Misc. minor musings & testing v1.10s oddities

[Crystalion]

Often, however, I'll run a quick test to verify an answer.

There was something I wanted to know about Taunt (too messy to discuss here, but suffice it to say that Taunt is one of those client/server can easily disagree skills, and it matters) and I bumped into another oddity along the way...

While you might think Taunt forces the monster to come after you personally it turns out they are quite happy to scrape off on another player or your hireling. In the case of another player, the Taunt AI can release right away, fyi (no time to test further on *that* as I was already far afield). In the case of your hireling, the Taunt AI will not only hold, it will hold past the death of your hireling.

Yes, that's right, the monster, in v1.10s SP repeated tests, will stand stupidly over the corpse of your hireling (ala D1) swinging at it and ignoring all other considerations.

If Taunt worked on act/bosses/champs this would be a major exploit. As it is, I imagine it might have some value as a minor exploit in certain situations in Hardcore.

AFAIK the server is only breaking Taunt when the Taunted monster "can't get at" the target it wants to get to. Since the corpse is easy to get to the AI gets necrophiliacishly stuck.

As this is obviously a (minor) bug and not a feature, I didn't do any thorough testing about using the effect in combination with obvious other techniques, like Confuse, minions, etc.