Here are some details about how dying works in EverQuest II.
Each time you die, you leave a spirit shard on the ground and take a penalty to your stats, experience, and item wear. When you retrieve your spirit shard, your stats are returned to normal and a large part of your experience penalty is paid off. If you choose to not retrieve your spirit shard, you will automatically absorb it after three days pass (online or offline), but you'll take the full experience penalty.
When you die:
You leave a spirit shard on the ground
You lose some of your stats and pools (health, power)
You owe some experience debt
Your equipped items are slightly damaged
When you retrieve your spirit shard:
Your stats and pools are restored
Your experience debt from that death is reduced by about more than half
The act of recovering a shard is purely an act of reducing debt and recovering lost power. Shards are not a repository for experience, and can only pay back debt, not add regular experience.
Multiple deaths are cumulative:
Each time you die you take an additional stats and pools penalty. This will cap out at around five unrecovered deaths
Each time you die, you take additional experience debt and item wear, with no maximum cap
The stat and pool penalty is based off the number of shards remaining in the world, so the more unrecovered shards you have, the larger your stat and pool penalty will be.
As long as the player has five or more shards in the world, they're going to have the max stat penalty. Recovering shard number eight will immediately give back a chunk of experience debt, but would have no immediate effect on the stat penalty as there are still seven more shards out there.
If you do not retrieve your spirit shard:
You automatically absorb your spirit shard after three real-time days have passed, whether you're online or not.
This will restore the stats and pools lost from that shard, but will not reduce your experience debt at all
Maximum shards per character:
A character may only have up to 10 shards in the world at a time. If the player dies with 10 shards in the world, they don't leave additional shards. This means they don't take an additional stat penalty, but they also don't have a shard to recover to help with experience death. Essentially, dying this many times means taking full experience debt with each death.
If you die and are resurrected:
You can only be resurrected if you haven't released and are still lying on the ground dead.
Spirit shards cannot be resurrected.
If you get resurrected, you do not leave a shard on the ground - you immediately regain your stats and reduce your experience debt the normal amount, just as if you'd picked up a shard.
Groups share debt
Group sharing is a new system that reinforces grouping by allowing groups to share risk as well as reward. Certain classes are at higher risk of dying due to their role, even if they play well. A lot of times, the player who died didn't do anything wrong - they just weren't healed in time, helped out on a bad pull, or had some bad luck. This system lets the group share the penalty for dying, just as they would've shared the reward if they'd won.
Group sharing greatly lowers the penalty for the occasional group member dying. If your group is playing pretty well and someone dies once in awhile, you won't feel much of a penalty at all. If you have members dying frequently, or if your whole group wipes out, then you may want to reconsider what you're fighting or work on refining your strategies.
Here's how this works - If any member of a group dies, their experience debt is split evenly amongst the group members. The shard recovery debt* is not split and is applied only to the player who dies. (*This is the portion that is fully refunded when a player retrieves their shard.)
If you're in a two-person group, each person gets about half of a normal debt if one of them dies. If you're in a six-person group, each person gets about 1/6th of a normal death if one person dies. Because the debt each person gets is much smaller than a normal death, and because all group members are paying off the debt at the same time, it is much faster to get out of debt than it used to be. Joining groups will lower your risk more than they used to, and help you pay off your debt that much faster. Group sharing should lower large debts being racked up by higher risk classes.
This system encourages you to keep your group members alive and healthy. If you end up in a bad situation, it's worthwhile for one person to die if it will let the rest of the group escape. Because of the way sharing works, it won't help you if your whole group wipes out - so think twice before going into situations that are likely to kill the whole group.
The corpse retrieval I don't have a problem with. EXP is slow in EQII so I'd rather debt be near nothing or at least some kind of revenge system in which you or your group kills the guy that kills you and you get no debt, but that's nowhere near the point I'm going to get at here.
The new system requires groups to take part of the debt. Let's look at what we know about MMOGs.
- Most of the people who play have no clue how to use this wild thing called 'teamwork.'
- Broadband != DSL != Modem != T1. Lag is going to ruin this system.
- When people die, it truly is their fault. Plain and simple. Every class has ways to avoid death.
I honestly believe this is the most ridiculous thing the EQII team has done. A lot of their other systems are absolutely fine, but this...Who in the hell came up with this? Does he honestly believe that every single persons group will always be perfect?
Does anyone think I'm insane? Or is it as ludicrous as it seems to be?
Edit: Oh and to further back up my point about friends, family and EQ fanbois being the worst kind of people for early beta; here's the first few posts:
Thanks for the detailed info :). Nicely done.
....That's not beta feedback, n00bler.
Sounds great. Just curious on the amount of debt split among group members. Does that equal the full debt (shard recoverable debt + non shard debt) or just the difference between the total debt (minus) the shard recoverable debt?
This guys problem seems to be how much debt rather than the fact he's getting debt because someone else died...
I actually love this system, much more nice than LOSING experience and a heckuva lot better than EQOA's debt system.
Uh, comparing shit to shit doesn't remove the better shit from the 'shit' category.
I like this new system more than any other death system I have seen in an MMO.
At time:cost, Star Wars Galaxies was significantly better. It promoted socialization (big time) and downtime rather than grinding to get out of red.
Anyway, this rampant fanboi shit goes on and on.
Oh, and here's the thread:
An Update on DyingI think one of the most important things to know about EQ2 is how unfriendly it is to soloers. If someone in your group dies, expect the rest to die in a matter of time. When I see someone die, I get the fuck out of there because PvE is all sorts of outta wack. Though, I suspect this is a feature and not the result of a dev screwup.