Saturday, the Midsummer Fire Festival began. As part of that event, a new boss – Ahune – was added to Slave Pens.

He has a number of ok drops, but what really drew us to him was the new Deathfrost enchant. One of the enchanters in our guild really wanted to get his hands on it, so off they went to Heroic Slave Pens (which also happened to be the daily on our server).

They rolled up with four guildies and one pug – a Prot Warrior, a Holy Priest, a Warlock, a Druid, and an Ice Mage (the pug). Since Ahune is before the first boss in the instance, they attempted him, several times, without much success.

After giving up, they cleared the rest of the instance and then asked me to bring my own mage in to help finish the job. I agreed, and off we went.

They’d already learned the basics of the fight, which they explained to me. Basically, he jumps out of the ground. While he’s out, you shouldn’t DPS him, you DPS the adds. He summons a big add (which must be tanked) and a bunch of small adds, who tend to run around and die quickly. Every 90 seconds, he submerges and turns into an Icy Core – and this is where you unload all your DPS. He also spawns ice spikes underneath people, and if you don’t move right away you’ll be launched into the air and take some damage.

The fight was a chaotic and utter mess. We won, but I’m not entirely sure how.

The tank grabbed the big add with no problem, but we did have some trouble with the smaller adds. They ran all over the place – making my AoE less than useful. The warlock would seed them, but that tended to bring them all right on top of him. The pattern I fell into was Scorching them, and then Arcane Exploding when I noticed three to four on the warlock.

The real problem was mana consumption. This ended up being a long fight – I think we went through 3 or 4 submerges. I went completely OOM, despite using a pot, a stone, and an evocate.

To make matters worse, he and his adds are immune to Frost damage. I ended up throwing on my non-Frost gear (a mix of PVP/Kara epics to replace the Frozen Shadoweave) and spamming Scorch on the adds and Fireballs on the Frozen Core.

My advice is to try and end this as quickly as possible. Use all the cooldowns you have and try to burn him down after one or two Frozen Core rounds. If it goes any longer, your mana users run the risk of running out of mana.

I’ve got an idea if I bring my Paladin to tank it, though. I’m thinking if everyone stands in a straight line behind me, the adds will run by me and hopefully get caught in the Consecrate. I can tank the adds, and my Consecrate/Retribution Aura should kill them fairly quickly.

Once the big add is dead, the ranged DPS can unleash some low-mana using DPS (i.e. Scorch) on Ahune, to bring him down a bit before going into the Frozen Core phase. Any melee users can stay on the adds to clean up and kill whatever gets through to the healer.

This would help conserve mana on the part of the DPS, and it would help bring him down a bit so that Ahune is more likely to die in one Frozen Core phase rather than two or three. Worth a shot.

Not that it matters all that much anyway. The Priest got the enchant, and we’re unlikely to go back.