resurrection-sickness
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Ditching the Death Penalty
About ten days ago, Blizzard Community Manager Taepsilum posted in the EU forums on a thread about removing the death penalty. While this may sound like a political hot potato that WoW Insider would do best to avoid, Taepsilum was actually responding to a post calling for the removal of resurrection sickness from the game. The original poster asserted that it was outdated, no longer necessary, and flatly inconvenient. That it detracted from the game's experience. Taepsilum's post was as follows. Taepsilum The death of a character should be something important, the death penalty is there to make sure players don't disregard it, in my opinion it's actually already too easy and too fast to resurrect. It's because of the penalty and the lost time when doing a corpse run, that players will be more cautious about their character. If you decide to resurrect at the spirit healer, it's because either your character died in a very weird place (and you should be more careful), or you just don't want to corpse run. I think we should all be glad that there's no experience loss as death penalty, that would probably be a bit too harsh, but I do think we need something to keep death from being meaningless. We're always open to good and new ideas of what that might be; as long as it's not "removal of the death penalty", feel free to chip in ;) source
The Perfect Ten: Death penalties
Death penalties belong in that tier of MMO discussion topics that is reserved for the most controversial subjects, along with skimpy armor and the New Game Enhancements. Death, as we know well, comes for us all with big, nasty, pointy teeth. But for some reason, we are not fans of it, neither in real life nor in online games. One of the reasons death penalties continue to be a divisive subject is that they used to be brutal beyond belief in MMOs back in the olden days of yore. As the MMO genre progressed, the penalties were lightened and experimented with in an effort to avoid driving players barking mad because of them. So we've ended up with two camps: one group of gamers who campaign for harsh death penalties to make the world seem exciting and dangerous, and another group that campaigns for lenient penalties in the interests of sanity. So today we're going to go through 10 of the most-used types of death penalties in MMOs, starting with the most brutal and ending with the most lenient. Stay for the after-column party as well, as you'll get a taste for this debate in the comments section!
The high cost of rez sickness
Lotonero got his thread locked because he posted it in the wrong forum, but he makes an interesting point: rez sickness costs are higher than ever. Death costs are already pretty high -- when you're dressed in greens and blues it's not much of a problem, but get yourself down to red on some high-level epics, and see if you don't wince when you hit up the repair vendor to pay the piper. But rez sickness costs are even worse -- they affect durability on all of your items, even those you're not wearing, and so when a dual-specced healer or tank with two or even three sets of gear goes rez-sick, the amount they have to pay goes through the roof.Now, you might think what I thought: if you're carrying around that much epic gear, then a) why are you dying, and b) why are you rezzing from a spirit healer? But Wryxian, right before sending Lotonero packing to the suggestions thread, throws in his own two cents: "Maybe not." Maybe Blizzard might consider it -- dual specs wasn't around when they originally thought up the cost of rez sickness, and maybe since many players are carrying around two sets of gear now, it's due for another look. I didn't think the Hearthstone cooldown needed a nerf either, but we got that anyway.So maybe it's something for Blizzard to think about. My guess is that most players will not think it's worth the change -- gold is flowing so freely nowadays and the death penalty is so cheap (back in the EQ days, we used to lose XP or even levels) that it's not a big deal, especially when you choose to go rez sick. But it's true that this is one of the game's oldest mechanics, so maybe it's time to take a critical look.
