WoW players debate which in-game holidays have the hardest achievements

One of the most iconic achievements in all of World of Warcraft is “What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been,” which is a meta-achievement that requires you to complete eight other meta-achievements, each of which is associated with WoW’s biggest in-game holidays.

It’s often regarded as one of the most time-consuming achievements in the game, and in a recent thread posted to the WoW subreddit, players debated which of its legs is the hardest to complete. 

The common consensus among the WoW player base was that all of the meta achievements attached to the game’s holidays are relatively equal in terms of difficulty. The biggest obstacle that you’ll likely encounter while trying to complete all of WoW’s holiday achievements is time itself 

Players cited the Lunar Festival achievement “To Honor One’s Elders,” as the biggest time-sink of a holiday achievement, mostly because the Elders you’re required to interact with during the holiday’s duration are much more spread throughout Azeroth than other holiday objectives are. Whereas Hallow’s End candy buckets and the Midsummer Fire Festival’s fires are easily findable and located near major landmarks and towns, Lunar Festival elders can be sprawled throughout zones, requiring a lot more of your time and attention. 

The Brewfest meta-achievement, “Brewmaster,” was also determined to be not necessarily hard by players in the thread but rather extremely time-consuming. Although it’s been far more streamlined in recent years, the Brewmaster meta-achievement used to require you to sample 12 brews from the Brew of the Month Club throughout the course of a year. You would’ve needed at least 12 months to complete that achievement, and if you missed a brew during a specific month, you’d be waiting several Brewfests to wrap it up. Thankfully, that requirement was removed from the Brewmaster achievement.

If there was one holiday achievement that was cited as the toughest by the WoW community, it was the achievement “For the Children,” which is associated with the Children’s Week holiday. While this meta-achievement is no longer all that difficult, it was once the toughest one to earn, all thanks to a single stepping-stone achievement known as “School of Hard Knocks.” That achievement requires you to bring the orphan that you adopt during Children’s Week into several battlegrounds and accomplish tasks such as assaulting a base in Arathi Basin and returning a flag in Warsong Gulch. 

This achievement was an especially hard requirement for the Children’s Week meta achievement, largely because so many players would be attempting to complete it, and you’d encounter plenty of competition while attempting tasks inside of battlegrounds. Fortunately, it was removed as a requirement for the Children’s Week meta achievement in 2022, making Children’s Week a much easier event to complete. 

Currently, Hallow’s End is ongoing in WoW, giving players a chance to earn the “Hallowed be thy Name” meta-achievement. The next holiday with a major achievement will be the Feast of Winter Veil, which begins in December.