Roll call for "hidden" bonuses/features

[Crystalion]

(I am assuming you aren't playing Hardcore--you can read on for fun if you're a HC player though)

There are quite a few reasons you might not lose any experience when you die in v1.10s. The common ones are:

1) you are playing normal difficulty, where there is no xp penalty for death
2) you died due to pvp action (so "MK" is still a factor in D2, though less of one than D1)
3) you had no xp into your current level (and you can't bust a level in D2, unlike EQ)

I believe I have, however, discovered a rather odd one...

4) If you are sufficiently high level to be suffering a substanstially increasing-by-level xp penalty, and you can level up before touching your corpse (touching, not looting/fully looting, is what triggers the xp regain), then it would appear that you are moving the xp "saved" in your corpse, albeit at a 25% penalty, into your new level, where, interestingly enough, you are suffering roughly a 25% penalty to xp over your previous level. Thus these should effectively cancel out, which means you essentially died "for free" in terms of xp. (The big "if" here is whether doing without the equipment on your corpse poses a problem for you in time-to-level efficiency).

(Please remember that you do *not* regain xp for looting a corpse in town after you leave a game.)

Indeed, it would seem possible, should one game have enough xp available to do a full level up for you when you are at high level, to deliberately die 16 times during a level (16 is the max number of corpses you can have in v1.10s) in hell difficulty, then level up and loot all those corpses to level up yet again (in merely a few seconds--note that when you level up this way you don't get the "chung" sound announcing it). At sufficiently high levels this would seem to be a wash in xp except when you consider that xp is also diluted in the event that you are fighting monsters "too far below your level" and this technique basically allows you to harvest them more efficiently for xp for one additional level.

I have done some testing on all this and it seems right, but I'm lacking the final confirmation for, say, the level crossing test vis a vis xp penalties for my level 83 amazon. Someone else can certainly run the test though: with a character in the 80s or 90s about to level up, get yourself killed instead (hell or nm) and then level up before looting the corpse, being sure to record your xp before and after the corpse loot. I suggest you die unequiped, so that you are not impaired in your leveling efforts by temporary loss of equipment.

Of course, if I find time amidst all my theoretical testing schedule to actually level a character that is already 80+ then I'll report back by edit.