Quote: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.
Yes, I have only a 10% chance of triggering OW with my belt, not having found any of the unique bows/xbows that do better, but it's easy to see when this happens.
My comment wasn't that OW is ineffective in preventing regeneration (even if poison da may be an easier way to do this equipment-wise, though of course it doesn't work vs poison immunes, and PMH is more-or-less permanent) --- if you're using OW as to stop regeneration, then it's very valuable. But that as a means of inflicting damage, OW it isn't terribly impressive, even with the improvements to it in 1.10.
Your comments on Lightning Bolt suggested trying out LB as an autohit method for applying PMH. Curiously, it doesn't tag monsters with PMH at all, though it does apply open wounds (as well as crushing blow from what you said). So my 'zon needs to use a standard throw attack to apply PMH (melee, jab, or poison javelin hits all work too -- I don't have any other javelin skills to try).
The timer on PMH is odder than what I said before. Waiting < ~5 secs in town doesn't remove PMH. Waiting 5-10 secs to about a minute in town does remove PMH. Waiting several minutes in town seems to 'freeze' PMH, and you can't restart regeneration after that just by going between the town and the dungeon. (I suppose this is related to the 'sub-zone processing' you describe which certainly seems to fit with my experience.) On the other hand, if you run several screens away from a monster tagged with PMH and wait a second or two then run back, it will regenerate again, and this is true even you've 'frozen' PMH for going to town and back. So this part all seems very messy and unpredictable, as no doubt is the way the code handles the different active/passive/town etc. zones.
p.s. One nice new feature I only now just noticed is that you can use the unsummon skill to unsummon your valkyrie (or decoy).