Have I just been really lucky? I often have loads more trouble with zombies.
Why exactly ARE night horrors so indestructible?
With a legendary weapon skill (axe), the corresponding fighter stat (both of these are big factors particularly in relation to breaking grips by cleaving) and if your shield/armor/dodge were at least at proficient, statistically you were fine. Tactically, I don't know what you choose to do. Did you have armor? Were you inside the lair by yourself, outside, with or w/o meatshields, etc? The more you have stat-wise/companion-wise the more mistakes you can afford and what not.
Stat minimums feel like high agility with proficient defensive skills, and competent weapon and fighter while wearing no armor. But that's for the slower muscular/incredibly muscular night troll/horror (that you'd fight solo and win consistently against outside the lair). You can get lucky and fight the unarmed weak/skinny night troll/horror like this, but really in this case you need to be fully armored (with no armor speed penalty) to avoid bad rolls when strikes come through your shield/dodge, have more than proficient weapon and corresponding fighter stat, minimum talented defensive skills. This is outside the lair soloing as well. The most statistically uphill night troll/horror fight would be alone inside the lair, versus a weak and skinny unarmed night troll.
DF shorthand for fast is skinny. Muscle can be a modifier to speed. So weak and skinny is *tends to be* the fastest type of night troll/horror as opposed to incredibly muscular. Speed trumps everything else (which can make them the most dangerous type of troll/horror, particularly if unarmed, since they work in grabs if weaponless). The description weak is also in relation to other night trolls, so compared to o dwarf/human/elf/gobin, it's still freakishly strong. I'd also wager the guess the
nopain, noexert, nofear, very high speed and strength, high wrestling, striking and dodge is what makes them so dangerous.
From the solo combat perspective, "feeling speed" and pretty much "feeling if you are equal to, better than or being outclassed by," is more about how long it's taking to score good hits and specifically getting that hit to the leg/foot that will drop their speed by getting them onto the ground (less about duration of the match itself). When this starts to take too long, likely any mistake will a fatal one. You know when you're lucky if you somehow get away with a mental error and all this is going on. Night troll fights that end too quickly I'd chalk up to whatever. Winning the medium/long length combats at the lower stat ranges is where I'd say you're winning consistently.
tl;dr - It depends...Not all, but the skinny ones have stats that let them screw you up while being light enough to fall into the weird "almost impossible to pulp" range as I recall, like an undead weasel but bigger, and usually with a knife.
^That's a really strange thing to say and have it make perfect sense.
Interesting. I haven't had a character with the strength to send anyone flying in 40.xx. But then I never go vampire and my attributes are baseline. Was the blunt you used high contact area? With blunt I generally use war hammer, so breakage, but no massive pulping, also unlike morningstar, no easy cutting of tendons and ligaments.