After developing my last sorceress character to level 80 ("katmai_src", account "jrtomshine"), I found her to be so weak as to be almost unplayable in late hell mode. After one or two hits from nearly any monster, she would keel over and take a good deal of my gold and experience points with her. So, in planning my next sorceress character I decided to look carefully at energy shield and it's telekensis synergy bonus.

To summarize, energy shield allows a character to absorb a percentage of the damage delt using mana rather than life. For level 1 energy shield, 20% of damage delt is drawn from mana, so if a monster hits for 100 damage, only 80 is removed from life. Unfortunantly, the remaining 20 is not simply removed from mana -- 40 mana points are removed. Adding points into telekensis provides a synergy here: at slvl 8, only 1.5 points are removed from mana for each point absorbed by energy shield. So if a monster hits a character with lvl 1 energy shield and lvl 8 telekensis, 80 points are removed from life and 30 points are removed from mana for a total of 110 points removed total.

A natural question is: how few points can be lost by varying the number of points in energy shield and telekensis? Of course, maxing both out is the ideal situation, but that's 40 skill points!

Using Matlab, I generated the following figures. The lines represent surfaces of equal damage -- i.e., any point along a line will take the same amount of damage specified for that line (something like isobars on a weather map).







If you wish to calculate these values yourself, it can be done in Excel using the following worksheet. Since different players may wish to invest different numbers of skill points into energy shield and telekenesis, there is not "best combination" short of maxing out both. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who makes use of this work though, as I'm always on the lookout for a better way to build a sorceress.

Jon

im just gonna go with u have too much time on ur hands to make an excel chart for diablo :-P