I killed the Lich King and all I got was this lousy title

Tonight I killed the Lich King.

No, this is not a jubilant bragging post; in fact it's the opposite. I was very disappointed by the whole experience, and while I didn't say anything about it right after the raid (since everyone else in the group seemed to be very happy with the kill and I didn't want to rain on anyone's parade), I do need to vent somewhere.

Basically the whole thing left me almost completely cold. Maybe because we were on the frozen throne? /rimshot. But no really, the biggest emotional reaction that the fight got out of me was me laughing out loud when I saw the popup asking me whether I wanted to accept Terenas Menethil's resurrection. The rest of the time I just stared at the events unfolding on my screen and felt vaguely disappointed. There are a couple of reasons for this:

My alt is not my main

The thing that stung more than anything I think is that I got the Kingslayer title on an alt before getting it on my main. It's not just any old alt, it's my "main" alt, the one with whom I've been running ten-mans pretty regularly since Trial of the Crusader, but still an alt. At the same time I've been working on the Lich King fight with my main as well, my main who has much better gear, while playing the class that is closer to my heart than any others, playing a role at which I am much better than I am at tanking (which is what I did on the kill tonight)... but still that wasn't good enough. It leaves me with a certain bitterness that I find hard to explain somehow.

One-shots are very anticlimatic

Don't get me wrong, before tonight we spent many hours spread out over several weeks practising the fight, wiping a lot and improving only relatively slowly. But tonight we went in and killed him on the first attempt, and regardless of how much we practised in the weeks before, it just felt kind of wrong to me. The last boss of the expansion strikes me as someone who should go down after a night filled with blood and sweat, close to the end of the raid, after you just had a one-percent wipe on the attempt before. Those are the boss kills that feel truly glorious and make everyone erupt in cheers on Vent. Downing the Lich King with relatively little effort on the first attempt of the night didn't make me feel heroic; it just left me feeling slightly confused and wondering whether that was really all there was to it.

Welcome to the Tirion Fordring show

If you don't want to be spoiled about what happens towards the end of the fight (not after), don't read this bit. Basically I already knew that the fight would effectively end once Arthas' health reached ten percent, but I didn't know what exactly would happen after that. I didn't think it would affect my feelings about the fight negatively because I remember reaching the ten-percent mark on Archimonde on Mount Hyjal as something that felt extremely exciting at the time even if it meant that we had already won. Basically lots of wisps show up, you become immune to damage and pwn him for the last ten percent - awesome. I thought the Lich King fight would have something similar, but no.

What happens is that the whole raid dies for no reason and Arthas laughs about how he's going to resurrect all of us as scourge now. Then Tirion finally decides to break out of the ice and kicks his arse, while the ghost of Terenas Menethil graciously decides to give everyone a res so they can assist Tirion. I don't think I've ever seen a boss fight that made me feel less heroic in my entire life. Basically what it comes down to is that all that struggling with val'kyrs and defiles was utterly pointless as the Lich King was only playing with us anyway, as evidenced by the fact that he one-shots us all when he grows tired of the game. Good thing that Tirion was there to save us all, huh? I don't mind fighting alongside friendly NPCs, but Mr Fordring really just makes the whole raid look like a bunch of tools. Couldn't he have saved us those repair bills and asked the light to get him out of that ice block sooner? It would have saved everyone a lot of hassle. Bah.

The video at the end just makes no bloody sense

Then it's all over and you get to see a special cinematic, cool. Originally I wanted to avoid watching it until I actually got to kill the Lich King myself, but I kind of spoiled myself by accident when the monument in the middle of Dalaran went up and I went "ooh, what's that", clicking on it like a clueless fool. I wasn't too impressed by the video but didn't want to be too judgemental in case I was missing some context from the actual fight. Now that I've seen it... nope, there's nothing missing, it still makes no bloody sense. I can only agree with everything that Chastity from Righteous Orbs said in this post a few months ago. "Okay, this was kind of stupid," is not really what I wanted my final thoughts about the end-of-expansion boss to be.

So yeah. My alt is a Kingslayer, woo. Yogg-Saron excited me a lot more.