Why death penalties are not meaningful in high end content

[Ligraph]

Before we begin:
This is not a thread discussing whether Death Penalties need to be greater or lesser, or anything else. This is a discussion (using math) to show whether Death Penalties are or are not meaningful to a level 30 player.

Let's look at the total penalties from 5 rapid deaths:
Saves vs Fear are fairly meaningless, so I'm just looking at the neg levels.
5*(-2 Abilities, Attack Rolls, Saves, Skill Checks, -1 Effective Level)

So:
-15 Attack rolls (10 neg levels, 5 from stats)

• Don't know how significant this is.

-10 Every Stat

• This is -5 Damage per Hit, which is not much.
• Is also -150 HP, which is significant sometimes.
• Also is -5 DCs, which hurts.

To lazy to calculate spell point losses, probably around 100?
-10 Saves

• Might be significant depending on build.

-10 Skills

• Only really an issue for UMD.

-5 Effective levels

• Could be kind of painful for spellcasters, not by much though. DCs (might) take a hit though.
• If this effects how much HP each point of Con gives, this would be -5*ConMod HP, which could be significant (100 wtith 50 Con)

So all together, this is maybe -250 HP.
Most characters at level 30 have at least 1000 hit points, so this is 25% of someone's hit points. This does hurt. But not a ton. Especially for a build which tries not to get hit.
This is really the only part of the death penalties that really matters, although the Saves and DCs might hurt certain builds.


Edited because I put the title as "Why death penalties are meaningful in high end content"