SpiritHealer
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"Return to Graveyard" button appears in latest Cataclysm beta build
Picture this: You're an innocent, wide-eyed goblin, exploring the Ruins of Gilneas in Cataclysm. You're minding your own business when all of a sudden, a hideous, jaggedly polygonned female worgen leaps out of the bushes and assaults you! You fight valiantly, but -- QQ! -- your chosen class has been nerfed to the ground in beta patch after cruel beta patch! You clutch your chest, cursing Ghostcrawler with your final breath. You fall to the ground as a sassy little green corpse. "No problem," you think. "I'll simply run back to my corpse!" And so you try. But ... you can't find it. I mean, it's there somewhere, but you're on the wrong side of a moat, and ... well, you've never been here before. Wait, this doesn't look familiar at all ... I mean, it sorta looks familiar but ... it's different. You think you've seen that tree before but ... no, wait, it looks exactly like all the other trees around here. And ... dammit, your ghost just fell into this deep trench. Crap. You're nowhere near your corpse or the Spirit Healer. How the hell are you going to get out of this? The answer: The brand new Return to Graveyard button. It's a new feature in the latest beta build, and it does exactly what you think it does.
Of corpse running and you
I'm sure we've all done it from time to time -- trying to get somewhere new, you've encountered heavy resistance from the locals and died a terrible death. Refusing to give up, you've run back to your corpse and continued on, until you're caught and killed again. Perhaps you thought you'd be smart and run to the spirit healer in your destination zone, far off from where you died, only to tragically see that you've been sent back to the location of the spirit healer closest to your corpse. This does make traveling through areas high above your level quite the challenge -- as I'm sure they were intended to be. Die, run back, rez a bit further down the road -- then simply wash, rinse, and repeat until you've reached your final destination. However, over at Mania's Arcana, Mania provides us with two tricks that will allow you to do the majority of your traveling as a ghost. The trick? If you die on one continent and then spirit rez in the other (yes, you can ride boats and zepplins as a ghost!), you'll be allowed to rez right where you want to. And, perhaps more conveniently, if you run as a ghost to wherever you wish, disconnect, reconnect, and then try to spirit rez, you'll be allowed to.Now, both of these little tricks smack of overlooked bugs, as the intended behavior of the game client is clear. But at present it is a working strategy in-game that can be used to more quickly move you from point A to point B.
Should you lose experience when you die?
In the World of Warcraft, the cost of dying is really pretty minimal. Yes, there's the trouble of running from the graveyard to your corpse and yes you take 10% durability damage to all of your equipped gear (the cost goes up to 25% if you need to spirit rez). So you lose a minute or two of time running back to your corpse eating/drinking/bandaging, and rebuffing yourself before getting right back to where you left off. In terms of gameplay, you're not really set back at all -- you don't lose experience or levels from death. And sometimes death can even be beneficial to your character: say, by killing one of a pack of three monsters (dying in the process), and then coming back to take out the second and the third. You've just managed to kill a group of monsters larger than you could have killed alone -- all by benefit of the death system!But the penalty for death is so light that there's not really much reason to avoid it. Oh, I know the time spent in corpse runs adds up and the cost of repairing gear only gets higher and higher. But it's not the end of the world if you die -- and it's hardly even the end of your online character. And so there are some players who think the death penalty needs to be harsher. If death mattered, we'd all be playing more cautiously -- in fact, the difference in playstyle would make it a whole new game. But it would make the most difference in the raiding game -- I can't say I've ever learned an encounter without a few deaths. Losing experience or levels for wiping in a raid situation?"Sorry everyone, I just leveled down to 69 from that wipe, have to go grind."Ouch!
The Death Stories Project
The Death Stories Project is a research progress focusing on how players experience death in MMO's. The project is currently seeking contributions from players of various MMO's who are interested in describing their in-game experiences with death and share screenshots. There are no results or findings posted yet, but the project looks to be an interesting one. So take a look, and if you have time, fill out the survey. [Via WarCry]
