>>714185351
and that's the thing, killing off the Lich King is something they could have done eventually, but doing it in the same xpac that introduced him was a complete waste
WotLK would have been peak warcraft if they had to balls to make the players actually lose
It would have raised the stakes immensely on future xpacs involving the Lich King because now you've established that in fact it "is" possible to lose against him, that there's no guarantee at the end of the xpac you'll be defeating the scourge

And honestly, it could have been done in a way that's actually fun and would have been supremely memorable
If they had made it so ICC wasn't the final raid

ICC ends fairly similar to how it did, except for the miraculous save at the end, party gets wiped, and revived as the Lich King's new enforcers, and the actual true final raid is "Wrath of the Lich King" in which you're acting as his enforcers and assaulting various locations in Northrend

Post ICC, Icecrown itself gets removed as a zone with quests and purely turned into a zone filled with endless hostile mobs

Then as the new raid comes out, split up in wings that are each about conquering a different place and time gated, and whenever any guild on your server completes a wing, several zones in Northrend get turned into purely hostile zones

By the time there's only a few zones left the quests itself in Northrend change, and purely become about the Alliance and Horde desperately evacuating the continent