Uh oh! My character died. Now what?

Upon the death of your character, you have a choice: remain in your body and wait to be revived, or release your body and respawn. If you are revived, you appear back at the site of your death. If you release, you drop a spirit shard and appear (with all items) at a nearby explorer camp.

What is an "explorer camp"?

Explorer camps are spots where you can choose to reappear when you die. They vary in terms of location, but there will be a nearby safe spot for you to regroup and recover. Some camps may be safer than others, depending how far you have ventured out into the world.

Can I cast a bind spell wherever I want or use a Soulbinder to decide where I will respawn like in EverQuest?

No, there is no binding of this fashion in EverQuest II.

What are the results of character death in EverQuest II?

Each time you die, you leave a spirit shard on the ground and take a penalty to your stats, experience, and item wear. When you retrieve your spirit shard, your stats are returned to normal and a large part of your experience penalty is paid off. If you choose to not retrieve your spirit shard, you will automatically absorb it after three days pass (online or offline), but you'll take the full experience penalty.

When you die:

• You leave a spirit shard on the ground (unless you are revived by another player before releasing)
• You lose some of your stats and pools (health, power)
• You owe some experience debt
• Your equipped items are slightly damaged

What happens when I retrieve my spirit shard?

• Your stats and pools are restored
• Your experience debt from that death is reduced by more than half

The act of recovering a shard is purely an act of reducing debt and recovering lost power. Shards are not a repository for experience, and can only pay back debt, not add regular experience.

What are the effects of multiple deaths?

• Each time you die you take an additional stats and pools penalty. This will cap out at around five unrecovered deaths.
• Each time you die, you take additional experience debt and item wear, with no maximum cap.
• The stat and pool penalty is based off the number of shards remaining in the world, so the more unrecovered shards you have, the larger your stat and pool penalty will be.
• As long as the player has five or more shards in the world, they're going to have the max stat penalty. Recovering shard number eight will immediately give back a chunk of experience debt, but would have no immediate effect on the stat penalty as there are still seven more shards out there.

What happens if I do not retrieve my spirit shard?

You automatically absorb your spirit shard after three real-time days have passed, whether you're online or not. This will restore the stats and pools lost from that shard, but will not reduce your experience debt at all.

How many shards can I have in the world at one time?

A character may only have up to 10 shards in the world at a time. If the player dies with 10 shards in the world, they don't leave additional shards. This means they don't take an additional stat penalty, but they also don't have a shard to recover to help with experience death. Essentially, dying this many times means taking full experience debt with each death.

How do I retrieve my spirit shard?

You must return to the site of your death and reclaim the shard. You will see it at the spot where you passed on. Though you'll have to get within a reasonable range of the shard to retrieve it, you won't have to get right on top of it.

Can other players get my spirit shard for me?

Spirit shards do not behave like corpses in EQ. You cannot cast resurrection spells on spirit shards, nor can other players move them. Only you can recover your own spirit shard.

How do I get rid of my experience debt?

Debt is reduced as you gain new experience. Part of the experience you earn goes toward repaying your debt while the other part continues to advance your character's level.

What happens if you die and are resurrected?

• You can only be resurrected if you haven't released and are still lying on the ground dead.
• Spirit shards cannot be resurrected.
• If you get resurrected, you do not leave a shard on the ground - you immediately regain your stats and reduce your experience debt the normal amount, just as if you'd picked up a shard.

Who can cast a resurrection spell?

All priests have the ability to resurrect players in their group who have not yet released their corpses (players who have died can be grouped/ungrouped while corpses). Additionally, paladins, necromancers, and dirges can cast basic non-combat resurrection spells. Priests have much more variety and flexibility in their choice of resurrection spells, and are the only ones able to cast rez during combat.

What is group debt sharing?

Group sharing is a new system that reinforces grouping by allowing groups to share risk as well as reward. Certain classes are at higher risk of dying due to their role, even if they play well. A lot of times, the player who died didn't do anything wrong - they just weren't healed in time, helped out on a bad pull, or had some bad luck. This system lets the group share the penalty for dying, just as they would've shared the reward if they'd won.

Group sharing greatly lowers the penalty for the occasional group member dying. If your group is playing pretty well and someone dies once in awhile, you won't feel much of a penalty at all. If you have members dying frequently, or if your whole group wipes out, then you may want to reconsider what you're fighting or work on refining your strategies.

Here's how this works - If any member of a group dies, their experience debt is split evenly amongst the group members. The shard recovery debt* is not split and is applied only to the player who dies. (*This is the portion that is fully refunded when a player retrieves their shard.)

If you're in a two-person group, each person gets about half of a normal debt if one of them dies. If you're in a six-person group, each person gets about 1/6th of a normal death if one person dies. Because the debt each person gets is much smaller than a normal death, and because all group members are paying off the debt at the same time, it is much faster to get out of debt than it used to be. Joining groups will lower your risk more than they used to, and help you pay off your debt that much faster. Group sharing should lower large debts being racked up by higher risk classes.

This system encourages you to keep your group members alive and healthy. If you end up in a bad situation, it's worthwhile for one person to die if it will let the rest of the group escape. Because of the way sharing works, it won't help you if your whole group wipes out - so think twice before going into situations that are likely to kill the whole group.