As those who have read the patch notes for Book 7 know, all classes are get­ting an abil­ity that allows them to revive their char­ac­ter. Although a few announced changes for Book 7 have groups clam­or­ing about “easy mode” being enabled for this game, it seems as though this abil­ity has seen the major­ity of complaints.

On the sur­face this sounds like a big deal, but there are some sig­nif­i­cant limitations:

Play­ers may now revive them­selves in place, via a but­ton on the user inter­face win­dow when a char­ac­ter is defeated, instead of retreat­ing. This fea­ture is dis­abled in instances, dur­ing Mon­ster Play and after instant defeat.

• At lev­els 1 through 9, char­ac­ters will have a 30 minute cooldown (shown via a “Revived” effect) that pre­vents them from reviv­ing again.
• At level 10, when the char­ac­ter receives the “Jour­ney­man” char­ac­ter­is­tic, the revive cooldown increases to 1 hour.
• At level 40, when the char­ac­ter receives the “Heroic” char­ac­ter­is­tic, the self revive cooldown increases to 2 hours.

Accord­ing to Tur­bine, you’ll come back with 20% power and morale. You’ll also have the stan­dard dread/item wear applied per a nor­mal death.

After read­ing this, I’m just fail­ing to under­stand what the big deal is. You can’t use it what­so­ever in the two places you’ll die most: instances and PvMP. That alone drops down its use sig­nif­i­cantly. Addi­tion­ally, most of my deaths in non-instanced zones are usu­ally because I’ve been over­pow­ered by a wave of ene­mies. Am I really going to re-spawn right in their field of view at 20% Morale? I’m just going to die again in that case. Retreat­ing is still the bet­ter option.

There has been some con­cern that this is going to expo­nen­tially increase the amount of poor play­ers in the later por­tions of the game. I don’t know what data these opin­ions are based upon, but it’s hard to think of these state­ments as much more than hyper­bole. There’s absolutely no way that this will make up for the lack of a class with a proper revive skill.

As it stands, I don’t hon­estly believe there is a sig­nif­i­cant group of play­ers out there that are going to see this skill as an open pass to buf­foon­ery. Are there peo­ple out there who are think­ing “oh ha ha, I died, bet­ter revive and keep being ter­ri­ble at the game!”? Hon­estly, where are they? Who are these peo­ple? Why would any­one want to deal with the debuffs given to their char­ac­ter when being revived in this way any more than retreating?

If these peo­ple are that bad at the game, they’re likely going to be dying more often than the skill’s cooldown would even allow. About the only thing I see com­ing out of this is peo­ple using it once in a while to avoid hav­ing to pop up back at a rally cir­cle. Some­times they’ll be able to save some time. Some­times other play­ers might not have to wait for them to run back to the Fel­low­ship from a rally point.

I think at the end of the day, we’re going to see the same gen­eral skill lev­els by Level 60. Some peo­ple will know it inside and out and some won’t. That’s exactly how it is now and it’s how it will remain. When I hit the Rift for my first raid, I didn’t feel like all of my knowl­edge of PvE in non-instanced sit­u­a­tions (again, the only place where these skills work in the first place) mat­tered too much. I had to fol­low the lead of my team and do things I never did before. There’s a learn­ing curve for this and even “bad” play­ers are going to have to get better.

Peo­ple are going to want to avoid dying even with a self-revive abil­ity, just like they want to avoid dying when they’re in a group with a min­strel (or even mul­ti­ple min­strels). It’s incon­ve­nient to you, it’s incon­ve­nient to oth­ers and it’s incon­ve­nient to that task at hand. If you come across peo­ple who revel in dying (assum­ing these peo­ple exist in the first place), then stop group­ing with them. They could die and beg to be revived now as it is.

I think the prob­lem with the over­all argu­ment is that you have to take it to its inevitable con­clu­sion. Peo­ple have always been able to get revived by a vari­ety of classes. So any­one that plays reg­u­larly with a Min­strel, for exam­ple, and gets revived when they die isn’t going to be good enough? I mean, what really is the dif­fer­ence there? Are they less tal­ented when that hap­pens?   I hon­estly feel it’s a spe­cious argu­ment. I feel like there are peo­ple build­ing up a straw man argu­ment for this … com­ing up with a group of peo­ple that there’s no evi­dence even exist.

The skill really can just be summed up as this: some­times when I die I won’t have to run quite as far. Is that really so bad?

Per­son­ally, I can live with it.

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