It's also worth noting that you can gate in combat. This probably shouldn't ever be your first plan of escape, since gate is a lot of mana and any target, even a low level NPC, potentially could make its saving throw to resist the gate, but sometimes it's the only choice.

I've got an old, old log somewhere on another computer, of playing a healer and trying to fight an assassin/warrior/A-P group, only to be hit with curse, entwine, and blindness (dust) in the first round of combat. I survived that by alternating healing myself as much as necessary to stay alive with trying to cure the blindness until I could gate out of there. There's not a lot of characters that have even the potential to survive a situation like that (short of just being tough enough to beat all three away), but a healer definitely can.