The Outdated Concept of Res Sickness

Community WoW Community Council
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So, to put it bluntly, Res Sickness serves no purpose nowadays.

Nowadays, I would wager the vast majority of players who have to take res sickness take it because they fell into the abyss and their corpse spawned somewhere they can’t reach, they died somewhere they can’t reach as a ghost, or their corpse is being camped in War Mode.

Res Sickness made more sense in Vanilla, when MMOs were new, and most of the other MMOs in the market didn’t even have a corpse run feature. (In Final Fantasy 11, for example, if you didn’t get ressed by a player within like 10 minutes, you were sent back to your hearth location. No other option)

So, I offer a better solution: Add a second button, next to [Return to Graveyard] that is simply [Ressurect at Insert Hub Name]. This could even be replaced with your hearth location, if they felt like it. The 25% durability loss could still be applied to make there be a decent penalty for opting for this, and maybe even apply some other sort of penalty that won’t completely disable your gameplay.

This would prevent people from effectively not being able to play for 10 minutes due to things like the corpse being out of reach, or being camped. It would also have the secondary bonus of allowing players being camped in War Mode to simply decide “Enough is enough” and go back to the hub. (Note: I would think using this option in War Mode would require a bigger penalty to encourage people NOT to use it, but also not punish them so much they can’t play if they use it. So like, 75-100% Durability Break or such)

And those who don’t want to run all the way back from the hub/inn? They can do the normal corpse run. Heck, you might even go so far as to actively encourage corpse running by having it nullify the 10% durability loss from the death. (As the major source of repair bills are dungeons/raids, this wouldn’t have much effect on that, so it would essentially just be a nice incentive to walk back.)

Companies should always encourage people to use features, not discourage them to not use them. (Which is the current system)

As an added bonus, this would prevent LFG, LFR, and Random Battlegrounds from having to deal with someone who queued with Res Sickness. Which happens way more often than it ever should.

I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts on if they believe it’s also outdated/etc.

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On a similar note, I’d like to hear others thoughts on the Daze mechanic.

I think it has VERY MUCH outstayed its welcome in WoW, at least in its current state. I’d be more inclined to say it’d be fine if they simply removed the fact getting dazed dismounts you.

But at the same time I’ve died from being dazed to things I shouldn’t have died from because they made it impossible for me to get out of things I needed to. First thing to come to mind is the frontal strike mawsworn do. I’ve died a dozen times to it entirely because I was dazed.

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I do largely agree that the res sickness mechanic is a bit outdated… 10 minutes of waiting around is too big a punishment for ressing at the spirit healer. At the same time, it does serve some purpose.

In the cases of dying in unreachable places, I don’t think removing res sickness is the solution, I think the solution is to let us actually reach those places. Perhaps ghosts should get a couple of abilities to help them do that, allowing us to glide, fly, blink or boost our movement speed could help with that, or simply move the corpse to a reachable location if you die in an area that is in a hard to reach spot.

On camping… I think that if it is such a big problem that you can’t even respawn and run away to safety, you should perhaps have the option to temporarily opt-out of PvP when you respawn, perhaps talking to the spirit healer gives you a 30 second buff that disables PvP so you have a chance to run away.

Let’s also acknowledge that if these are the only instances players take the res sickness, it really speaks to how efficient it is as a deterrent; you only do it when you absolutely have to.

I think a “fast travel through death” sort of thing is definitely going to be abused one way or another, I don’t really like that idea. Being able to use your hearthstone while dead, and the hearthstone also resurrecting you, might be a decent compromise. Dying shouldn’t be something you can use to your advantage, unless it’s specifically something that is part of the design (i.e. Spirit of Redemption). Prohibiting this sort of behaviour is part of res sickness’ design, if not one of the primary motivations of what it’s intended to do.

