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Praying for Salvation
Can we please nix the extra 10-15% xp loss from praying for salvation? With vitae up, I die, then die again that's loss, stacked upon loss for praying. 
I'm a consent-based roleplayer! Kindly ask first, and I will return the favour. Open to developing tinyplots.
Atlantis is my client of choice! (Guide)
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Comments
I like that praying for salvation has a big experience cost because it incentivises people to actually use resurrection skills or immolate.
Right?
Anyway, I still think a double whammy of xp loss is ridiculous when using vitae and then having to pray for salvation.
But I'll be poking at envoys to see if anything can be done.
I'm a consent-based roleplayer! Kindly ask first, and I will return the favour. Open to developing tinyplots.
Atlantis is my client of choice! (Guide)
If you don't want to die twice and lose twice the experience then don't use vitae.
I have and do run for corpses, including of people not in my org, if I'm not doing anything else. These days I have a resurrect but I used to just suck up the immolate power cost. Serenwilde has resurgem which works for Serens from anywhere provided they can get a coven going. Other people do these things too.
There needs to be some risk involved with dying. The experience loss is honestly nothing in comparison when you look at how quickly people get experience these days.
I'm mostly surprised people still use vitae. It's bad, don't use it! XP cost for praying has been reduced pretty significantly over the years, so there's no reason to eat a second death. Vitae is niche, I've never viewed it as a way to always avoid praying. If you're in a high risk situation, you risk eating xp loss twice. If you're in a low risk situation, it saves you from praying.
@Falaeron is right, there needs to be some incentive to not die. Either through a long timer like TA reform, or an xp penalty otherwise there's no incentive to not grind areas far outside your level or afk astral or whatever and rely on no xp loss safety nets.
As for the main topic, I think there should be some loss so there's a risk to dying. But maybe praying should be faster, it does take you out of the game for a long time.
Imagine if instead of losing xp/essence you had to wait 2 minutes before any form of resurrection could even begin. How many people would look at the game and go "no thanks"
On the off chance the "but you're a TA!" argument pops up, I lost a good 15-20% of titan praying after a dumb error, it sucked but rather than bemoan the system I dusted off and carried on.
P4S is very much avoidable off Prime thanks to conglugate, on Prime if you're dying and dying again from vitae before you can move out, the issue is more about you putting yourself in a situation you couldn't handle, and not recognising this earlier and avoiding it.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Though this is now just going into 'xp in general' territory vs 'I think vitae could be looked at'.
I personally, wouldn't mind having the option of waiting 1-2 min if it meant less to no xp loss. This is assuming there is no one that can help me (they can't/don't want to get to me, or pulling them in would only result in them dying too, ie- Heartstone putting them in a dangerous place)
Or:
-Kick it with the Fates, or like have the opportunity to have a Ghost only realm to complete a task or mini quest to come back without loss. (Go seek, herd and shear the Wooly Llamas of Life or something to make more thread, idk) It wouldn't be a mandatory thing, if you just didn't care and want to get right back into the thick of things, you still could.
- For the thrillseekers, have some hunting areas (with a warning sign) have riskier chunks xp loss, but also that much greater xp rewards
-Have higher xp incentives for defending/raiding, conflict stuff etc.
-A timer on xp loss, multiple consecutive deaths don't count
- Bring it to 1% loss at the higher levels through Titan and Demi when PvE
- Other mmos/rpgs opt for equipment repairs over xp loss, make tailors and forgers work to more than just creation and upkeep for upkeep sake. Continual minimal gold sink over extended time.
As an average, casual, manual player, losing potentially 2-3 hours spent in the 'Grind' in less than 20 seconds is disheartening. Some days, disheartening enough to move on to something else. That's potential time and money from me being spent elsewhere, other games, other competing non-IRE MUDs (rhymes with emu and phonics). Sure, it's a 'tradition, everyone does it, if I had to go through it so do you' kind of mentality. I prefer positive reinforcement over negative, and just because 'it's always been this way for 20 years' doesn't mean we can't change it up with the times.
