The Elemental Invasion thus far

This is so fucking exciting!

Yesterday night part 4 of the elemental invasion began. People were reporting that Orgrimmar was under attack by elementals, and judging by the commotion caused it was certainly more serious than the previous petty "attacks".

While it is evident that Blizzard's intention was for the invasion to start off small and then have it escalate, the first three parts were quite lackluster.

Quests to do with lore are by all means great, but this is the Cataclysm we're talking about - we don't want to go around babysitting small fire elementals in Orgrimmar, we want to kick some elemental ass.

Part 3 of the invasion started three days ago, on the 13th. This is where things started getting interesting - apart from disrupting even more twilight cultists, we were sent off to Nagrand.

Horde dogs and Alliance rats gathered just under the elemental plateau, and since this is Ravenholdt we're talking about, people naturally started slaying.

There was just one problem - the Throne of the Elements is the home of four elemental elites. Gordawg is seen in the image to the right, and to quote wowwiki, "he will one shot you" if you engage in PvP here.

Casters could attack quite freely from the Stonehenge-esque stone arches, but eventually people started heading to Halaa instead.

Enter Novemeber 15th. Seven of us were in an Arathi Basin premade when people in guild chat reported that elementals had started attacking Orgrimmar at 21:15. Mmo-champion confirmed that part 4 of the elemental invasion, the last before Deathwing attacks, had just started. When we had beaten the rat randoms in Arathi we portaled into Orgrimmar.

More and more people joined in and eventually formed the biggest crowd I have ever seen in WoW. 

While some 315k health elementals attacking a capital city isn't a fantastical phenomenon, the amount of people joining in was what made the event impressive.

 

The black Orgrimmar sky is lit up by the elemental flames

So we headed to some Alliance capitals to see how crowded it was there and how hard it would be to stealth around. Stormwind city was crawling with rats, and after dying a couple of times Artturi and I decided to check out Ironforge.

It started out quite satisfactory. We got a few kills, but then someone who we weren't expecting turned up.

That's right, the midget king came after us. I didn't get a better screenshot however - the first thing I do when I aggro a 5 million hp faction boss is not precisely to take a screenie - notice the sprint + vanish.

Needless to say, we deemed Ironforge especially dangerous (it's bad enough with its few escape routes and choke points) and headed home.

As a pre-expansion event, the Elemental Invasion will naturally be compared with the pre-WotLK Scourge Invasion (which originates from the patch 1.11 Naxxramas Scourge Invasion), which is a hard event to beat, really. It doesn't share the same PvP quality of the Scourge Invasion (indeed, it barely has any PvP quality), which even allowed you to attack your own faction. The fourth part of the Elemental Invasion was quite spectacular though, I must say - and we haven't even seen Deathwing yet.