When you are downed, your character is in a debilitated state. As a result, you cannot move, dodge, activate any of your skills or undertake any of your profession mechanics.  You can tell when you enter a downed state based on the fact your health will have reached zero and you are now stationary, in a heap on the floor.  Thankfully this means that you don’t yet have to give up the fight and although you are severely weakened, this does not mean you are finished.

The third downed skill tends to be offer defensive utility and again varies from profession to profession. Some are certainly better than others, but most can cause enough damage to finish off weakened foes. My particular favourite is the thieves, which allows you to drop a smoke bomb and vanish in stealth.  The rangers ability to call your pet to your downed location, to revive you, is also incredibly useful.

Enemies when you enter the downed state will continue to attack you, based on your inability to avoid them.  Each time you are downed, whether from a player or enemy you incur one downed penalty.  This downed penalty reduces your health when in the downed state by 25% for each point and will last for a total of 1 minute.  After being downed 5 times within the space of a minute you will be defeated, resulting in you having to teleport to the nearest Waypoint.

If you are downed underwater it is actually called drowning and you’ll be prompted with a message stating “Swim to the surface!” while if you are downed on land the message will state “Fight To Survive!”

1. You enter a downed state when your health reaches zero.

2. When in a downed state, your standard skills are replaced with 3 profession specific skills and 1 global skill all professions share.

3. You can rally when downed by killing your foe through using your downed skills (or if someone else helps) or by using your Skill 4 (bandage).

4. You can finish other players when they are downed by (default) pressing F next to their downed body.

5. Beware when finishing people as they will be able to fight back and disrupt your attempts with their own downed skills.  Learning each professions downed skills is incredibly important (the guardians is a nightmare!)