Was this a CMan?

[Taeguk]

A moaning spirit gestures mystically!
A gust of wind tugs at your sleeves. Suddenly, a fierce wind rips through the area, scattering everything in its path and making it difficult to remain standing.
The wind knocks you off your balance and you fall over.
Your arms are forced down to your sides!
Roundtime: 12 sec.
Roundtime changed to 6 seconds.
The wind then subsides.
PR>
The spirit wails a sad, eerie song!
The moaning spirit swings a suddenly quite solid arm at you! Powerless to move out of the way, you can do little but flinch and pray.
... 25 points of damage!
Strong blow breaks your neck!

Death followed. I have never seen that attack before though. What was it?

[Donquix]

It's a special moaning spirit one i believe, other non-corp undead might do it but i only recall the spirits doing it off the top of my head.

[Drew]

Looks like an SMR.

[IorakeWarhammer]

that was getting pwned. bad advice removed lol

[Drew]

that was getting pwned. but yeah, special critter cman. dodging skill would def help, probably also cman and POSSIBLY CDEF.

Dodging skill will not help. Dodging doesn't help with cmans or SMRs. So there is no scenario in which dodging would help. Also in this scenario cunning defense wouldn't help. Combat Maneuvers would help, but physical fitness would help the most.


Read this page for more info: http://www.krakiipedia.org/wiki/Creature_maneuver

[Asha]

lol at IW's really knowledgeable advice.
Yeah just guess mate.

[Archigeek]

What Drew said: physical fitness helps a lot, as does wearing armor with a lower maneuver penalty, and being fully trained or even over-trained for your armor.


From Krakiipedia: "Overtraining in the Armor Use skill will reduce the experienced Action Penalty of the armor. Every 50 ranks acquired above the minimum ranks required to train off Roundtime penalties will result in an Action Penalty reduction of (Armor Group - 1).

For example, an augmented breastplate requires 90 ranks of Armor Use to train away its RT adder. It has an Armor Group (AG) value of 5 (skin = AG 0, robes = AG 1, soft leather = AG 2, hard leather/scale = AG 3, chain = AG 4, plate = AG 5). Its base action penalty is 25. So, if it is worn by a player with 140 ranks of Armor Use, the action penalty will drop to 21, to 17 at 190 ranks, and to a minimum value of 13 at 240 ranks." - GM Coase

The gain from over-training in PF is harder to quantify, as we haven't been given an exact formula. Droit and I came up with some theories that I think are pretty close, if I could remember them. Droit posted them somewhere. I'll see if I can find them.

[Archigeek]

The armor penalty is a relatively significant factor. For a character exactly trained for full plate at cap, it contributes a penalty a little bit above the difference between 1x and 2x PF. Overtraining in armor to reduce the action penalty and/or using Armored Evasion can reduce the maneuver penalty by a fairly significant amount, however.

Coase


That statement basically lead Droit and I to believe that 3 ranks of PF is roughly equal to a reduction in armor penalty of 1. The theory being that the difference between 1x and 2x PF is 100 ranks, the penalty is 35... 35x 3 is "a little above" 100. That's the theory, though I don't think it's a direct reduction. In other words, I don't think you can completely train away your armor penalty by picking up an extra 100 ranks of PF. In fact I KNOW you can't, as I have 303 ranks of PF and still get hit by SMRs.

[m444w]

This manuever is not a standard manuever, it is more like Vysan's insta-death manuever, the only way to combat it is to not be prone... So, whatever cman that is that stands you up when attacked, and being light enough for the call wind previous to you getting attacked is the only way to survive it. I have survived this manuever once in all my years of hunting with my characters, when they properly set it up (the call wind being the set-up)

[Rolton-Sammich]

This manuever is not a standard manuever, it is more like Vysan's insta-death manuever, the only way to combat it is to not be prone... So, whatever cman that is that stands you up when attacked, and being light enough for the call wind previous to you getting attacked is the only way to survive it. I have survived this manuever once in all my years of hunting with my characters, when they properly set it up (the call wind being the set-up)
Bingo. The moaning spirit punch is a straight up WTFPWN.

[Archigeek]

So maybe you're just plain screwed.

My only suggestion then would be to see if it is a puncture/slash/crush attack and get some resistance for whichever one it is. That's what was determined with the rift crawlers. Their attacks are slash. They have a pretty high minimum fail rate, but even then, the slash protection will likely keep you alive. Maybe this one is the same but crush instead?

On the other hand, if it only rarely happens, you're probably best off just chalking it up to a bad day at the office and moving on.

[Celephais]

Actually... the Physical Fitness and SMR advice still applies, if he didn't get proned by the call wind, it wouldn't have happened (according to m444w), and the way to avoid call wind is PF and reducing armor penalty.