Performance drop with partially known long plain NTLM

[tetraburmium]

I had assumed that inputting the mask as a single string of constants and variables would in effect create a hybrid dict+mask attack with only one dictionary entry (which to me seems computationally equivalent to setting up a dict+mask attack) - but I suppose the way the algorithms in lite are implemented doesn't take the 'constant' left hand side into account and focus its effort on the 'variable' portion?