My hunter is called Derzan. That was a design flaw: I came up with the name on the first evening, back when I still thought of myself as a daring man, and everything that happened to him afterwards was invented by my cowardice. By rights he should have been called Caution.
The thing is, he is the only one I have. In hardcore there is no second attempt: dead is dead, and your whole journey stays lying exactly where you got careless. I lost my first one at level twenty-two over five silver: I chased a boar that was worth five silver and failed to notice the second boar. I have been a different man ever since. Not a better one - a different one.
The rules
I have eleven of them. The first ten I wrote down myself, honestly, in the notes app on my phone, and they read like a safety briefing at a sawmill.
Never two at once. If two of them are heading my way, I leave, even if both are weaker than I am. Two is not twice as hard; two is unpredictable.
Always eat to full. My character chews at every spare moment, like a cow. I have probably lost a full day of playtime to this and I do not regret a second of it.
Anything with a capitalised name is none of my business. There is a bear walking across the meadow with "Old Thunder" written above him - that means the meadow belongs to him today.
And the funniest part: I read ability tooltips. All the way to the end. In full. With every number and the fine print at the bottom. I am probably the only person on the server who knows exactly what the shield bash of a renegade guard in Tirisfal Glades does, because I stood there reading it while he was walking towards me. That, incidentally, is also a risk. Irony does not protect you from damage.
Caves
Caves deserve a section of their own. I do not go into them.
A cave is built treacherously: it has one exit, and it is also the entrance. While you are inside, your only escape plan leads back through everything you have already woken up. Above ground I always know where to run: there is the road, there is the bridge, there are the guards, there is the water. I do not really move through the world with my eyes at all - I move through it by escape routes. I barely remember the beautiful sunset over Thousand Needles, but I do remember that there was a drop on the right, and you can go down it but you cannot come back up.
Because of this, half the quests in my battle pass are unfinished. They are forever asking you to climb into something.
My wife once asked why I had been standing in the same spot for twenty minutes, and it was a fair question. I was standing and looking at the entrance to a mine. Inside, so the rumour went, lay a decent item for my level. I looked at it for about twenty minutes, then went off to pick herbs, and the evening ended with me selling those herbs at the auction house and buying the very same item for money. I am not ashamed. I am almost not ashamed.
Uldaman
And then something ridiculous happened. We got talking in voice chat - four others just like me, one character and one life each - and somebody said the word "Uldaman".
Uldaman is my kind of cave in its purest form. A huge dungeon under the sand, stone golems, one entrance and a great many reasons not to go in. I said honestly:
"Lads, I do not do caves. I have a rule about it."
"We all have rules," the priest replied. "That is why we are still alive."
What happened next was not what I expected. We spent two hours going through Uldaman. Two hours on a dungeon a normal group clears in twenty minutes. We pulled everything one at a time. We backed off from anything extra. Three times we sat down to eat in the middle of a corridor, and not once did anyone say "come on, let us just go already". It turned out that in hardcore everybody plays the way I do. All this time I thought I was the only lunatic of my kind, and it turns out there are enough of us to fill a full group.
When someone shared their screen to show where the patrol stands, I realised that for the first time in a month I was not afraid.
Rule number eleven
We came out alive. All five of us. No triumph about it: the item that dropped for me was mediocre, and I did not even put it on straight away.
I climbed out onto the sand, sat down on a rock by the entrance and ate to full - out of habit, even though there was no danger left anywhere near. Then I got out my phone and added the eleventh rule to my notes.
Sometimes you can. But slowly.
What a one-life mode actually is - here. Rules, restrictions and sensible advice - in the hardcore guide.
