If you haven't done the Unbinding of Kith'ix, or even heard the discourse surrounding it, you might not be aware that the events of this one-boss raid have proven controversial.
To talk about it will require us to go into spoiler territory. But we're going to be talking about stakes, trilogies, tropes, and lots of thematic ideas and concepts that go beyond the most recent mini-raid.
So, Spoilers Ahead:
I don't really do any in-game roleplaying in WoW, but I do have a kind of biography and character concept for at least my more-played characters and older ones. My main is a Human Paladin, and I always thought of him as someone who was really kind of omnibenevolent - he'd fight obvious evil, but be reluctant to fight against foes like the Horde, where warfare is more of a failure of respect and communication than some inevitable conflict of good versus evil.
But I had it, at least for a while, that he could not help but feel a great deal of anger for the Blood Knights, and Lady Liadrin in particular as the one who founded the order. After all, back in Burning Crusade, when they were first introduced, the Blood Knights came by their paladin abilities not through a devotion to the tenets of the light, but through the forceful draining of a Naaru, stealing this power without respect or compassion for the source of it (even if it would be suggested that M'uru had secretly allowed itself to be drained in this way for longterm good of giving the Blood Elves this power, Liadrin and her knights were not aware that they had this unspoken consent).
Of course, this plot actually resolved within Burning Crusade itself, in 2.4, with Liadrin coming to A'dal and confessing her sins and begging for forgiveness, which A'dal granted, along with this revelation about M'uru. By the end of Burning Crusade, the Blood Knights had effectively become traditional paladins, and while conflict with the Alliance put them at odds with the Silver Hand and the Vindicators, ultimately their traditions wound up resembling the Silver Hand's before they were brought under the broader paladin order's umbrella.
By Legion, Liadrin was the class hall champion whom I had running around with me across the Broken Isles, and I liked to imagine that my character and Liadrin would have had long talks about reconciling as both representatives of our respective traditions and as individuals.
So, when, in the story quests after the Unbinding of Kith'ix, Lor'themar gives a brief speech eulogizing the fallen Blood Knight Matriarch, I imagined that in the headcanon of my character, he would go to the Sanctum of Light beneath Light's Hope Chapel and, as Highlord of the Silver Hand, honor Liadrin by writing her name into the annals of the order's greatest champions, marked by some sort of official address.
Yes, Liadrin is the latest NPC to die at the end of a raid in Midnight.
While they leave open a little ambiguity as to the fate of Turalyon and Alleria (Alleria should be dead, but I don't think they'd kill off Turalyon by just letting him fall a long distance,) the impression we're at least meant to be left with after the Voidspire raid is that both of them have died (Voidspire is maybe the most direct abject failure we've had in a raid. Even with the Incarnates escaping the Vault of the Incarnates, we at least do take down Raszageth,) and then we have Zul'jan dying in the Vault of Ula'tek, and now Liadrin.
So, why are people upset?
Well, I think there are two main reasons: one is simply that they don't want to see this character die. She has, of course, been part of the game for 19 years (pretty close to 20, given that she debuted with Burning Crusade in January of 2007). And while I don't think she's been a terribly prominent character in all that time, she has been one of the major Blood Elf NPCs, as well as a key representative of what a Horde Paladin looks like. I've also heard some complaints about this being some imbalance of Alliance versus Horde NPCs dying, which... is not really something I get, mainly because tallying which faction has lost more NPCs seems a crazy way to determine supposed bias toward one faction or another (indeed, you could argue that killing off a major Horde NPC means that the Horde is getting more drama).
The other, and I think more salient point of complaint is the manner of Liadrin's death. When we fight Kith'ix, he has some incredibly powerful abilities that, well, basically get us permanently stunned without Liadrin's help. Liadrin makes a prayer to the Light to use her as a vessel, channeling more holy energy than her body can handle to give us a chance. And indeed, her abilities are crucial to our actually beating Kith'ix. Some people probably just saw the cutscene at the end and didn't understand that this provided context for her broken-bodied state at the end of the fight, and that's an unfair position to judge from. But that being said, I think a reasonable complaint would be that, well... we've seen other NPCs channel the Light in crucial ways during various fights and they've been fine. To me, maybe the most glorious miracle of the Light in WoW is when Tirion Fordring, frozen in a block of ice by the Lich King right as our battle begins, is able to break free of his restraints after Arthas - instant-wipes the raid. (This doesn't happen anymore, which is either a bug or a change meant to keep bugs from keeping you dead if you run ICC at max level these days.) While this is more like one brief moment of miraculous power, it's still a guy who has been frozen in solid ice for like ten minutes. But Tirion is fine, only dying later to the Legion's invaders several years later.
