Bellwether of 4 Haelz recently posted about her woes with Ahune, the summonable boss who’s around during the Fire Festival. I commented there, agreeing and saying that I think Ahune is tuned too hard, and I want to elaborate on that here.

I’m sure plenty of people can comment and say they PUGged Ahune with no problems, and that clearly I’m “lol doin it rong”. So, let me explain my problem with the issue:

We went in there with a group of T5/6 geared people who’ve been grouping for two years or more; as a group, we can do heroic Magisters wipe-free; we’re not random Donalds. We had a bear tank, a BM hunter, two frost mages and me healing.

First up, of course, everything in the encounter is immune to frost, which limits the mages to arcane damage (or below-par offspec fire spells), which means they OOM in no time flat. So there are swarms of adds around, which the bear finds very hard to control, so there’s lots of stray agro, everyone gets smeared, I can’t heal through splash damage very well as a paladin, I get smeared from heal agro, we wipe. And because the daily quest is to summon Ahune, not to beat him, you only get five tries a day at him.

You should not have to ask people to respec for a holiday event. Holidays are supposed to be fun and relaxing, with some free gifts for everybody. Look at the Headless Horseman – he was, in my opinion, a well-tuned holiday event. Easy enough that you didn’t have to be well-geared to take him on and people could bring alts for a bit of fun; rewarding (gear-wise) for people at the right level to take him on. Compare that with Ahune, who is far more challenging, with a loot table that’s fairly unrewarding for people who can actually beat him.

I understand why Ahune and his adds are immune to frost damage, but I think it makes for a bad seasonal event. The one-two punch of the frost immunity plus there being a score of adds that have to be AoE-killed or AoE-tanked is just too picky for a holiday event.

In other words: Blizzard, if you’re going to put in a holiday event that’s unplayable for a (fairly popular) spec, you need to make it easy enough that the rest of their party can successfully ‘carry’ them through it rather than having to replace them. Who wants to PuG a holiday? That’s like going on a roadtrip with a stranger because he’s got a better car than your friend.

So, I will still be heading for Ahune to smash his face in – I’m not letting that tabard pass me by. But I’m not happy about the design of the encounter, and I think it’s disappointing that Blizzard dropped the ball on this, when the rest of the Fire Festival has been done so well.