Midsummer Festival!

A slight excursion to the current holiday. The Midsummer Fire Festival has been going on for a few days now, and unfortunately, I've just started. This holiday essentially consists of honoring and desecrating fires, as well as several different torch tossing dailys. The achievements, which I myself am going for, require one to honor and desecrate all the fires, steal flames from enemy capital cities, and to buy a set of clothing from holiday vendors using the currency of the holiday, which are Burning Blossoms. The one other thing is the defeat of a boss named Ahune who resides in the Slave Pens in Outland. I am ashamed to say, I've never done an instance in Outland outside of Ramparts. I got started a few days late, and I've yet to see someone looking for a group for Ahune, which worries me a little bit. Hopefully one will come around.

The main part of getting this achievement done is time. I have to do most of the fires in Eastern Kingdoms and the ones in Outlands. You know what I hate about this? Little bastard druids who follow you around and camp your non-PvPing ass. That's what I hate. Anyway. Time. It's taken me a few hours to do most of Kalimdor, and I suppose it will be similar for Eastern Kingdoms. Ahune probably won't take that long; he's a boss apparently just inside the entrance of the Slave Pens. To access the encounter, players must pick up a quest from an NPC inside the instance, who directs you to another NPC who gives you an item to summon Ahune at the Ice Stone (which hasn't melted lately, I might add). He should be a fairly quick kill, since he is still level 70.

And that's about all there is to this event. The Burning Blossoms you aquire from the fires around the world should be plenty to get the set of clothing. Blossoms for the extra items can be gotten from the daily quests in any major city.

Here are a couple of in-depth guides to the Festival: WoW.com, Wowhead. Both are good guides, with a few differences. The Wowhead guide is much more in depth: it has more information about the specific requirements, quests, and rewards, all of which can be easily investigated further with links further into the Wowhead site. The WoW.com guide is more of an "at a glance" guide, and is good to use if you're, perhaps, just looking for coordinates of the fires. Either one works just fine.

Personally, this event is slightly nostalgic because it's the first event I remember doing, last year. I started in early May last year, and they didn't yet have the Easter event. I thought I was so cool that there were holidays integrated into the gameplay in WoW. It was so different from what I was used to, which was mostly console RPG's and platformers. The dynamic nature of the game really stood out to me through the holidays. It's rather quaint to think I was so impressed by something in which the only major benefit I got was a nice little xp buff.

Next, the rest of the 3.2 changes. If I feel like it.