Yeah … I recruited a bargain wildman with some wonderful traits to enhance his basal wonderfulness, and he even had a rare talent for ranged defence … so I gave him some scale armour and a heater shield, and sent him off into battle against goblins, and he didn’t get shot by arrows and ran them down and trapped a couple of ambushers who were at a height disadvantage … and the bastards punctured him three times and he was dead …
I had a thief with very high initiative as well as high defence skills (and 3-star melee attack talent), and I gave in to temptation and gave him Dodge to make him less likely to die before progressing to awesomeness, but now that his melee defence is over 50 and he’s wearing heavy armour (and still has a Dodge bonus higher than +10, even though I’ve never leveled his initiative up), it’s still not uncommon for him to get scratched quite early in battle and immediately lose the Dodge bonus … but he survives without it, and now I wish I’d spent the perk elsewhere …
The only instance in which it seems worthwhile to raise initiative is when some bowman has a 3-star talent for it and doesn’t have much talent for other things that would be more useful. Then you might as well use it so that he can go first and be less likely to get caught in melee or get shot in an archery duel (and still have high initiative once wearing some decent armour).
