What’s the dumbest way you have died in World of Warcraft?

Character death has been a core mechanic in video games since their inception. For many years, the easiest way to game was as an arcade game — not everyone had access to a computer or gaming console at home. The death of a player meant having to put another coin in or someone else getting a turn. Dying in game was a key part of the game design. 

Even the early text based adventure games on personal computers (or university mainframes) used death as a key marker of success or failure — as with many PVE games in any format, there are often many, many ways to lose and only one way to win. The many varieties of ways to die in games have become some of the earliest pop culture memes — I’m looking at you Zork with “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue”. 

A popular category of video games are the roguelike — a style of game where the goal is to progress as far into the game (often procedurally generated) as you can before dying, if you die the game sends you back to the start to try again. In some formats you will retain some of the skills or items, but typically you go back to a blank slate — retaining only the knowledge you as a player gained during previous playthroughs.

While there are now hardcore servers for World of Warcraft and a hardcore character option for Diablo 4, the overwhelming majority of players still choose to play the more traditional format where character death is at most an inconvenience. You may need to repair your equipment and lose a few buffs, but on the whole it is no different than if you had not died at all. 

Sometimes death is the point, there are a number of quests or secrets in World of Warcraft that require you to be dead to interact with a key NPC or quest item. Sometimes not dying is required to achieve success, but the developers have made that extremely difficult. Most raiders are used to dying over and over, the in-game tracking shows my current death count at 19,657 at time of writing, but will most likely be higher by the end of the day. And the in-game tracker only goes back as far as achievement tracking; it doesn’t count earlier deaths.

Some of my more embarrassing deaths having included a cat jumping on my keyboard, auto-running into C’thun’s room, falling off Teldrassil, jumping off high places while forgetting I’m not on my druid, and disengaging backwards off so many raid encounter platforms.

What’s the dumbest way you have died in game?