Killed by a tree

[BFrost]

Damn, that was ridiculous...
I usually travel through the animated forest by using darkness, as the trees do not see in the dark and don't fight back (unless panicked?).
So I reach the wall of flames with a very promising 17th level gnomish monk and decide to return back. So I make my way through the dark forest as usual, killing all the trees in the way, and suddenly...
Someone critically hits you...Someone critically hits you...Someone critically hits you...You die...
So this way of traveling through the forest is not safe too...

[vogonpoet]

Does the flg confirm it was a tree that killed you? Sometimes non tree monsters get generated there, only to be quickly killed by all the trees. If you disabled all the trees, and some sort of seeing in the dark nasty was generated, its conceivable it would be able to hunt you down and pWn you.

/Or it might just have been a tree

[zeteginara]

1. Even if they cannot normally attack in darkness, any monster that 'panics' will attack in darkness.

2. Trees level VERY FAST the more you kill. I've had a character around your level quickly get torn apart after killing about 100 trees; and he was able to wreck them before that happened. (You know how Burning Hands and Fireball make the entire forest hostile? Well, turns out, so does a wand of ball lightning.)

Anyway, so, as you decided to make a normal thing out of slaughtering your way through the living forest while using darkness, you probably killed hundreds of trees, causing them to level. A lot.

Then, you got unlucky and made one panic, and put it in a situation where it was somehow forced to attack you... and well, it obliterated you with its ridiculous stats.

That's my theory anyway.

The moral: Don't consistently use killing as a means of getting through the animated forest.