Roll call for "hidden" bonuses/features

[Crystalion]

As far as Occhi's experience with the monster resetting it's life, I believe this is something else completely unconnected with PMH, but I don't know what causes it.

While I can't support this with code-reading, it has always been my educated guess that there is a "sub-zone processing" garbage collect. To wit, the local space around players is always processing (i.e. actively running) and sub-zones players were recently in also continue to process--for a while. That is, like garbage collecting, those sub-zones are removed from the processing queue fairly quickly in the absence of players.

Since each player can have at most one (personal) town portal active in the game (across all acts) you could also create a little island of processing around each player's portal. I've heard this suggested, but doubt it (though I've never tested for it).

In any event, when a sub-zone has its processing shut down, a certain amount of "clean up" occurs on shut-down and "re-creation". This, according to all evidence I've ever seen, can include the effect of restoring a monster's HPs completely. My theory here is that there is a least recently used throw-away algorithm, such that the game, when it stops processing the monsters, "freezes" them in time, as they are, but that garbage collecting can result in that state information being thrown away, and the monster is effectively reborn.

Lots of implementation details there, which could be probed by testing or code-reading, but I think I have the general outline essentially right.

I also tried open wounds recently, from a crafted belt, and was a little disappointed in it's effectiveness after all the great stuff I read about it.

Well, iirc, the belts only come in at 10% chance, so you'd have to hit a monster lots and lots of times over any given 8 second period (afaik the timing for OW lasting) to keep their regen off and unresistable OW damage being done. This is rather non-optimal for most "real world" conditions.

OW chances of 25%, 35%, 50%, 100% are readily equipable on a hireling in various ways, and are often more effective than poison (because OW has a longer duration and there isn't immunity to it--provided you get a hit in, of course, perhaps needing a little elemental rider to go with your phys vs. a phys immune, which isn't hard to do). PMH is arguably godly/required for v1.10 hell difficulty. Sometimes, however, your restrictions on your (or your hirelings) equipment choices make poison or OW a reasonable alternate.

I also suspect there is some poison immune ghost or bug-cloud with not very many hit points that OW really melts beautifully, but that's a situational thing.

Crushing blow, as far as I can tell is still pretty worthless for ranged attacks, though I haven't tried to test it in detail.

Actually, at potentially five hits/sec. vs a single target (no reliance on IAS, nor possible) with Blade Fury, I suspect CB could be quite useful. Other ranged attacks, afaik, can only get up to around 3 per second.

Where crushing blow should really shine would be Dragon Talon, landing a hit potentially eight times a second (non-ranged, so no CB penalty) vs. a single target (possible, afaik, around slvl 42, with proper weapon, IAS and BoS--of course you don't have to go to this extreme to be effective).