On the second though he must have 2nd Tier def perk that can cheat death.
Exactly. Its called “nine lives”. Only bandit leaders have it.
Remember that ALL enemies use some of the perks from the normal perk system. Orcs for example have the shield crusher perk, doing extra damage to shields. Werewolves have “berserk”, restoring AP if they score a kill. All goblins have quick hands and so forth….
It will become a lot clearer to the player once we have implemented the right-click info window on enemies, but all UI tasks atend to be very tedious, time consuming and bug-creating :(