragraph, let's just say that this is looking to be one awesome patch. Without going on about how good it is, let's take a look at what's being said.

From the PTR Patch notes we got to see some insight where Blizzard's development team is taking our class.

Hunters

• Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.

Now I'll admit when I first saw this change I was a bit hesitant. Changing one of core abilities is always disconcerting. But then I started thinking about it a bit more.

Well I grabbed my own video of the new Feed Pet animation, but it turns out that Lougara on YouTube did it much better, so that's their video you can watch above. Yes, as hunters everywhere have noticed, Blizzard has added a brand new animation to the feeding of a hunter pet -- you can actually see your hunter toss a piece of grub to the pet, who then catches it and noms away.

It would be cool to see it go a little further -- maybe have the pet claw and chew away at it for a moment -- but then again with so many different types of pets out there, it's probably tough for Blizzard to make them all look good. Still, it's a nice little touch for immersion, and it has the added bonus of showing other players when you're tossing food to your pet as well. Of course, with Bloodthirsty as a pet talent or the Glyph of Mend Pet going, you may not even need to feed your pet any more, but if you do, that's what you'll see.