Shattered Kingdoms

Okay I understand a tiger will be naturally aggressive and attack things on sight...
I understand it will hunt it's prey...
I can possibly see that they could be able to swim...
But I thought they wouldn't be on the road.

If anything maybe the tiger's levels need to be checked.

My herculean/hardened initiate giant, in full brass armor died pretty fast.

You'd think the lower level characters could at least travel safely down the road to the portal stones.

If you're talking about the tigers in Zhenshi, they're actually not that bad. A jman will have little to no trouble dealing with them. What you really need to watch out for is the cougar...the one flagged hidden, that gets like four or five wild fighting attacks per round, furies, and eats even mentor/master level chars of certain low-hp classes, and occasionally camps the roads near the Zhensh portal stones.

However, the basic rule of SK survival applies in your situation as well:

Always have a pet, preferably one that can rescue.

yup the tigers in Zhenshi.

Maybe the gate guards could advise initiate and below characters to run from the tigers and jaguars when being attacked? Or at least that they attack on sight to kill whatever they're attacking.

In general its extremely rare for the tigers to wander into the path between Nerina and the portal stones. OA is right, I had an apprentice merc that tore through them easily.

By the sound of it, it was more bad luck on your part. You can't run from the tigers from memory because they track and can even climb.

Running at a low level from those is pretty pointless. They track a LONG distance. The cougar at least doesn't track, I believe. SK's wilderness is really dangerous. It's not advisable to travel it farther than you absolutely must at anything under jman, and even then there's a good chance you're going to run into something stronger than you can handle, or that tracks farther than you can run. Again, the only real solution to that when flying solo is to have a pet that rescues, and try to get some distance between you and the problem while your pet fights (which, I might and will add, it won't do for long without you there).

Under jman, you should probably have a higher level PC escort to a lot of places, especially if going cross-country. Not everyone will be willing or able to take the time to give you that escort, but there are a good portion of characters who will. Asking an IC mentor (or calling for one if you haven't gotten one already, hell even if you have but they're not around or available) is probably going to give you the greatest amount of survivability at low levels in SK's wilds.

It's not the ideal solution I sense you were looking for, but it's what the game offers.

Those NPCs, the spiders in Teron, the imps and the crocs in the empire are what we call "rp enforcers."

"Look, a lowbie! Make him Arrpees! spam spam spam dead"

I resent that remark.

They really scary ones are the locust and roc.

Najs *shiver* Those things hurt my fistar merc more than the Seraph of Sargas did, no joke.

QFT

They are so brutal