Why does the Monk's Inner Sanctuary sometimes cause Fear?

Question

The Monk's skill, Inner Sanctuary, reads

Create a runic circle of protection on the ground for 5 seconds that cannot be passed by enemies.

Strangely enough, this seems to have a very high chance of fearing enemies. I'm positive I don't have any chance to fear on my gear, and I only seem to fear enemies when I use this skill.

Does Inner Sanctuary have some kind of undocumented chance to fear? Or am I missing something here?

I'm using the Circle of Protection rune

Answer 1

I have seen this as well, and it can also be seen in the video on the official skill page for Inner Sanctuary. Part of the "enemies can't stand here" feature is implemented as "enemies standing here when the circle appears will flee out of the circle." This makes sense, because if monsters already standing there when the circle appeared did not flee, the skill would be almost useless.

I don't know if this is a standard fear, or a separate effect, but the fear icon does appear over the monsters' heads.

There is some discussion on it in the official forums:

• Thread 1, where people say it's fun to Cyclone to gather up mobs, then use Inner Sanctuary to send them all running, for crown control
• Thread 2, where people say that elite monsters are not feared, but are knocked back.

Answer 2

You can see it as an "invisible tooltip". Some skills are not fully documented, what we know so far :

Barbarians :

• Wrath of the Berserker breaks most CC that are on you and make you immune to them for the skill's duration.
• The relentless passive allows you to use revenge without proc. beforehand. (this one allowed me to survive for very long periods with less than 10% health)
• Furious charge breaks jailer. Leap attack does not.
• overpower can be activated during whirlwind without breaking the whirlwind
• Using revenge will interrupt some long attack animations. It works extremely well on the minions at the end of act 1 that wind up the big red hammer that hits for a ton.
• Using furious charge while ice balls explode prevents freezing.
• The barbarian passive superstition says you will take 20% less non-physical damage (This includes arrows and other similar ranged attacks). The way it works is you will take regular damage from non-physical attacks yet you have a 20% chance to absorb the attack taking no damage from it. It will average out to 20% less damage but it is not as consistent as the tooltip states.
• While leaping in the air you can dodge frozen orbs. It is a good way to avoid them but it is hard to time correctly.
• Lightning monsters can proc revange
• Revenge can also be procced by environmental damage, like the flame jet things in A3 that don't hit too hard but tick very fast.

Demon Hunter :

• Companion uses the DH's crit chance, meaning it benefits from Sharpshooter, but doesn't remove the buff. If you don't do anything, your pet will crit 100% of the time. Not useful, but funny to watch.
• Smoke Screen breaks CC
• The thunder bola rune allows to stun bosses under hell difficulty. 2 demon hunters can easily stun-lock a boss this way
• The bonus damage on the Demon Hunter's Entangling Shot rune: Shock Collar scales with attack speed.

Monks :

• Activating the Monk's Sweeping wind refreshes the ability's timer and maintains its current stacks. Useful to retain max charges while moving to the next pack of mobs.
• thunderclap breaks jail
• dashing strike also breaks jailer
• SSS allows you to go invul for ~1 sec, allowing you to dodge the freeze explosion and other stuff.
• Blind resets the monsters animation, making it very useful against mobs with a slow attack animation (big friggin' dudes in act IV for example). Also works against bosses
• Fear (last rune on BoH) also does so, but does not work against bosses.
• Mystic ally inherits the monk's defensive stats

Witch doctor :

• Spirit walk breaks all cc.
• Recasting a pet spell resets the pet's cool down timers.
• Hex can sometimes be cast on two monsters.
• The rain of corpses will can cause bodies to fall anywhere on the screen, not just where grasp of the dead is located.
• Spirit walk can cause you to skip your own characters dialog because you leave your physical body behind when using it.
• Spirit Walk gets you out of all sorts of sticky situations... Spirit Vessel, however, does not. It only makes you invulnerable, it doesn't break you out of freeze or jail and it doesn't allow you to walk through people. It doesn't give you a speed boost either.
• The Witch Doctor's skills Haunt and Spirit Barrage will ignore line of sight.
• Grasp of the dead with the rune Groping Eels has its damage % increase based off of your attack speed. The more attack speed you have the higher % of weapon damage it does a second, at 2.21 attack speed they do 58% weapon damage a second.

Wizard :

• Mirror Image and fracture teleport break Freeze, Stun, and Jail.
• Illusionist will proc off absorbed attacks.
• Venom Hydra pools stack.
• If you launch the Celestial Arcane Orb from far enough away to a mob it will hit it once when it 'passes' through and once when it explodes.
• Fracture Teleport will remove mirrors that are up when it procs its own.
• IAS from Slow Time can stack with each other.
• Ray of Frost slows attack speed (Blizzard does not).
• you can only have at max 6 extra units as wizard. so uf you have a venom hydra and start casting arcane mines, after the 3rd mines, you will lose 1 hydra head for each mines you lay. Casting hydra after mines however will simply make all the mines disappear
• Archon Arcane Strike has a slight knockback and always interrupts attacks of non-elite mobs (pretty much leading to melee immunity).
• Archon Disintegrate can shoot through most walls (incl. waller elites), pillars, etc.
• Mammoth Hydra stacks but not as efficiently as venom hydra because it's only one head versus 3.
• Magic weapon is bugged (still?) to give twice the buff. the first buff is additive, but the second is multiplicative. So Glass Cannon + Sparkflint + Force Weapon is a 1.633 damage multiplier, not a 1.57 damage multiplier, and not the displayed 1.42 damage multiplier.
• Diamond skin can be activated while frozen.

General :

• Knockback doesn't seem to work on elites/bosses and certain mobs. On regular mobs, it will also reset their attack animation.
• Stun works on elites/bosses, but the length is extremely short compared to the original duration. It can still be used for reseting their attack animation.
• Different skills affect life on hit differently. I think I heard that Cleave reduces life on hit by a lot, but it works on every target you hit so its good for crowds, but other skills reduce life on hit less and are better for single targets.
• Some items can grant skill bonuses that are VERY relevant late game. For example, I have a weapon that gives 10% extra magic missile damage.

source