Originally Posted by
Xoshara
Preface: I don't have any ancient dragons, nor any uberpeds. My highest dragon is a 74 adult with 300 training points in Power, 312 in Primal, 228 Tooth and Claw, and 48 Focus. My highest biped has both ratings under 20. My permadeath character is a level-20 TnC/Strength/Primal hatchling - among the weakest of the weak.
Playing a character with self-imposed permadeath opens one's eyes to how avoidable death is.
When one knows the consequences to death aren't permanent, one's psychology allows one to do things one shouldn't do, and one dies of that.
On my non-permadeath characters, the vast majority of deaths are caused by little mistakes on my part that could've been avoided if I'd just been paying more attention. I am not a good fighter, and the few cases where that fact hasn't caused a character of mine to die were the results of miscellaneous stupidity instead of combat ineptitude.
Despite that, perhaps I'm a more conservative fighter than others. I generally don't attack things more than twenty levels higher on my 74 adult dragon, and only three levels higher on my other characters. I don't try to farm, i.e. the maximum number of Giant Ice Beetles I'll fight at once is three, and that gets me pretty close to death so if I had permadeath to worry about on the character that can hunt them I'd be cautious of having even two at once. I rarely go into deadlands.
99% of the time I don't group, though.
The largest number of Death Points I've had recently was four, which was because I made mistakes while hunting arbotus near Feladan. Probable examples of those mistakes:
1. Chose the wrong position to pull arbotus to, leaving myself in the midst of a path additional arbotus would wander through.
2. When overwhelmed by more than three or four arbotus, I didn't start trying to escape until it was too late.
3. I'm too hesitant to use Spiked Scales. With its two-minute recycle, I don't want to squander it when it's less than necessary, but I often fail to realise when it has crossed the border from wanted to needed.
4. I forget to use Primal Health sometimes because I don't expect it to have as short a recycle as it does.
5. Didn't maintain breezes constantly enough.
6. Confused targeting, i.e. still having myself targeted after casting a heal or Cleanse-teched resist booster and failing to realise this before it's too late to fire off an attack that would've made the arbotus die instead of me. Or maybe I do realise it, but waste time trying to select the enemy visually instead of via the target nearest key. Or I can't retarget the enemy I was attacking before because another one closer to me is blocking the key and making it difficult to click on the right one.
7. I didn't balance the direction of my damage output so that the opponents would die in an optimal order related to their differing strengths and amounts of remaining HP.