Death penalties, damaged gear and lost tombstones

I am all for death penalties as long as they are known upfront. What I am having a hard time with is logging in what is believed safe for a 42 level Sword Swinging tank and enter into the fray with multiple Droach and get smoke before I am fully logged in. Try to retrieve tombstone, and die 6 more times. Ultimately I find 6 of the 7 tombstones. Now I have gear permanently damaged. I am not sure why I could not find one of the tombstones. Aside from the monster swarm that I had vary little chance of damaging, and no chance of surviving their 2 to 3 hit deaths (btw: they seemed to stun on near every hit, so running was not much of an option, I tried)

So do I just suck this up as newbie luck, or is there some way to repair my armor and trinkets? I would prefer not to/do not want to have to get garbage items from NPC's and try to fight in areas equivalent to my skill level?

Whats the answer?

You seem to imply you only tried to recover tombs. If you right-click broken items it will lead you to where you can right-click them all to repair your gear.

Thank you I will try that tonight. That would be great, my original understanding was this was a death penalty and required the missing pieces to be recovered...ie recovering the tombstone.

The tombstone is just a shortcut. :)

Were you doing the Druid event for the Droaches or were you an unfortunate passer by while the druid event was happening? This tombstone, stunned until dead and crazy aggro range sounds just like the Druid event in Elt.

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Originally Posted by Niph

You seem to imply you only tried to recover tombs. If you right-click broken items it will lead you to where you can right-click them all to repair your gear.

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Interesting. But, unfortunately, not true. I just checked it out with my hardcore character. Right clicking on the broken item gives you a distance to your tombstone, without a direction. It doesn't tell you somewhere else you can go.

"It will lead you" was to be taken as "you get a receive a good hint" not "it takes you there by the hand", sorry for the misunderstanding. :)

There's no fixed duration for tombstones to exist. They clean themselves up when there's too many other items on the ground in the same zone. Hardcore players' tombstones are higher-priority than non-hardcore tombstones, meaning that they will last longer. But their duration can't be guaranteed.

As others have said, though, the tombstone is just a shortcut. It's the item itself that stores where its "broken pieces" are. Broken items can be right-clicked to track down your death-spot, and right-clicked again to repair the item. The interesting thing about this is that since it's stored on the item, not the player, there's no time limit: as long as the item exists, it can be repaired by going to the right spot. So you can store your broken items for later, or even give them to a friend to go repair for you -- anyone can repair it!

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Originally Posted by Citan

There's no fixed duration for tombstones to exist. They clean themselves up when there's too many other items on the ground in the same zone. Hardcore players' tombstones are higher-priority than non-hardcore tombstones, meaning that they will last longer. But their duration can't be guaranteed.

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I just realized it might give me an exploitable way to removes tombstones. Say you play in an area littered with tombstones (Borghild's "deathrow" comes to mind), you could drop stackable items such as femurs on the floor one by one until tombs are collected, then pick the remaining femurs...

Worked, thanks. BTW for those after me, it is similar to surveying when you have to hunt for your body without a tombstone.

I have learned something completely new in this thread. I've played this game for over 2 years and never knew gear could break except if it became legacy. I have always out of habit gone back and consumed my tombstone. I did that from previous mmo training not because i knew my armor would break if i didn't.