A day's travel east of fortress Guildtouch is hillock Veiledfences. The sheriff of Veiledfences passes on information about giant bears roaming the surrounding area, some of who have earned a name.
Bim brings walking speed up to 0.9xx for the bear hunt, dropping 13 units of moose meat and leaving 20 of 31 iron bolts in the civic mound. At 1.2xx jogging speed, he slow travels west of Veiledfences, with odor and tracking active, in the direction of a lair. Bim periscopes up out of slow travel mode into fast travel on occasion to check for any nearby asterisk. Surely enough, north of The Sewer of Salves is an asterisk. This asterisk meanders toward Veiledfences in zigzag fashion, but eventually the distance is closed. The tracks lead to a giant black bear recruit.
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Bim approaches prone, in vegetation when possible, and orthogonal to trees when possible, for a rating of fantastic visual stealth. It's good weather and daylight, so it won't get any better that that.
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It takes 4 bolts to ground the giant black bear. There isn't any reason to continue showering it with missiles. The previous moose suffocated/fell to missile fire because no shot caused grounding, prior to the left/right lung damage. Bim switches to copper spear and moose leather shield. While the first order is
grounding by whatever method, the second is debuff by causing
nausea.
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Bim enters this fight with zero fighter/wrestler/weapon skill, so he's equal to the bear on this plane of comparison: his dabbling offense versus the bear's dabbling defense.
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Defensively with novice shield, dodger and observer, he holds a one level advantage and can afford auto-defense. Unlike the sentient NPC who can improve skills when a combat runs long, this bear will not change in anyway from start to finish.
While the goal is to kill as quickly as possible (headshot, major artery rupture, suffocation, cumulative wound bleed out), instead of waiting one tick for the menu to refresh with potentially better targeting (weapon use only on
normal strike/easy/easier—fairly solid/square/very square) and occasionally manually blocking incoming attacks, Bim will use that tick to wrestle and latch on grabs. Grabbing will yield not only XP for fighter/wrestler/observer, but will also prevent the bear from dodging away.
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Any entry in the combat report equals some type of XP gain. In the second image linked above, Bim gets XP for spear/fighter/observer for the
cyan colored entry, and for the two
magenta colored entries, XP for wrestler/fighter/observer. Wrestler as a skill advances so quickly because you get XP for both the grab and for the grip break (with larger, stronger than you critters). When the fight ends due to a throat shot (major artery rupture) Bim's managed to take fighter/wrestler from dabbling to adequate and gained some XP for spear.
As can be seen, despite superdwarven endurance, a grappling heavy combat causes tiredness. When fighting something that's been properly debuffed (nausea, stunning, in pain), you could be reckless enough to push into over-exertion as that can cap off willpower nicely.