I'm a consent-based roleplayer! Kindly ask first, and I will return the favour. Open to developing tinyplots.
Atlantis is my client of choice! (Guide)
You don't have to use vitae - it's an option. Much like doing anything in the game. Because it's a game. Yeah, losing XP sucks, but with the amount of aetherhunts and Astral hunts that happen lately, losing XP is easy to gain back. That's without adding in golden tonics, cookies, achievements etc, etc. Hell, even "normal" hunting, it's easy to get back.
Edit: edited this edit because I can't have thoughts
I'm a consent-based roleplayer! Kindly ask first, and I will return the favour. Open to developing tinyplots.
Atlantis is my client of choice! (Guide)
Out of curiosity, what video games do you play? [emphasis mine]
EDIT: More to the point, how old are they? That kind of really insane punishment for failure is an outmoded game model not seen in anything but say... roguelikes where it's a core part of the essential concept of the roguelike with specific intent. It's just not a part of modern games - even toning down a hyperbolic few hours of grinding to say... one hour of non-optimized grinding. I think it's safe to say that games in general have moved on from this kind of thing, even games that are centered around punishing mistakes and limiting the player's ability to save like the darksouls series. You're looking at needing to repeat at most 30-ish minutes of what amounts to combat puzzling, a far cry from monotonous grinding for much longer.
I don't really have a strong opinion on this in the sense of putting grinding and xp at the top of my personal list of issues, but in part that's because I... don't grind anymore period so it's academic personally. That said, it's a dumb thing. It doesn't really serve in making players more cautious in how they bash most of the time as deaths quickly become functions of bad luck basically, and that's safeguarded against by grinding less efficiently which... is also subjecting the grinder to extra hours of grinding - potentially many many more than actual loss would net. Ho hum.
Grinding is necessary to some degree, to generate friction in the gold 'economy' and give levels some meaning. Punishing people for dying by grinding with more grinding that has the potential to generate more grinding by the same means isn't necessary, or even helpful.
The ostensible point of having a negative consequence to dying in PvE is to force you to change your behavior or risk extra time grinding. That equation only makes sense if "extra time grinding" is supposed to be a bad thing, or it wouldn't be a negative consequence. Practically how can a midbie change their behavior to avoid that risk? Chiefly risk modification in the form of what boils down to slower grinding, either a new less risky location or the same but more slowly. In other words, extra time grinding - the same bad punishment.
Sure, the top tier grinder removes this risk and therefore doesn't interact with that system at all. If we therefore balance at the top, xp loss on grinding has no effect at all. So, why do it? XP loss on grinding just makes no sense no matter how its sliced. Don't replace it, just remove it. If people then bash up to demigod too quickly, as plenty of people in this thread put it, the xp loss wasn't really meaningfully slowing those people anyways, so that's already a problem and won't change based on removing xp loss. That would have to be tackled separately.
In short, xp loss on PvE doesn't achieve a useful goal* or serve a useful purpose in the game. Depending on who you talk to, it's frustrating and painful or it means and adds nothing. So... no matter who you talk to it's either painful or pointless. I think it would at least do no harm to remove it, and would at best ease the frustrations of non-optimized grinders.
*I don't count pushing people towards time optimized bashing as a useful goal. It's a risk management question between risk (and the overall expected statistical outcome of that risk) of what everyone seems to agree is a boring activity and guaranteed extension of that same boring activity. The overall outcome is extending that boring activity for some folks (risk prone) and not for others for no benefit. Remove the loss. If things move too fast, slow them down directly instead of obliquely and frustratingly.
If its too high you discourage combat too much if its too low its not important.
The pray timer is maybe a bit too quick for combat events. Often you can die and be back into the fight before the fights over. Maybe an extending pray time based on number of deaths. Like first timer is 60. Second is 90 etc etc.
Although its a really minor issue either way.
I like PvE XP loss. I think there should be a penalty for misplay/aggressiveness/not paying attention.
Nerf Aetherhunt XP hard.