I never had a valk in my parties. Please tell me:

How often can a valk "Cheat Death" ? Only once ? Or is there a reduced chance for a second or third succesful cheat ?

Thanks

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As far as I know, it's unlimited.

When a conscious Valk loses her last hit points, she goes unconscious and regains some hit points based on her current stamina. If she gets killed while unconscious, she's dead.

That's definitely not true. A concious Valk can very well be killed. She might cheat death, and fall unconcious, but it's not a certainty. Other way around, i'm fairly sure i've seen an unconcious Valk cheat death as well.

I haven't seen a counter anywhere, which make it less likely that she'll cheat death the 100th time compared to first time, but that doesn't mean the game doesn't keep track. You can survive 5 kills in a row, but you can as well die 5 times in a row.

Seems fairly random to me.

My experience is that as long as the valkyrie has stamina, she will cheat death. The only time I've had a valkyrie not cheat death was when her stamina was very low and probably brought to zero by the hit.

Being that I am reasonably free with allowing deaths, a recent party I had may provide an example

Near End of Game Statistics
Hobbit Samurai - 15 deaths
Dwarf Monk - 5 deaths
Hobbit Ninja - 6 deaths
Human Valkyrie - 0 deaths (but cheated death at least 6 or 7 times, and at least one time cheated twice in the same battle , although I had woken her with smelling salts before she cheated death the second time)

I did another experiment with a -1 hp regen item (actually with the halberd, diamond ring and garland of roses) and a lvl1 human valk (+9 str, +7 pie, +9 vit) and another (+7 dex, +9 spd, +9 sen). While camping, they cheated death 3 times before dying. It looks like if the valk gets even one pwr1 heal spell, the counter is reset and you might be able to go indefinitely. (No bards in the party, expert).

So I guess I was wrong about the unconscious. But in actual game play, I've never had a conscious Valk with reasonable stamina not cheat death. In the Faust Halberd experiment, the Valk must have cheated death at least 50 times before the party was brought out of camp by some Savant Troopers (during the combat she keep saying 'what a relief, what a relief, what a relief ...'), so your chances there also might be level and Vit dependent, but I think it might be more severity of the attack (which is probably why I thought if you get clobbered while unconsious, you die).

I had already done a test on this by standing in some lava in the rift. My valk cheated death about 11-12 times before finally dying. This was also about the same time the fighter died.

I think that the chance of cheating death might also be lvl dependant, but I am not exactly sure about this.

Does anyone know whether cheating death only applies for damage related deaths or instadeaths too?

[ 03-15-2004, 12:35 PM: Message edited by: dplax ]

It works when you get pushed off the Bough by a Trynnie Hunter...

Seems to me, that a party with two Valks and Vi is nearly undestructable.

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I'm running a party of 6 dracon valks and
yes it is hard to kill them as long as you have healing and smelling salts.