penalty for death isn't the big deal, penalty for sucking is. this game is big on zone control much like in SB when we wanted to max out our guys..we had to fight for the camps that we could xp at..and then you had to king of the hill it afterwards...only there's not 1-3 stagnant places to camp where you only see people roll in every 30 minutes...it's more like a few people every 5 minutes, and a full group every 15 while you're constantly moving running a circuit or or jumping from quest spot to quest spot about 3 minutes apart from each other max.
the higher level you get, the less choices in instances to jump to you have...and less places to evasively acquire xp. eventually at 80 it seems like the best thing to do is to get 1 spot on lockdown.