Shattered Kingdoms

If you're not dead, you can leave. They're going to follow you and beat the living daylights out of your brains, but you can still at least move--provided you're still alive. If you have an angry NPC after you, staying in the same place that they're in will probably kill you--and I've noticed that most mercs are mob-resistant, so it's probably safe to say that they can try to leave if they really want to.

The point of not being able to get up while being prone is that you are busy defending yourself from attacks. If the merc calls for a strategic withdraw, the rest of the team is going to do their best to distract them so that you can crawl you [REDACTED] away with the rest of them.

That is why, prone status should end after combat, IMO.

Well, there's another argument that says you're prone because you're half unconscious because someone bashed you, rather than just playing twister on the ground to avoid blows like a 70's Hong Kong movie.

If you're half unconscious how do you get four or five attacks a round?

I think mercs and barbs are pretty balanced now, wimping retreat with this I think is removing some of the tactical advantage of the mercenary.

You get 4-5 inaccurate attacks a round. You are pretty much like that afroninja from youtube, just strike around.

Anyway, if you are in prone position and you can't even grab a tiny potion from your inventory and quaff it, how the hell can you stand up and follow the others that retreat?

A lot of you are going about this discussion the wrong way, you can't look at what makes sense and what doesn't, you have to look at whether it makes sense from a mechanics points of view. Not whether a halfling call pull a giant out, or whether whatever... It's just a game mechanics issue that needs to be addressed.

If it remains as it is and prone disallows you from joining in the retreat, retreat will become no different than fleeing (in some cases) save for the fact that you can choose a direction. It would be a huge wimp.

The merc leader can no longer blindly type ret s and expect everyone to walk out safely. He has to pay attention at the "regains its footing" msg and retreat the right moment.

That is so easy to see in all the battle spam.

Use triggers to have it in a different colour in your client and send echos/sounds when it happens. It's no different than any other msg that can be lost in the battle spam.