I didn't realize how much easier semis were than night trolls until I greeted a Giantess in her lair and she was dead before either of us could respond. Do not pass unconsciousness, go directly to death.
How quickly the giant and the cyclops (also add roc and dragon) go down versus one solid penetration shot (through skin, fat, muscle, finally fracturing bone) is the biggest negative with vanilla pain values. The plus for vanilla pain values is you have to learn to play with less margin of error for your own character. Everyone's MMV.
This run (began as peasant, playing rogue, pain value: skin 0, fat 1, muscle 2, bone 25), I was awoken to the value of grip-fighting/pummeling in DF grappling right around the time Bim, Cerol and
Nisa went semimegabeast hunting. In order to neutralize the semimegabeast grab (as Nisa wasn't really going to negotiate that being an AI),
Bim opted to
grab first. Doing so was reminiscent of the second ettin Bim fought, which boosted wrestling and shield. Night trolls followed and they became far too manageable once I realized the AI, if grabbed, almost never responds with a counter grab. The AI's decision tree if grabbed is to either select from their striking menu or grip break if wrestling is chosen.
If you grab a night troll or establish several holds on a night troll (stats here are higher than the first Bim link), they'll be preoccupied with your grabs rather than grabbing you. If they strike, you just need the necessary shield to block whether that's manual or auto. It's an interesting Khabib Nurmagomedov oriented-pressure game that seems to work on everyone from semis to titans to night trolls. Once you have around proficient shield, you're almost on the verge of running away with it and the fights become less competitive. There's a little more to it than that, but those are mainly stat-building things that reveal themselves during the run itself.
I didn't realize the value of grip-fighting/pummeling in previous 42.xx test worlds because I was trying to go beyond grip fighting and actually move further down the grapple road map. And there really wasn't a need to.