Before we get into tactics and team balance, let's look at exactly how health and death work in Pillars of Eternity. It's an unconventional but intuitive system that simulates short-term and long-term damage.

-Endurance measures short-term combat damage, while the health bar shows you how close your characters are to death. Your endurance pool is reflected on your character portrait, and your health pool is shown as a vertical bar next to your character portrait.

-Incoming damage is applied to both pools, but while endurance regenerates between encounters, health damage stacks. Health can be recovered completely by resting at a campfire or an inn.

-If your endurance runs out in a fight your character will be knocked out until the end of combat. Once the combat's over, the character stands up and their endurance quickly regenerates. If your health runs out you become maimed.

-A maimed character regains their endurance, but has only 1 health, and suffers severe penalties to accuracy and defense stats. If they're reduced to 0 health again, they're dead.

-Yes, really dead. If your main character dies it's game over. If a companion dies they are gone. There are no lovely magic potions or phoenix downs that will bring them back in Pillars of Eternity. Say your goodbyes and carry on.

-On higher difficulties, or if you're playing on expert mode, you don't get the benefit of the maimed status, you just die straight away if your health runs out.

With all that in mind, let's focus on how not to die.

This looks really bad for the guy on the left. He's out of endurance, but he's got loads of green health. If the party survives the fight, he'll get right back up again. The guy on the right however is close to being maimed (look at the tiny red bar next to his portrait). The horizontal grey bar on his portrait reflects wounds, which stop endurance from regenerating beyond that point.