Dying in the Maw would let you respawn instantly at a resurrection stone, effectively teleporting you to safety, but it came at the cost of losing your hard-earned stygia that you could collect by returning to your corpse - the Soulslike approach to resurrection. I think a similar system could work elsewhere, as I’m not a particularly big fan of ghost running in the first place, but there needs to be some sort of cost to respawning in a safe zone. Ghost running could be the “free” option to respawning, costing a little bit of time and effort, while respawning at the spirit healer would come at a cost, perhaps with the option of alleviating that cost by returning to your corpse. I’m not sure what that cost would be, though.

In summary, I do think res sickness is a bit outdated in its design, but simply removing it without putting in another system of deterrence isn’t the best solution. Death isn’t very meaningful if it’s convenient.

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I think the daze effect is really annoying, but it’s also a pretty good system. It means that you can’t just run through groups of enemies to skip them. I think the implementation could be better… but I would keep the dismount effect in, as it’s a smart tool for level design. Perhaps instead of having a random chance at being dazed, you get a little health bar for your mount that will daze you when depleted? That way, trivial enemies won’t daze you while you’re running through old content, and you also have some interesting decision-making when you try to run through a couple of enemies.

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I get that and you do bring up some good points, but one thing you didn’t touch on is the fact res sickness as it is is punishing to not only the player who takes it, but if they join a group, it punishes that group. You can’t kick someone from a random battleground that has res sickness for instance. I’ve had a WSG where someone had Res Sickness for 6 of the 10 minutes. We obviously lost. And if you kick them from LFD/LFR, you will incur a penalty in being able to kick again, so if you get a rude person, you’re stuck with them.

(Note, these are obviously outliers, but it does happen, lol)

Though I guess they could always just make it so you can’t queue for group content with Res Sickness?

Though I do still believe encouraging people to spirit walk is better than discouraging them to spirit res. You attract more bees with honey, after all. :stuck_out_tongue:

This would be a neat way to fix it. A big issue is getting dismounted flying through the air and getting hit by a level 20 eagle lol. Or in old dungeons/raids with mounts enabled, getting dismounted by level 30s. It’s like… ugh.

Or in current content, being dismounted by the first hit from a non elite. -.-

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Totally agree on rez sickness. Every time I take rez sickness, it’s because I died from falling off the edge of the map (e.g. in Korthia) and am unable to reach my corpse. It’s the worst of all worlds when you make the corpse run and then find you can’t rez so you have to return to graveyard and take rez sickness. So then I’ve been double penalized.

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I think this is more a problem of no flying mount while dead which should be baseline at this point

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As far as the PvP point I think warmode as a whole would be pretty much ruined if you could just instantly teleport away from the person killing you. People do this now with shard hopping addons that instantly invite you to a auto invite group and hops you to another server. Blizzard should really be handing out bans for this as its basically just being abused to escape game mechanics. I think certain situations are pretty much expected in warmode and one of those is getting ganked and if it happens spirit rezing is just part of it. I know that ive run up on people ganking all the npcs and lowbies in certain areas and had to kill then enough for people to be able escape and continue playing and while they can sit the timer if they didnt have to take rez sickness it would just be further abused by the worst percentage of players

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There should be a penalty for using it in war mode, but it should still be an option.

Back when I leveled a character on a pvp server for my friend, I was like level 46 or so in tanaris. A couple alliance thought it was hilarious to kill me and camp my body AND the graveyard.

They did it for like 2 or 3 hours before I gave up, logged it, deleted the character and told my friend sorry.

Yes, it is a part of war mode, but some people go past that and disrupt your ability to play the game. And as not everyone has other characters they play, it can outright stop you from playing.

They added the buff to the Maw because horde players were complaining about this, if you recall.

On a side note, a good alternative could also be to mark all the spirit healers on the map when you die, and allow you to run to them and res with one of them. As it stands now you can only Res at the spirit healer you were sent to. I’ve tried running to another before lol. I doubt anyone is going to camp every single spirit healer.

5 Likes