So I was trying pretty hard to get the dying state to come into play at all, let alone in a manner that was survivable. I did everything I could to stack the deck in my favor, but still it failed. I had three storm bulls whittling me down with painstaking slowness, and here's what the end of the fight looked like:
Your skin gleams with an adamantine sheen!
* Driving in with naturally fluid movements, a storm bull pounds at you. You attempt to dodge. The fist lands a good hit that bruises your lower back (More of a love tap than an attack!), lightly stunning you.
[You're near death, very badly balanced with opponent dominating.]
Your base defense is roughly equal to your opponent's base offense.
>
You feel a surge of life energy as your regeneration pulses, the spell pattern manifesting as a cascade of rutilant sparks that bathe you in a warm glow.
The internal wounds to your back feel better.
The internal scars to your left leg feel better.
The internal wounds to your right arm feel better.
The internal scars to your right leg feel better.
The internal scars to your right hand feel better.
The scars to your head feel better.
The internal wounds to your left arm feel better.
The wounds to your left arm feel better.
The wounds to your head feel better.
The wounds to your right leg feel better.
The scars to your right leg feel better.
The internal scars to your abdomen feel better.
The internal wounds to your right leg feel better.
The internal wounds to your left leg feel better.
The internal scars to your right arm feel better.
The internal wounds to your head feel better.
The wounds to your back feel better.
The internal scars to your head feel better.
>
You feel yourself falling...
You feel like you're dying!
>
Your subconscious rouses to remedy your stupor.
You serenely open your eyes.
Your subconscious strains with the urgency of your need, remedying your stupor.
>
* A storm bull lowers its horns and charges with a loud bellow at you. You barely fail to block with gargoyle-hide shield. The body lands a light hit that thumps painfully on the toes of the left foot.
You no longer feel the insomnious solace of Awaken.
Your skin loses its protective numbness.
Your death cry echoes in your brain as it quickly dawns on you that you have just died! Already, you feel the tug of eternity upon your soul and you struggle to remain tied to this world.
A chill takes the seat of your soul as your remaining spiritual strength bleeds away steadily. However, you are comforted that you have curried the favor of your god, which will greatly improve the course of your resurrection or reincarnation.
Your body will decay beyond its ability to hold your soul in 139 minutes.
[You're extremely imbalanced]
Your base defense is roughly equal to your opponent's base offense.
That all happened in an instant; there was no time to do anything in between any of that. So I hit the dying state and Awaken pulled me out of it beautifully as planned, but the next little flick killed me. I'm guessing it's because I was woken up, so no longer technically dying, meaning my vitality buffer was gone. And since I was just in the dying state, I couldn't go dying again so soon, and the light hit depleted my miniscule vitality without me having a chance to get up and escape.
I don't think it's necessarily anything that needs to change on the combat end (although it might be), but something needs to be tweaked around so that I would have had a chance to survive that. Granted, I could easily have prevented things from getting to that point in the first place, but I was specifically trying to engineer that very predicament.
Some ideas:
1. Being prematurely roused from the dying state lets you keep the bonus vitality imparted by the dying state instead of making you pay it back. You would thus wake up with a little bit remaining instead of being at practically zero.
2. Waking up from the dying state causes you to scramble out to missile range as you wake up. Isn't that similar to what Murrula's Flames does to give the newly raised cleric a chance to not just get killed again immediately? I think they get a brief room calm or something. If not a generic effect of the dying state, maybe it could be a metaspell that makes Awaken do that.
Just for kicks I tried it again without Awaken, and I only lasted two light hits in the dying state before I was dead (vitality death). That's with 75 Stamina...the dying state doesn't seem to be even giving a legitimate chance to begin with.
Thanks,
-Life Sustainer Karthor
