Okay, so last night, I'm grinding in giants and I somehow got stuck in a boulder right in the middle of a pod of giants. I could still move within the rock - change direction and still throw attacks - but I was stuck. The giants I'd kill would respawn and I'd kill them again, and in between their respawns I'm trying to get a traveler's map from CM. Anyways... I finally managed to get a map and warp to Keplan before a respawn of giants would stop the timer bar of the map.

So, if this were to happen again and I were to die and some expensive crystal broke - would I be able to get it back without having to use one of my three recoveries? I mean, in that situation, it was not the fault of the player.

Yeahhh this is why crystal breakage shouldn't even be a thing.

If people had perfect internet with no outages, if BDO was completely bug free and had zero server issues, MAYBE crystal breakage could be okay, but that is not reality and crystals breaking due to something out of their control should never be an issue in a game where you need to grind for hours to get those crystals back.

The 3 restore limit a year is just a bandaid solution so that customer service won't get flooded anymore with restore requests.

OP, I don't know the answer to your question, but I feel your pain and I would contact CS if it happened after your 3 restores, and hope that they acknowledge their problems and do something to help you.