Here we are, my old friend. You and I, waiting for downtime again. Yeah, we got a little spot of downtime coming our way again. I'd recommend you go check out Vin Diesel in the latest installation of the greastest series of cinematic triumph of our time, Fast & Furious, but that isn't coming out until Friday. Also, I am a little hurt that it was not named 4 Fast 4 Furious, as would only be proper. Also, I stumbled across a pretty heinous spoiler on IMDB that may have ruined the movie for me. Get this. Are you ready? Here's the big reveal: It has an ampersand in the title.

Yeah. But anyway, it doesn't come out til Friday, so I suppose you'll have to satisfy yourself with WoW news.

As usual, you can get your WoW information fix here while you can't play. We got a new build fresh up on the PTR, so expect news from that and a wide variety of other good stuff. In addition, you'll probably want to check out what's been happening in the last few days. As usual, I got a few things you might want to take a look at after the break.

Hot News and Features

• Battle.net account connection issues are still ongoing, and Blizzard's set up a support page for them.
• Starting a new character, Rookie? We have some advice on naming.
• WoW, Casually discusses finding the right casual guild.
• Arena Season 6 will see some easier to get gear and a few other interesting changes. Ghostcrawler also spoke a bit on Arenas, Battlegrounds, and PvP philosophy.
• GDC was this past week, and both Rob Pardo and Jeff Kaplan had some pretty interesting things to say.
• Even if you aren't a huge fan of PvP, Orangemarmalade's 2v1 comeback is still a sight to behold.

Class News and Guides

• The long awaited second part of our Cat Druid Gearing guide is here.
• So what's the diagnosis for Rogues? Encrypted Text is looking for a cure for the RNG.
• Mages got a little bit of Blue love on the European forums recently.
• Patch 3.1 is the patch of Shaman PvP, says Totem Talk.
• Warriors will not be pushed, pulled, stamped, filed, numbered, briefed, or debriefed... or will they?
• Check out some of the recent Paladin patch changes.
• Spiritual Guidance has priestly advice on 3-drake Sartharion.
• Lichborne discusses some of the current buzz-worthy Death Knight DPS builds on the 3.1 PTR.
• Blood Pact looks back at the Warlock respec project.

Raids , Quests, and Instances

• RP? In my raiding? It's more likely (and fun) than you think!
With Outfitter's creators discontinuing their work, you might want to check out these alternate addons. On the plus side, you won't need to find a replacement for Carbonite.
If the Pa'troll's getting you down, I'd bet you're stuck making truth serum. And if you're stuck making truth serum, maybe these addons will take some of the pain away.
How do you recover from burnout in time to take on Ulduar?

Professions, PvP, and More

• If you're starting to fill up on non-combat pets, you might like this random pet macro.
• Arena does seem a little less popular these days. Apparently, it's 65% less popular.
• Check out the latest top 10 rankings on the Arena server.
• Insider Trade talks all about flasks in 3.1.
• In Time is Money, we discuss Low level cloth drops.
• 3.1 will do away with specialization-specific pets for engineering.

Odds and Ends

• Have a little insight into WoW's bandwidth. Just not too much.
• if you have Vista, you might like this handy search widget. For everyone, there's also official iGoogle WoW themes.
• Filefront, a prime file hosting site that hosted its fair share of WoW machinima and strategy videos, has closed its doors.

Tags: downtime, maintenance, roundup, server-downtime, server-maintenance, server-status, tuesday, tuesday-maintenance, tuesday-morning, tuesday-morning-post

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, Odds and ends, News items