ESET's Zero-Day Protection relies on its signatures,
ESET Signature is so-called DNA-based generic signatures, which are rather complex definitions of malicious behavior and malware characteristics. These generic signatures also rely on heuristics and emulation to evaluate the scanned sample.
In the generic signatures lies the strength of ESET’s proactive detection. This means that the detection is effective, as well as efficient – a single well-crafted generic signature can detect thousands of related malware variants and that our antivirus software can detect not only malware that we know of, or have seen before, but also new, previously unknown variants
Most of the AV have Behavior Blocker to detect malicious behavior whereas in ESET if you enable Potentially Unwanted Application & Potentially Unsafe Application that will be able to detect most of the malwares, ESET signature is itself works better than any Behavior Blocker.
The 3 New Features introduced in ESET Smart Security 7 are good features but they still need a lot of work.
HIPS really doesn't exist for a normal user, HIPS are made for the users who use to say that ESET's Zero-Day Protection is not good, so just Configure it how you want & it will provide the best zero day protection.
I am really not good at testing firewall but i do love Interactive Mode of Firewall which is really very awesome.