question about eshield

[ecdhduy]

how does eshield work with items that add % dmg taken goes to mana?
like tal belt has 37% dmg taken goes to mana, and nightsmoke has 50% dmg taken goes to mana. if you have 50% eshield, is it added to the 50% that nightsmoke has?

[Smackin]

DTM is calculated after es is applied, so its absolutely obsolete to a well-built es sorc because u wont take any dmg. Since u dont take any damage, DTM is absolutely useless.

[mztan]

Not to mention that DTM only works for physical damage. Useless indeed :(

[WNxZerker]

IIRC what the above posters mean is that unlike E shield DTM takes the physical amount of damage you take, and then gives you that amount of mana based on the % DTM you have.
so 50% E shield cuts your damage to health in half, and then your 50% DTM would give you that mana back (if you have a 1:1 instead of the default 2:1 ratio of mana taken for damage absorbed) so you would have a full mana orb but have still taken 50% damage to your life orb.

if you want to 100% cancel out damage to your life orb, you will need to max out telekinesis and get E shield to 95% absorb. then stack Magic Damage Reduced, and Damage Reduces items, to reduce that 5% damage to nothing.

however the problem with this is your mana orb is always low when your in combat, so you need a lot of mana, and a lot of mana Regen to keep enough mana to cast spells while taking damage.

also note that E shield counts the amount of damage to take tou your mana orb before resists and PDR and MDR items, those mods will only count towards damage that goes to your life orb.

Zerker

edit:
if you have a low amount of absorb on ES and are only using it to take the edge off of the damage you take on say a max vita sorc, then %DTM items will help you keep your mana orb up.
so say you have 50 absorb from ES, and max block and rest vita, and you have around 500-600 HP with little HP gear and dont want to go squish, then you don't necessarily have to max telekinesis as your %DTM items will give you back some of the mana that ES took away, making it in effect more like max TK. this is just theory though, I have a sorc like I described, but she would benifit more from max TK and more absorb from ES even with base energy, I look at the %DTM on my tals belt as a drop of gravy, not something to shoot for.

[mztan]

Yeah, IIRC DTM is a percentage of the final damage taken to your life bulb. So if you have 50% ES (and, for calculation's sake, 1:1 telekinesis) and 37% DTM from Tal belt, from a 100 physical damage hit, you'd take 50 damage to life, and 50 - 0.37 * 50 = 31.5 mana burn.

As your ES %age increases, the usefulness of DTM decreases, since you'd be taking 37% of a small fraction of the original damage. E.g. 100 damage, 95% ES = 5 damage to life bulb, of which 37% is ~2. So you'd lose 5 hp and 95-2=93 mana. :( not that useful.

I suppose it would be possible to optimize %ES and DTM to try to get the most damage reduction. Perhaps it's possible to find a optimal solution given different weights for hp and mana, since 1 point in mana is much more dispensable than 1 point in hp. E.g. we could establish that 1 hp is worth about 2 mana. Alternatively, this ratio could be defined as the ratio of hp to mana your character actually has, and then adjusted slightly to take into account replenish-life/regen-mana rates. I.e. for serious ES sorcs the ratio could be in excess of 1hp:4mana, but more traditionally it'd be around 1:1 (I think?).

(Also, all of these calculations get skewed heavily if there are any %DR items like Shaft, VampGaze, etc)

However, my guess is that there aren't enough DTM items that are otherwise useful enough to merit wearing solely for this exercise. If it were possible to get DTM above 100%, it might actually be feasible...

[WNxZerker]

are you sure DTM is a mana burn, and not a mana gain?

also your maths a little off, to work out percentage you would go
50 * 37 / 100 = 18.5 so it would be a 18.5 burn (if you are correct about it being a burn)
(you can see your math is off because your 37% is actually more than what 50% of 50 would be)


Zerker

[mztan]

Err... DTM is physical damage taken goes to mana, right?

So, if we're taking 100 damage with 50% ES, 50 damage goes to hp and 50 damage goes to mana. Without Tal's belt, that's exactly how much damage you'd end up taking (that is, without other modifiers like %DR and whatever).

However, with Tal's belt, 37% of the damage you'd take to hp would go to restoring your mana. Thus, you'd gain 50 * 0.37 = 18.5 mana. This makes your total mana loss 50 - 18.5 = 31.5. Does that make sense?

Energy Shield is the mana burn, and DTM is mana gain.

[WNxZerker]

I see what your saying now.
originally it looked like you were saying 50 + 31.5 loss of mana.
instead of 31.5 total mana loss after the mana gain of 18.5 from the DTM modifier
we were saying the same thing :P

Zerker