How Does Energy Shield Work in D2R Ladder Season 2 - How Is Damage Reduction Calculated

How Does Energy Shield Work in D2R Ladder Season 2 - How Is Damage Reduction Calculated

11/29/2022 3:22:35 PM

Energy shield is definitely one of the coolest skills that the Sorceress has access to, it's also one of the most confusing aspects to the overall defensive kit that you can put on something like the immortal sorceress. In today’s guide, we break down how energy shield works and we cover how every type of damage reduction works in concert. We take your average energy shield nova sorceress, break down how the game will actually try to apply damage to your character. Finally, explain whether or not you really need resistances on the energy shield sorceress build.

D2R Ladder Season 2 Energy Shield For Sorceress - How Does It Work & How Is Damage Reduction Calculated

The Defensive Stats

Attributes

Strength: 158

Dexterity: 67

Vitality: 96

Energy: 506

Life: 1243

Mana: 3967

Mana Regeneration: 125.4

Defenses

Defense: 818

Defensive vs Missile: +500

Block Chance: 11%

Hit Recovery: +110%

Thorns: 14

Damage Reduction: 7

Magic Damage Reduction: 28

There are two things to understand about energy shield right off the bat.

First and foremost that it will only ever absorb up to 95% of incoming damage and we're going to use a lowercase a on absorb there, because there's a stat in the game called absorb and we don't want to get those too confused.
Secondly, it's synergy from telekinesis will reduce how much mana damage you take. At Max Synergy, you're only going to be taking three quarters of a point of mana damage for every one point of damage absorbed by energy shield itself.

Looking at a pretty average energy shield build sorceress, pay attention to all the different defensive stats that you have on this build. So your life, your mana, how much flat damage reduction and flat magic damage production that we have are actual resistances along with any percentage damage reductions that we have. Lastly, take a look at absorb and magic absorb. The vast majority of these stats probably do a lot of things that you never expected them to do. For people who are not aware, this is how the game will attempt to apply damage to you in order. So first, the incoming damage will check if you have bone armor or Cyclone armor, then it will hit your energy shield. After that, it'll hit flat amounts of damage reduced and magic damage reduced. After that, it'll check your resistances see if you have any sources of negative resistance like lower resin, then check your percentage absorb and then your flat integer absorb. Lastly, it's going to check excess damage reduced as well as excess magic damage reduced. If looking at the shark doesn't make it abundantly clear, each one of these different types of damage reductions act on very specific types of damage. Energy shield is going to work on every damage type except for poison damage.

There are 2 buffs that you can technically get if you were to equip certain rune word armors. If you had rain runeword giving you access to cyclone armor as well as bone runeword giving you access to bone armor, you could theoretically have every type of damage reduction in the game on a single sorceress character.

How Does Energy Shield Work in D2R Ladder Season 2

Damage Calculation For Energy Shield

1000 physical (Bone armer - level 10, applied by sorceress, absorb 155 damage) + 1000 fire (Cyclone armor - level 15, applied by sorceress, absorbs 208 damage)

A monster's incoming attack is carrying a thousand physical damage as well as a thousand fire damage, so some of that physical damage is going to be offset by bone armor and some of that fire damage is going to be offset by cyclone armor of physical damage. 155 of that is going to be offset by our bone armor and 208 of the fire damage is going to be offset by cyclone armor.

845 Physical + 792 Fire (Current skill level 40, absorbs 95%, duration 1080 seconds)

Before anything else happens, the incoming damage has been reduced to 845 physical as well as 792 fire. How much damage has been offset? Since it's going to reduce the incoming damage by 95%, that means that only 5% of the damage will be left over.

42 Physical + 39 Fire (Mana 3967-2801)

We're always going to round down, so that's going to leave a total of 42 physical damage and 39 fire damage coming out the Sorceress before her other types of damage reductions.

How much damage was mitigated? It looks like 1555 damage was stopped by energy shield, because we have maxed out telekinesis, we're only going to receive three quarters of that damage as mana damage. So we multiply that by 0.75 or 75% of the damage mitigated and it looks like we're going to take 1166 mana damage. Since our character starts off with 3967 mana, that means she'll be left with a remaining mana total of 2801.

Damage Reduced by Total & Magic Damage Reduced by Total

Damage reduced by at first will only stop physical damage, magic damage reduced by at first will only stop magic fire lightning and cold, it'll completely ignore physical and poison. Flat damage reduced by values have a very interesting facet to them which is that if they are greater than the incoming damage, at the end they will reduce the other types of damage on the attack. Since our attack is carrying physical and fire, if we have 50 damage reduction as opposed to 7 damage reduction, that would eclipse the 42 incoming damage. That means that 8 leftover physical damage reduction would then go on to reduce any remaining fire, cold, lightning and poison damage, the extra caveat there being that it would only stop incoming poison damage from the first frame of damage or the first amount of bitrate poison damage. Not only that damage reduced by are also less effective against incoming attacks that deal damage as bitrate as opposed to dealing damage in a single hit. So the examples would be Diablo's Firestorm or Diablo's Lightning Hose.

To be able to stop a single point of physical damage from Diablo's Firestorm, you need 25 damaged reduced by, and that cool interaction with magic damage reduced by goes the opposite direction. It will decrease any incoming physical damage on the same attack if there were to be left over damage reduced by. Taking 7 damage reduced by and 28 damage reduced by, the 7 is going to subtract from the 42 physical damage and the 28 is going to subtract from the 39 fire damage.

35 Physical + 11 Fire

After that, we still have 35 physical damage as well as 11 fire damage that needs to be mitigated in some way or we're going to be taking that as life damage at the end.

Resistances and any sources of negative resistance would come in for physical damage reduction:

Damage reduction: 10%,
Fire resistance: 75%

31 Physical + 2 Fire (Fire Absorb 15%)

So then we're left over with 31 physical damage in just about 2 fire damage. At this point we need to look at sources of percentage absorb that our character has. The only versions of these that exist are fire, lightning and cold for percentage absorb.

Percentage Absorb

The interesting part to understand about absorb is not only does it reduce incoming damage, but it also heals you for that amount of damage. So for you to get the maximum benefit from absorb, you need to have already lost some amount of life.
Another interesting thing to know about it is that percentage absorb is capped at 40% and it will both reduce incoming damage and heal before any effects like plus flat absorb. What it basically means is that if you are at less than full life you get double the effective percentage absorb whereas if you're at 100% life, you just reduce incoming damage by its percentage.

So we have 15% fire absorb and we're assuming that the sorceress was at 100% life to start. What this basically means for us since we have such a low number is that we're going to reduce incoming fire damage by one because we're rounding down, but life totals aren't whole numbers in Diablo 2. You can have decimal points worth of life.

31 Physical + 1 Fire

Then we are left with 31 physical damage in 1 incoming fire damage. The last two things that we would need to check is flat values of absorb which we do happen to have some of. We have 16 magic absorb and magic damage reduction applied to fire cold and lightning. The weird part is that magic absorb actually doesn't, this stat specifically only absorbs incoming magic damage. So for our calculations, it doesn't do anything at all, but magic damage reduced by inmagic absorb apply to different types of incoming damage.

32 Physical/Fire (Life 1243 - 1211)

So the last thing that we need to look at is just how much damage did our sorceress end up taking. If we take her life total of 1243 and we subtract the total amount of damage which equals out to 32. We end up with 1211 remaining life on our sorceress, starting from 2000 total damage on the attack.