Making Death Work for You

So, sometimes death can be a good thing. In most games I’ve played, it is decidedly not. Death is something to be remedied post haste as your dead body contributes nothing. A couple exceptions have been seen in WoW to either pick up a quest or teleport into a zone via resurrection. The city takes a slightly different approach. Your dead body contributes nothing, unless you or your teammates decide to exploit your demise.

So, this exploitation can occur in several ways. The basic method is the combat rez. All rezzes are combat capable (the worst rez brings you back with full HP but no end) and the majority of them have some form of bonus as well, such as granting you a bonus to your damage. These buffs are sometimes paired with delayed debuffs, but you usually make out ahead in the buff game.

The second method is through offensive self rezing. There are a few standard self rezzes that just get you back on your feet. Then there is rise of the phoenix which not only puts you back on your feet but nukes the area around your corpse for a decent amount of fire damage, has a stun effect, and deals some knock back. The dark armor rez, while less flashy, packs a devastating AoE stun with the caveat that there MUST be a nearby enemy for the ability to work. Willpower has a somewhat more mild self rez, really acting more like a self targeted combat rez from the above category then an offense power.

So, all these are well and good, but there are two more corpse abuse abilities that take the crown. The leadership power pool is available to everyone, and the final power is called vengeance. If a teammate dies, click and the rest of the team gets a sizeable to huge (depending on your AT modifiers) buff to their accuracy, damage, and defense, plus a one shot minor heal effect. And then there is fallout, the power that turns your buddy’s corpse into a small nuclear strike. There have been people that design significant parts of their build around fallen comrades because the powers are just that powerful. A radiation defender can utterly turn the tide of the battle if a teammate falls. Hit vengeance to grant huge buffs to the team, click fallout to nuke the whole spawn, then mutate the fallen to get them back on their feet with buffs to their damage and recharge speed.

All this combines to make death a potentially tactical maneuver in combat. I can recall two instances offhand where I have deliberately gotten myself killed to benefit the team. Way back I was on a (mostly PuG) team where we had enough mitigation the arch villain we were fighting wasn’t really hurting us, but we couldn’t punch through his evasiveness. I had to literally kill myself by spamming a self damaging move that negates your ability to be healed temporarily in order to die, after which a teammates used vengeance and the rest of the team was able to land hits reliably again. Then just today we were fighting a monster at the end of a task force and our defender was running out of endurance so held back on the blasting. Seeing as this was a 4 man team without a real damage dealer we really needed the extra damage and the accompanying resistance debuffs paired with the blasts. So what do I do? I turn off my resistance shield and ignore the fact that I have self heals as I move next to the tank and try to take some AoE hits. As I take damage the defender gets an endurance discount (an inherent that I reallllly want to see replaced, but I’ll admit that it’s powerful when it kicks in) and can act again. Then when I actually manage to die…two teammates had fallout. The boss didn’t last long after those explosions went off and they put me back on my feet.

So with death having relatively minor consequences and sometimes being a tactically wise decision, you can see where I get my “death happens, oh well” attitude. Not that I don’t try to keep teammates alive but sometimes…

-Luigrein