Urgent advice needed:huge fire elemental

[Old_school_overlord]

Hi folks, fairly new to GMing

was looking at the Huge Fire Elemental, and it looks ridiculous for a CR7 monster - 15ft reach and 7 attacks of opportunitywith a slam at +17 dealing 4d8+4. 136 HP and good saves and immunities too.

As the group has little in the way of spells and ranged attacks, this thing has TPK written all over it at CR7.

Anyone have experience with these?

thanks

[Blackrat]

Well the trick is to not do anything that provoces AoO after the initial get-close. But elementals are pretty scary in the hands of DM who knows how to use them as are dragons too. One spellcaster with cold-spells does a lot of difference as does Resist Energy potions to drink before-hand. But these depend on PC's knowing they are going to fight Fire-type monster. A surprice by Fire-Elemental can turn quite nasty very fast.

[Runestar]

What exactly about them screams TPK? 7 AoOs seems excessive unless you can somehow force the party into actually provoking that many (that would require reworking its entire array of feats and maybe giving it a class lv or 2).

And when you say little access to spells/ranged attacks, how little/bad is it? For instance, an enlarged fighter with a reach weapon already has 20-ft reach, which outclasses the huge elemental.