It is my understanding that Z-Wave as a protocol upholds the state of the nodes as alive or dead. If the node stops transmitting (battery dead, malfunction, device destroyed…) it will be marked as dead. How can we read this state within HA? I think any sensor that has long, unpredictable triggering intervals would benefit from this.
MQTT has a Last Will and Testament feature to handle this but Zwave doesn’t have this feature.
They handle it via a ‘failed node’ list as discussed here:
http://www.openzwave.com/knowledge-base/deadnode
But I don’t know how HA interprets this list, if it does so at all.
Yeah MQTT is super nice. The only reason I’m even using Z-Wave is that I need secure small devices with long battery life, otherwise it would be all ESP8266/wifi/mqtt. I’ve literally spent more time troubleshooting the “simple and easy” Z-Wave than building ESP8266 sensors from scratch with zero knowledge about them and electronics in general. 
I still have weird behavior with some of my Z-Wave sensors and the vendor customer service has been useless.
Well, hopefully someone knowledgeable enough with HA sees this because I don’t know where to ask specifically.
Sigma recently released at least some of their specifications which used to be behind costly license fees and NDAs, hopefully this will help the OpenZWave project as well.
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