Sounds funny to me because I usually play halfings and build nothing but slingers until my heroes/summons/whatever are ready for the endgame. Skeletons defy that strategy a little due to missile-immunity. Fortunately they're so weak that my slingers can punch them to double-death with acceptable losses... So I always considered them a waste of time. When I play death books I go for wraiths and shadow demons for the life-draining, but mainly focus on crippling the enemy army.
Last time I died: Was scribing a fancy new Ars Magica spell despite the spellbook glowing bright red on the altar. I told myself it could be because I included a red skill (A pitiful excuse. I was doing dwarven science, my beer wanted to see what happened if I went through with it). The spell altar exploded (much larger than expected! !!!Success!!!) leaving me nearly dead at the bottom of a small crater. I stood there a second, in shock at the loss of the crafting ingredients, before getting struck by lightning. I ran for the nearest building but was struck again and killed. Did I mention I have 98% lightning affinity? The movement bonus is *usually* worth it... But lightning will rapidly strike me in even a normal rainstorm. I had been using the altar itself as cover. (It only strikes with line of sight, so I'm safe indoors... except that it will amusingly strike through glass roofs).
The bad part is, it's a sort of super-permadeath. There's this weird bug I've always experienced with FTB where my client loses all ability to talk to the server, but still gets updates. I can't open chests or chat but I can walk around, see the other players moving, see their messages. After ~30 seconds I disconnect with "End of Stream", or I can disconnect-reconnect to clear the problem as soon as I notice it. Doing this causes a single random item to be ejected from my inventory though - usually not from my hotbar. So very weird!
Ever since I died this time, the issue has gone from 2-3 times an hour to "absolutely always". I uninstalled and reinstalled java and FTB, turned my modem and router off for 2 hours, and deleted my player file. No matter what I do, I'm always disconnected after about 30 seconds and cannot interact with anything in the meantime. No one else on the server ever has this issue... I might replace my modem just in case it's the problem.
Minecraft, Feed The Beast, Direwolf20 pack.