guess what? You get to spend a shit load of time paying some shitty rogue or monk to drag your corpse somewhere so you can then hire a shitty mangina cleric to rez you and it was awesome.
I don't really like the old EQ death mechanics. I would go along with it but my preference would be for a less brutal death mechanic (although not meaningless like WoW etc), but have combat that is far more prone to killing you - even more than EQ.
The point I was trying to make about about FD splitting (which I do love in principle), is that I just don't like it when a game gives the players all the tools they need to survive 100% of the time. Because even though everyone starts out as a dumbass, eventually the dumbasses all get really good after constantly being punished to up their game, and the true retards just rage quit the game and never go back. So as the game ages, groups just become a boring chore because they are 100% successful and everyone becomes desensitized and used to making constant steady easy XP and loot. They expect it. And on the rare occasions that someone fucks up and someone dies, people start getting all grumpy.
I would prefer the whole game to be balanced to be harder than that, so at first when everyone goes through the retard learning how to play phase, it's a total nightmare, very regular deaths, trains all over the fucking place, you can barely leave the safety of the town guards without some total catastrophe occurring. And then in time... when everyone gets really good at their classes and understands how to play the game and win, the game still insists that they play on a knife edge. They can go to Befallen with a full perfectly formed group of tank, 2 healers, 2 dps/evac and a CC, but it doesn't mean they are 'safe'. Players will still fall through traps in the ground, maybe even fake floors move around so can't be learned, mobs should be invis and stealth and jump you when you don't expect it, shit should come out the walls and from the ceiling, there should be really nasty traps - baldurs gate style that paralyze people etc, crucial spells should be resisted, aggro should be fucking chaotic with mobs going from person to person eating them, casters should have 2hp, clerics should have extreme mana concerns, evac should be an absolute last resort, mezzes should occasionally fail, chanters mez themselves and people fail to disengage a target in time and break the mez, pathers should wander all over the dungeon and aggro when you least expect it, bringing with them any other group of mobs that was stood nearby, healers should run out of mana mid fight and ranger has to switch to ghetto heals, bard has to put away their swords and get the lute out, mages should run out too and desperately med for that one little slither of blue mana to cast that one vitally needed nuke, etc..etc..
To me it should be a survival game like that. Not just yet another game about adventuring for lootz and xp's. And when you die, you respawn at an altar with some xp loss and gear damage or something. I don't want to lose hours worth of exp, maybe just 20 minutes worth or something. But even that is significant, and more importantly, you have to start your dungeon run all over again, and even more importantly... the same catastrophic full group wipe should be very likely around every corner.
That's what I wanna play. I recently watched the LOTR movies and that's something I noticed in the movies too. The Fellowship of the Ring (ie- the group) didn't just strut in to dungeons with their minds set on all the phat loots and XP. If anything, they wanted to avoid dungeons... Dungeons are fucking terrifying, a giant squid monster might pop out of a pond at any second and just eat someone whole. Or a wave of 50 orcs might come charging at you, and there's no ez-AoE smackdown spells. The wizzy is an old dude who just uses his sword or staff, spells are a last resort type of thing. They spend their whole time trying to gtfo, not hanging around grinding mobs for XP. To me, EQ at it's best was like that. But we all learned to exploit EQ and then it become weak, imo. And SOE dumbed it down too. I would like something that is even more brutal than the first weeks of EQ in 1999.