Frozen Orb Damage.....specifics needed

[WarBlade]

As far as I understand. If you have 50%+ Cold Absorb, and more life than a single shard of the Orb will do, you will never die (your life should go up and down from damage, absorb, damage, absorb, etc.), regarless of resistances or Cold mastery.

That's pretty close, but not quite true. Unfortunately in order to absorb, a character must have the amount to be absorbed already missing from it's life.

Resulting from that, one shard might do X damage and the character gets hurt. A second shard doing X-1 or X-2 etc will behave as you say and the character will 'heal' before taking damage. Unfortunately if the second shard does X+2 or X+4 etc, that little bit extra will carry it beyond the threshold you were hoping to stay under.

If none of that makes any sense then just take it on faith that you reallly need to account for the damaging power of 2 shards rather than one before absorption is guaranteed.