Gaesatae way too overpowered

[Watchman]

There's actually only about two things people actually die of - enough direct damage to a sufficiently vital organ (the brain and the heart, and the latter may be conditional), and going into system shock. The latter is the most common, at least as battle damage goes, and is brought about by the body's regulatory system going haywire due to trauma and/or blood loss. How much of the former varies wildly by individual; even perfectly normal folks can sometimes keep going for quite a while with quite grievous wounds while others are down for the count from comparatively minor damage. The latter is fairly constant as the circulatory system tends to go bonkers if too large a portion of blood is lost.

The whole point in pain-killing combat drugs - an effect also achievable, if unreliably, through the natural hormonal secretions of the brain (endorphine makes morphine look wimpy) and/or suitable psychological conditions - is to circumvent most of the above by flatly cutting off the sensory feed that tells the system it even has suffered such damage in the first place. If the body simply doesn't know it has suffered such injuries it will try to keep going as if nothing had happened, until the point where enough blood loss and damage is accumulated that this becomes impossible and the system just shuts down. But without the normal feedback that brings about the shock state, this can take quite a while.

Now, of course, broken bones and such are still broken bones and will limit the functionality of the body if they're in the right place (say, limbs), regardless of whether the body deigns to notice the matter; but people with their sense of pain shut off can nonetheless do some very abnormal things simply by the virtue of flatly ignoring the "damage report" feedback that makes normal folks stop doing stupid and harmful things and curl into a screaming fetal ball instead.

It's not likely to be very healthy ignoring the warning signals like that of course, but that's a cold comfort to the guy whose sword in your gut you're not even noticing and instead cut off his head. And, really, many if not most such injuries would be lethal down the road anyway, so there's a certain amount of sense behind figuring out a way to keep going and (hopefully) killing regardless - if the spear wound in your chest will kill you sooner or later anyway, isn't it better you remain funtional long enough to kill the guy who delivered it and maybe some of his mates to boot rather than drop on the spot ? Certainly seems to fit the rather uncompromising views the Celts seem to have held about combat, death and the afterlife too.

Armour 5 for the Gaesatae is incidentally more or less in line with the rest of the Celtic swordsmen. Those "Northern" types have helmets similar to the Gaesataes' plus shirts and trousers, and get a 5 out of it. The "Southern" and Briton types have just trousers and get something like 3 from that, and I don't quite think lime-spiked hair counts for too much. I figure it partly represents their ability to duck behind their large shields for cover, and in the case of the guys with good helmets the fact the part that's mainly visible and reachable behind the shield is well protected by solid iron.