My proposal is: once you overcome all the hardships and reach level 60, death should not mean permanent character deletion. Instead, we could use a different form of penalty.
Having to restart from level 1 every time you die will wear people out eventually. All that hard-earned reputation, completed quests, and collected gear go to waste. Players will also be too scared to attempt harder raid content. Imagine if the main tank of a raid dies — the whole group is basically done for.
So my idea is that level 60 marks a second phase for Hardcore mode. The penalty upon death would be that all your equipped gear gets wiped.
For example, if you die inside a raid, every piece of gear you have used will vanish. Tricks like hunters feigning death to unequip gear, or rogues using Vanish to take items off, won’t work. Death will still erase all gear you were using.
You will also lose your current raid lockout for that instance, and have to wait until the next reset to try again.
Legendary items will shatter instead of disappearing entirely. You will need to complete special quests and gather rare materials to repair them.
This way, players don’t have to restart from level 1. They can stay motivated to take on high-difficulty raids.
That’s all I’ve come up with for now, haha. Hopefully the dev team will consider this.
