Eth's -25% defense

[Crystalion]

Regardless of how many Eths player A has in his weapon and how often player A hits the enemy, player B won't ever have an easier time hitting the enemy.

I'm not sure this is true, as worded.

It is not clear to me that a monster in hit recovery is allowed to block, for example, based on principles as opposed to testing. As soon as you open that can of worms, immediately other thoughts arise: what if the monster is stunned? (twister, shock wave, stun, war cry, mind blast... only stun is relevant, indirectly, re: eths, of course). What about hitting monsters as they are in the middle of being knocked back (i.e. actually in transit)? Et cetra.

Of course, what you no doubt meant was, the Eths themselves don't have a sticky effect on the monster's DR. But your wording does bring up these interesting (to me at least) issues.

It also causes me to wonder, if a monster could Berserk, and die while their DR was 0 (passiveaura or special coded?) would it persist to their revive? Ditto, with more practicality I suppose, with Inner Sight etc. (i.e. might some curses/auras touch the underlying stats of a monster, thinking that they will back out properly when the effect duration ceases, but instead death of the monster causes side-effects from unclean termination?)

Since I saw some evidence months ago that Set bonus states are not handled entirely properly, and recent reports claim the Anya resist bonus bug still exists, these kinds of oddities would not surprise me. (for that matter I went through an act change waypoint today wearing full trangs, going in as ghoul lord and coming out as necro)