So, why does Liadrin die?
Well, I think it's not that this story wouldn't make sense if she survived. But there's a tone that the entire Midnight expansion has been trying to establish: this is the dark entry in the Worldsoul trilogy. It dates back to at least the original Star Wars trilogy. The first movie ends with an unqualified triumph, even if Alderaan was blown up, Luke's caretakers were murdered by a government death squad, and Obi-Wan was slain, but it's only because of the brief shots establishing that Darth Vader makes it out of the Battle of Yavin alive that there's any real question of how much of a victory this is. But Empire Strikes Back famously ends with a downer: Han has been kidnapped, Luke loses a hand and also has his entire understanding of his family legacy turned upside-down, and the Rebellion is on the run. Return of the Jedi would resolve these by giving a greater victory than what was achieved in the first movie, and one that would last until the sequel movies decades later kind of ripped apart more or less everything that was achieved in the original trilogy.
But I digress.
The point is, the Worldsoul Saga is this experiment in making a trilogy out of World of Warcraft expansions. And while we'll have to wait until the conclusion of the Last Titan wraps up to see if it all stuck together cohesively, trilogies often give their middle installment the darkest tone. (This is part of what I thought didn't work about Mass Effect 3 - while the second game was more aesthetically dark, it's the only game where you can get all of your party members through the story alive, while the 3rd game has a high-stakes-fatigue issue that makes it feel darker than the second game.)
There is always a price we're paying in all of the major raids - the Voidspire is a strategic failure that ends with us fighting one of our own, the March on Quel'danas is a qualified victory that still sees Xal'atath accomplish what she set out to do, even if the Sunwell is saved. Vault of Ula'tek sees us fail to rescue Zul'jan and then also winds up freeing something worse than Ula'tek. And now this story sees one of Azeroth's great heroes die.
So...
I think we should be concerned about how this expansion ends.
Notably, at Blizzcon, they said that part of the reason that they were being very cagey about the Last Titan is that they would need to spoil the end of Midnight in order to describe what is happening. The implication of the brief teaser is that we'll be facing off against the Titans, or at least Titan creations, that are more powerful than anything we've seen from them before. But what might bring them to use such weapons against us?
Well, do we think we're going to fail to prevent the Worldsoul from being corrupted?
Ok, here's my prediction:
I do think we'll defeat Xal'atath. The caster dagger legendary out of the Worldcore raid looks suspiciously like the Blade of the Black Empire, which to me implies that we won't kill Xal'atath, but we'll imprison her within another weapon like she was for thousands (if not millions) of years up until the events of Battle for Azeroth (remember that that elf body she floats around in isn't actually hers, though it does seem that she was some kind of humanoid a very, very long time ago).
Thus, I doubt that her plan to "merge" with the Worldsoul to essentially become it and thus be born as what seems like it would be the most powerful god in the Warcraft cosmos, her essence might do something catastrophic to it - something that will at least seem at the time like the worst-case-scenario that drove Sargeras to try to mercy-kill the entire universe.
In other words, the expansion called Midnight is going to have a dark ending, most likely.
Now, obviously, it can't stick: I suspect that if this does happen, we're going to spend the Last Titan trying to cleanse Azeroth while all the most dangerous Titanic contingency plans kick into gear. If this theory is right, we're essentially going to be spending the expansion trying to prove that Sargeras was wrong, and that the Titan's attempt to cleanse Azeroth rather than destroy it was the right one. Where the nuance will likely come in is how the Titans' goals might have been noble, but perhaps their methods were too narrow-minded, and that the idea that only Titanic Order could preserve Azeroth was wrong - that the other aspects of the world need to be honored as well - that the Titans shouldn't have ripped the Worldsoul out of Harandar and built this whole other facility to house her, but should have instead worked alongside the other cosmic forces to keep her safe.
You know. The central moral theme of Warcraft. We're more powerful when we embrace our differences to work together instead of fighting one another.
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