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The reason I say this is because of balance. If you don't get it in two swings, you'll try a third. Of course, you're going to miss, so you'll take a fourth swing because "it's almost dead!" (Assuming you have four swings, of course.) And lo and behold you kill it, but now you're out of balance—and five more critters just spawned on top of you and are just dying to try out a new recipe for Thoom. Or Ghorak Zo, as the case may be.

(Why is maintaining your balance important? Because your defense drops with your balance. No balance, no defense. Full balance, full defense.)

Now if you take two swings, run around a little and get your balance back, then come back for another two swings, the varmint will be dead and you'll still have a good balance reserve for whatever wants to spawn in on top of you with a new cookbook. Take a look at the following for a little story about balance.

As you can see, I got a little cocky. I killed an artak cougar, which took four swings and depleted my balance, then I tried to take out an orga anger without letting my balance recover. The anger did a lot more damage than I was expecting (no balance, therefore no defense), but I managed to get it down to red by the time I was red. Since "one more swing!" would do it, I stood there and swung away... We both swung at the same time, we both hit at the same time, and we both died at the same time.

Since an orga berserk was tromping around right then (I'd had it trapped in the tree while I was fighting the anger), six more people fell before I was up and about again. Time fallen: 18 minutes. Should I have run? Yep. Did I? Nope. A stupid death? Yep.

So let that be a lesson to you. KEEP YOUR BALANCE UP—even if it means coming back in a couple minutes to finish off a monster. Staying for "one more swing!" is death.