Seriously, this should be a pinned post as often as I hear complaints about lost characters on here and other forums.
Your character is not lost or deleted unless you delete it.
1 Go to Character Selection
2 Select the dead character
3 go to “shop” in the lower left
4 Choose “Free character transfer”
5 Go play that character on a non-hardcore server.
6 Your character is NOT lost.
What you really lost is being on the hardcore server to do it, and the time spent.
Folks, we weep with you for your lost hours due to disconnect, stupidity, or griefing. We’ve all lost toons to that stuff too. (As of this writing, I haven’t made it past level 15) We’re sympathetic you can’t play with your friends at their level now or messed up your duo group.
However when you created the character you agreed to those exact terms even if you didn’t read them. It’s actually more fair than Real Life because we got a choice.
If you’re complaining about it and begging for a fix then all you want to do is to play hardcore without the rules applying to you.
Now I understand we have teenagers and adults who have trouble with this concept still. There’s nothing wrong with being further back on the journey to wisdom than others so long as you are still moving forward. REAL LIFE doesn’t have resets. it doesn’t have appeals. As you get older you see a lot of unfair things happen to innocent people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the “game mode” we live in outside of the game.
Take a lesson from this game mode: Think. Plan. Prepare. Be ready. Accept that some things will happen that you have no control over. Accept you might not be as “leet” as you think you are. 
