A pretty fun forum thread caught the attention of Bornakk and many, many regular posters as well. The player Course of Medivh-US asks a question: If your character said one last thing upon dying, what would it be? A majority of the responses were comedy answers, and only a handful leaned over to the serious side. The jokes were pretty hit or miss, but I got a few laughs out of it. Among my favorites...

• "Haha, you fool! You fell for one of the classic blunders, the first of which is, "never get involved in a land war in Kalimdor." Only slightly less well-known is this; never go in against a Gnome when death is on the line! Hahahaha... *dies*"
• "Pat? What pat?"
• "wwwwwwwwssssssssssddddddddaaawdssssd"
• "Et tu, Brutallus?"
• "With my dying breath, I curse Kalgan!"

Being an RP nerd, my characters would probably say something more serious. My Priest would lament her failures or regret she couldn't have done more before the end. My Paladin probably wouldn't say anything. She would just harden a defiant glare and pass on. If we were leaning to the silly side, my Shadow Priest would probably say something like, "Whoops, shouldn't have hit Shadow Word: Death there." Actually, I probably say that a lot already... but let's not talk about that. Let's extend this to you guys: What would your character say with their final breath? Heck, how do you envision your character taking the final spill? Old and grey on their deathbed, going peacefully? Being cut down in glorious battle? Blowing themselves up while skilling up Engineering?

Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. That above is the fun product of Wordle. I creatively call it "WoW WWS Healing". Click on it to give it a spin of your own.

So, if you've just randomly stumbled upon this multi-part saga on WWS meets healing, here's a lovely link to get you caught up. For the rest of you operating with mere short term memory lapses, this link right here will transport you to the example WWS we've been mulling about. But more on that after the jump.

I can't tell you how many times this has happened, and I'm sure you can all relate. You're in a group, in an instance, and in (or were in at the time) unfamiliar territory. Your group leader gives the command. You, being a good group member, follow the command that you've been given, only to see "wait!" go by just a split second too late as your group leader realizes that they've made a tactical error in judgment. The only problem is that you are already committed, and there is no going back. The next thing you know you're staring the rez angel in the face, and the rest of your team is either screaming in /p or (more often in my experience) howling with laughter in TeamSpeak at your group leader who just happens to be a (now) very embarrassed guild mate.

I think these kinds of stories are really kind of universal in WoW, no matter what language, countries, or other differences we may have separating us. In my case, I've been involved in wipes in places as varied as Wailing Caverns where we jumped in the wrong place, not knowing you needed to clear all of the Scarlet Monetary Cathedral before you pull Mograine, and level aggro jumping off a balcony pulling huge amounts of the dungeon down on us in BRD.

Of course, my personal favorite involved watching a Shaman say "Check this out!" and putting on Water Walking. He then decided it would be cool to run down the river as opposed to the land as a means of showing off. This, in and of itself, was no real big deal. However when he got to the end of the river rather than stopping he apparently completely forgot that he had Water Walking on and decided to take a swan drive over the waterfall. His intent was to just land in the pool below and swim to the side while the rest of the party had to ride down the cliff path in the Hinterlands. The only problem with this is that if you leave Water Walking on, it tends to makes the water react like you've just jumped onto solid ground. Needless to say that Shaman immediately died, and the guild mates he was showing off to still haven't let him live that one down as yet. (And frankly, we probably never will because he never lets us live ours down, either.)

What famous last word situations have you been involved in? Are there any that your guild mates still haven't let you live down? Anything that made you completely howl with laughter when it happened and still makes you chuckle even now? Share your stories!

Over on his blog, Gitr discusses the many ways in which one can die when playing a warrior after playing a priest for 64 levels. And oh -- I feel his pain. There's a reason I always play healing classes that stretches beyond helping others. There's no better way to save yourself than with a quick power word: shield or a timely psychic scream. While I've never seriously played a warrior, Gitr lists a few ways to die that I'm completely familiar with:

• Wait until you get to 1000HP and try to heal yourself.
• Spam the Bubble key over and over again to deflect damage.
• Aggro too much and try to Psychic Scream.

Whenever I'm playing my rogue, I just keep hitting the flash heal button and it never works out quite the way I expected. (Why not, I may never know.) However, I'm very glad to read that I'm not the only one who has this sort of problem when switching classes.

In the World of Warcraft, the cost of dying is really pretty minimal. Yes, there's the trouble of running from the graveyard to your corpse and yes you take 10% durability damage to all of your equipped gear (the cost goes up to 25% if you need to spirit rez). So you lose a minute or two of time running back to your corpse eating/drinking/bandaging, and rebuffing yourself before getting right back to where you left off. In terms of gameplay, you're not really set back at all -- you don't lose experience or levels from death. And sometimes death can even be beneficial to your character: say, by killing one of a pack of three monsters (dying in the process), and then coming back to take out the second and the third. You've just managed to kill a group of monsters larger than you could have killed alone -- all by benefit of the death system!

But the penalty for death is so light that there's not really much reason to avoid it. Oh, I know the time spent in corpse runs adds up and the cost of repairing gear only gets higher and higher. But it's not the end of the world if you die -- and it's hardly even the end of your online character. And so there are some players who think the death penalty needs to be harsher. If death mattered, we'd all be playing more cautiously -- in fact, the difference in playstyle would make it a whole new game. But it would make the most difference in the raiding game -- I can't say I've ever learned an encounter without a few deaths. Losing experience or levels for wiping in a raid situation?

"Sorry everyone, I just leveled down to 69 from that wipe, have to go grind."

Ouch!

While you may think that no death is a good death, some are definitely worse than others.  I can pinpoint my least favorite immediately - it was a full party of mid-40s players running through Jintha'Alor to finish making Zul'Ferrak mallets.  The final pulls as we approached our goal were level 51 elites, and quite challenging for our under-leveled group.  We finished and started heading out, to be met with respawns.  I, a cloth wearer, was taken out pretty quickly, while the rest of the group managed to run, and keep running, to safety.  I must say that extracting myself from this temple, swarming with angry trolls, was quite interesting.  But there are still other scenes that come to mind - instance runs gone wrong and particularly underhanded PvP tactics.  What about you?  Do you have a least favorite encounter with your friend the spirit healer?

The Death Stories Project is a research progress focusing on how players experience death in MMO's.  The project is currently seeking contributions from players of various MMO's who are interested in describing their in-game experiences with death and share screenshots.  There are no results or findings posted yet, but the project looks to be an interesting one.  So take a look, and if you have time, fill out the survey. 

[Via WarCry]