Idea: A quicker death experience

Since the beginning of WoW i really liked the way how dying and being death worked in the game. Where your spirit is at the Spirit Healer and then you have to find you corpse to resurrect yourself and continue. After like 19 years of playing, i think that system can use some improvement to make dying and resurrecting quicker and faster.

Spirit Healer at your corpse

My idea is that when you die you are not relocated at the Graveyard, but instead you get into the spirit world at your corpse instead. The Spirit Healer spawns in front of you at your corpse. She gives you two options to choose from: “Resurrect here” or “Resurrect at graveyard”.

  • “Resurrect here” brings you straight back to the living world on the field. This is a quick, but ‘not-safe’-option as the danger you died to might still be near. Also when you resurrect at your corpse you get resurrection sickness as well.
  • “Resurrect at graveyard” gives you a waypoint marker to the nearest graveyard. If you walk into a different direction and come closer to another graveyard the waypoint marker changes to that one instead. Resurrecting at the graveyard is safe and does not give you resurrection sickness.

If you die in a dungeon the last thing you want a long run from the nearest graveyard of the dungeon. So that system, and in some dungeons this is already the case, i believe, is changing as well. When you die in a dungeon you only get the option “Resurrect at Entrance”. Ofcourse you canwait for the healer to resurrect you right on the spot. But if the healer cannot perform that action for whatever reason, then you can resurrect at the dungeon entrance. No graveyard runs anymore so it will speed up the experience.

4 Likes

So instead of walking from the graveyard to your corpse so you can continue adventuring, you deadwalk to the graveyard to livewalk back to the general area of where you died to continue adventuring.

Making the journey twice as long if you want to avoid an instant resurrection penalty through Spirit Healer above your body with your suggestion.

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This is already the case for all dungeons in retail (there are also checkpoints in some of them) or are talking about classic?

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It is actually odd – from a fantasy point of view – that when you die your spirit somehow appears at a random graveyard and not at your dead body. Because isn’t that how it is in film? Someone dies on the operating table and they have the whole spiritual out-of-body experience where they see their own body as the doctors are operating on it.
It’s a bit weird that in WoW you appear in a graveyard and have run back to your corpse. Like, why do spirits appear in a graveyard by default? Isn’t that where the body goes after its been put to rest? But if the body is still out in the field, shouldn’t the spirit be so as well?

Yada yada, good idea!

Blizzard’s original intent with the whole “walk back to your body” was to have a death penalty that emphasized the danger of the world, but without being overly penalizing (like it was in similar games at the time).

Over the years Blizzard have added more graveyard and flying ghost form and so on, to make it even less penalizing to die. But still, I would prefer a more modern solution at this point, i.e. resurrect on spot, at nearest checkpoint/graveyard, or in town.
The whole running thing doesn’t serve much of a purpose anymore I think.

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While the core idea is not bad with updating the death walk… Your suggestion is, as pointed out by others, far from perfect.

I personally think the best and easiest solution is to just make player characters in “deathwalk” more into a “deathglide” and allow players to move/glide around like an actual, incorporeal spirit at 2x the speed than now.

That way players don’t need a fancy flying mount in deadwalk specific for the location AND it makes sense you move faster than as a mortal being in a mortal body.

Let the Ghosting commence!

It’s kind of iconic at this point. Removing it would take away from WoWs unique gameplay feeling.

2 Likes

They just need a “teleport to body” option where you can then find somewhere relatively safe to respawn. Graveyards can be useful, especially if you get stuck or went AFK and flew into the ocean, dying of fatigue. Also to allow the ghost to fly regardless of zone or level.

Not too keen on this idea as you’d have to run twice the distance to avoid res sickness and its (rather high these days) repair bill.
Also it would remove the corpse drag as a means of getting through some tough areas unless your new res let you choose where to res in an area similar to how it works now.

Personally I’d like them to implement flying as a ghost everywhere (maybe with some exceptions for technical reasons). I sometimes die and am befuddled to find I can’t fly and have to navigate (in a grey misty world) back to where my corpse is (which could be in some tricky mountain area).

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Maybe some mini-game in spirit realm and then you return in proximity of the corpse? :thinking:

2 Likes

Yes, making the journey twice as long makes it also more interesting to play with a healer.

So you have basicly three options with this idea.

  1. You resurrect straight away with resurrection sickness.
  2. Or you prevent resurrection sickness and walk to a graveyard and then back to your objective.
  3. Or you prevent both resurrection sickness and the graveyard-walk and team with a healer.

You can do wild things with that, haha. Maybe the sky above ICC can be healed and the only way to get into the Shadowlands content is to die. When you die you can go to any Spirit Healer for a teleport to Oribos.

2 Likes

I’ve always loved the Monster Hunter way to deal with death: you lose your senses and faint, only to be rescued by a group of felynes that put you on a cart and get you back to the safety of a basecamp. It’s immersive, you don’t actually die for real, and in a few seconds you’re back on your feet ready to go back hunting (though cutting your reward as a payment for the rescue service).

Doing something like this would also cut away the problem to get back to your unreachable corpse. You would no longer be able to corpse drag though.

The main point of the current system after all these years is the option to return to a safe place if you so desire. Less of a penalty with many more graveyards and dungeon entrances.

Sometimes it’s not possible to return to your body, most obviously when you fall off Outland. Other times you would resurrect, but everything respawns and you can’t get out anyway. Terrain can be annoying, especially if you fly and don’t know the way.

In most games upon dying you return to a save, usually the entrance or some other safe point. In GW2 you have to pick a travel point. Either way, this resets your challenge. You buff again, then try again, all the while gaining loot and experience.

It is generally good practice to encourage mindful playing. Hardcore is an extreme version, but with too little penalty, people exhibit careless strategies. There have been heated D3 discussions about hardcore vs softcore rifting.

My idea is that we skip the falling down on to the ground death.
When the time comes we just do an “oof” sound and be dead standing up.

While some races goes down and yell before starting the corpse run i’ll be halfway back already.
Saves alot of time :+1:

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