User:Quizzical/Rebirth

Many people know that every group should have someone or perhaps multiple characters bring rebirth, to prevent a wipe when you have to pull players away from mobs. This is compelling evidence that just because many people know something doesn't make it true.

Rebirth is, of course, a resurrection spell. Someone in your party dies, you use rebirth, and the character comes back to life. If it were the only such skill that could resurrect, it would be incredibly useful. But it is not--and some other such skills are superior in nearly every way.

First, we ought to note that most resurrecting must be done in combat. To swear off resurrecting in combat scarcely makes more sense than to insist that healing ought to be done strictly out of combat (though there have been occasional players known to do the latter, as well). The casting time and energy cost of resurrection skills thus matters. Resurrection signets (or for players, sunspear rebirth signets) are often optimal for this. They have the quickest cast time, use no energy, cannot be interrupted by spell interrupts, and bring the dead character back with full health and significant energy.

Resurrection signets do, of course, have the drawback that they can only be used once until the next morale boost. This is why, in addition to several signets, a group also needs a few characters with a permanent resurrection skill. This is both to save the signets when on occasion the needed resurrections can occur out of combat, and also to allow resurrection once the group runs out of rez signets. In bringing rebirth, players often focus on the latter, while neglecting to consider that the former also occurs.

For resurrecting while in combat, rebirth is unusually bad. It drains all energy of the caster, disables all skills of the resurrected character, and brings the character back with little health and no energy. Rather than decreasing the count of useless (e.g., dead) characters in the group as a resurrection skill ought to, it increases that number for a significant amount of time, with neither the caster nor the resurrected character immediately useful.

But people don't bring rebirth for use in combat, of course. That it is such a spectacularly bad resurrection skill in combat could be forgiven if it were unusually good outside of combat.

But resurrecting outside of combat is easy, and any of a number of resurrection skills can do quite nicely. Restore life, renew life, resurrection chant, resurrect, flesh of my flesh, signet of return, light of dwayna, and lively was naomei all work about as well as rebirth for typical out of combat resurrections. Death pact signet, restoration, unyielding aura, and vengeance can get the job done, as well, though the last two may require other permanent rezzes in the group and serve only a complementary role.

At this point, one may object, what about the mobs that you must pull the player to be resurrected away from? But after killing all players they can find, most mobs return to their spawn points. That leaves the dead characters all alone, so that mobs in the area are not a concern unless you must watch for roamers.

This, of course, assumes that you weren't fighting mobs at their spawn points. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd hope that someone in a conversation about the relative benefits of different resurrection skills would know better than that.

There are, of course, some circumstances that are not ordinary. There are cases where you cannot pull mobs, or where mobs will not return to their spawn points. These sometimes mean that to get close enough to resurrect the dead, the would-be user of rebirth must enter combat. In other cases, this means that a group cannot run away at all without causing the quest or mission to fail. Either way, if a resurrection is necessarily in combat, then rebirth's utility as an out of combat resurrection skill is moot.

But no, the objection is, what if characters die on your party's side of some mobs, but less than a full aggro bubble away, and then the living party members get out of combat entirely? While this circumstance is fairly rare in ordinary pve, the theory goes that a player with rebirth can stand out of combat and resurrect the character. Rebirth will warp the resurrected character to the caster, pulling him out of combat entirely. And then flowers will bloom, music will play, and they will all get along happily ever after, or something like that. I'll concede that rebirth does at least work wonderfully in this rare case.

But rebirth is not the only skill to work for this. Resurrect, flesh of my flesh, and signet of return will get the job done, too. While these three skills will not warp the dead character to you, there's no reason why he can't run on his own after being resurrected. If the group desires to get out of combat and refill life and energy before resuming combat with the mobs that nearly wiped you out, that can be done the same way that the resurrecting character got out of combat in the first place. Even if the character to be resurrected cannot make it away but is killed again, the death causes no death penalty, and he will then be further from the relevant mobs the next time he is resurrected.

I'll concede that this does take a little longer. But the great advantage of rebirth as a resurrection skill compared to others is reduced to saving a bit of time in unusual near wipe situations. And players take a monk secondary solely so they can use it to bring this awful skill? Far from saving wipes, rebirth causes them, by leaving characters without a useful resurrection skill, and thus unable to use one when it is needed.

I have never seen a wipe that could have been saved by rebirth but not by some other resurrection skill. Indeed, when a partial wipe happens, resurrecting characters away from mobs is necessary, and someone else in the group has rebirth, the player with rebirth is almost invariably dead and waiting for me (or my heroes) to resurrect him. Still, that I haven't seen a situation where rebirth would have been essential is not for lack of trying.

Consider the following scenario: go through Zen Daijun hard mode with henchmen and heroes, get to Yijo and Xeng Jo, and have all the henchmen and heroes die just shy of the two bosses at about "nearby" range. It doesn't take long, as Yijo can kill them in one hit with spirit rift. And to try to save a wipe, you get not rebirth, nor even flesh of my flesh or resurrect, but signet of return. And you don't even get a high rank in leadership to make signet of return function better, nor a resurrection boosting skill like we shall return. Resurrected characters with signet of return thus die in one hit from either boss, and without having to wait for spirit rift to trigger. And just to make things harder still, you have to protect Togo when running away, as if he dies, the mission fails.

If there is a case where rebirth alone works as a resurrection skill, then surely this must be one, right? Well, I tried it. It took several resurrections each to get the first couple characters out, as they would be resurrected, move slightly, and die. Once I had a couple healers out that could heal characters as soon as I resurrected them, things went much faster. But most importantly, it worked. I finished the mission, and without rebirth.

The point of rebirth is not as a resurrection skill proper, but rather, that it lets you warp party members through walls if one character can get across, such as by necrotic traversal. There are a handful of places in the game where this matters. But bringing rebirth as a resurrection skill makes no more sense than bringing lightning surge as an interrupt, no matter what the other people in your group who want to bring it say.