Q: Let me get this straight: you really can’t die in Guild Wars 2?

A: That is correct; you can only be defeated. When we made the decision to allow everyone to revive a fallen comrade, we didn’t want to explain why everyone suddenly had the magical ability to bring people back from the dead. Instead, we thought it would be cooler to say that people were defeated instead of dead, so that we could justify them being brought out of it by any ally who happened to be passing by. This also helps us lorewise in that we can now kill off NPCs and don’t need to deal with the question of why someone didn’t just rez them. From a game-mechanics standpoint, there is no real difference between dead and defeated. Either way, you’ve just lost and incurred whatever penalty is associated with losing.