Version 1.1

The reason that I wrote this guide is to try to help people with building an effective sorceress for player vs. player (PvP) game play. The instructions in here are just my recommendations and fit my game playing style very well. You should choose to follow none, a part, or all of them depending on your own playing style.

The major difference between a sorceress build for PvP vs. sorceress build for PvM is skill points and attribute points allocation. PvP sorceresses should have as many hit points (hp) as possible, sacrificing strength, dexterity and energy, while PvM sorceress should focus on energy for more effectiveness on killing swarms of monsters. Many of the PvM sorceresses I've met have less than half of my hp while much more mana than me (They would go for 300-400 energy while only having 10-50 vitality). With just above 1000 mana, I rely heavily on mana potion drops when playing Hell Act 4 solo, but 1000 mana is more than enough for PvP because most of the time you only have 1 or 2 targets instead of 10 or 20 in PvM. I will talk more in detail about attribute points allocation in section 2 of this guide.

For skill points allocation, firewall and blizzard are 2 highly effective PvM skills, better than frozen orb in some situations. PvP sorceresses, however, should not spend points on those so they can get max effect from orbs by improving cold mastery, and make themselves more endurable in PvP by improving energy shield. A PvM sorceress could have only 1 point in cold mastery and energy shield with some +skill items, and still be very effective. I'll get into details about skill points allocation in section 3 of this guide.

1. Equipment:

I decided to put equipment as the first section because the choice of them will affect the next section, attribute points allocation.

Weapon: Any one-handed weapon with faster/fastest cast.
Anything else is a nice bonus, but faster/fastest cast is the only thing you need for a pvp sorceress' weapon. I don't recommend Spectral Shard in here because it requires you to spend 26 dexterity, which could be spent on energy or vitality. Rare wands/scepters and Ume's Lament are nice for this purpose. Theoretically, you can get a wand/scepter with +88 mana, +19 hp, +49 to two resists, and fastest cast. The problem is that those wands/scepters are just about the rarest thing in Diablo 2, even more rare than 160 damage bows and 310 damage martels, because you can not gamble on them and 99% of the people do not imbue them. I myself imbued 6 wands between 2 characters and got 5 crappy ones, the last one being a +2 necromancer skill rare with some resists, which I traded.

A note in here: Faster cast rate is exactly the same as fastest cast rate.

Shield: Wall of the Eyeless.
I recommend wall of the eyeless here for its faster cast rate. Sigon's guard is a very nice shield, but faster cast rate is much more important than the extra blocking and +1 skills to most PvP sorceresses. A 3-Diamond shield is not recommended because resists don't mean a lot in PvP - we will get into details about that later.

Armor: Rare Light/Mage plate with lots +hp mana or Twitchthroe.
The type of armor I'd recommend is light/mage plate for pvp, since they do not reduce running speed. Of course, lower grade armor such as leather can do the same but they just look too ugly. :)

The important modifiers on armor for me are +hp and +mana. Armors can have max +39 mana and +59 hp, while anything close to those numbers is good. Resists/Fastest hit recovery on armor are a nice bonus, but not required. Some lightning resist might help you with dueling certain sorceresses/paladins and hit recovery will help you fighting bowzons. I'll get in details about those in later sections on Sorceresses Vs. Specific Classes.

There is also an unique armor called Twitchthroe worth mentioning in here. It gives your shield an extra 25% blocking rate, which makes it very nice for dueling vs. paladins and amazons. It may even help you survive 1 whirlwind attack from a barbarian if you are lucky.

Note in here: light plate requires 41 strength, mage plate need 55, and Twitchthroe requires 27 strength.

Glove: Magefist.
Magefist is the only pvp glove I would recommend due to its faster cast rate. Frostburn is nice for the increased mana, but faster cast is more important in PvP, for you don't really need tons of mana to kill 1 or 2 targets. Depending on your style, you can choose to wear Frostburn for gaining exp, but I have found magefist more effective for exp also. That is because 90% of the damage you do to monsters in a hell/8 people solo game will come from static field, and a faster cast rate means more static field can be cast in a given time, thus enabling you to gain exp faster than having more mana (which means you can cast more orbs).

Note in here: Magefist requires only 45 strength, while Frostburn needs 60.

Belts: Again, belts with +hp and mana.
The max for belts is +29 mana and +59 hp. The reason not to use nightsmoke is that after a few high damage hits, you will be dead anyway. The fact you can not drink life potions in PvP (as a generally agreed rule in PvP games) makes the 50% mana gain limited to half of your max hp, which shouldn't be worthy enough. Some sorceresses prefer using death's guard when fighting other sorceresses, and I believe it is not necessary because the only negative effect of a sorceress being chilled by cold spells is slow walking speed - being chilled does not effect casting speed (bug/feature?). You should always use teleport instead of walking while fighting sorceresses - sometimes it is good to run around necromancer's bonespirts or using run to lure barbarians into a whirlwind so you can teleport away and kill/damage them with orbs, but walking isn't necessary for fighting vs other sorceresses.

Note in here: a normal plated belt with 4 rows will require 60 strength; however, exceptional belts such as a demonhide sash or sharkskin belt also have 4 rows while only requiring 20 strength.

Helm: Tarnhelm.
It's a good choice. I'd never take it off for PvM, because of the high magic find chance. But for PvP, I recommend a helm with high hp and mana over it. The max for helms are +39 mana and +59 hp.

Boots: Fastest walk/run boots with +hp and mana.
The max for boots are +39 mana and +29 hp.

Amulets and Rings: There has been lots of debate on this topic. I'd conclude it with 3 types of setups:
Setup One: +1 or +2 skill amulet with as many +hp mana as possible, and two Stone of Jordans. The max an amulet can have is +88 mana and +59 hp.
Setup Two: +1 or +2 skill amulet with high hp, mana, and fast cast. 1 ring with fast cast, high hp, mana, and one Stone of Jordan. (The max for rings is +88 mana and +39 hp)
Setup Three: +1 or +2 skill amulet with high hp and  mana. Two fast cast rings with high hp and mana.

The reason for having 2 fast cast items out of 3 pieces of equipment is after wearing a fastest cast weapon, wall of eyeless and magefist, 2 more fast cast item will improve your cast speed by 1 frame, while 3 more fast item still improve cast by only 1 frame.

Personally I prefer setup one, as one frame less than the fastest cast possible is enough for my game play. Setup two would be nice also if you can find such a great amulet. I would not recommend setup three since the loss of both stones will make your mana reserve much lower (and a sorceress build for pvp such as myself doesn't really have too much mana.)

With all of this equipment, you should have a good hp/mana bonus, very fast cast rate, while very low resists (unless you can get great rares with both high hp mana and resist). Resists are not important 95% of the time in PvP based on my experience and game play; however, this topic is open to debate. :)

2. Attribute Point Allocation:

Strength: 45 - 60. The reason for 45 strength is that you can use all of the equipment I list above except Frostburn and mage plates. Again, if you found that magefist fits your playing style for PvM, then you might want to find a good light plate or a mage plate with -20%/-40% requirements and keep strength at 45. Else, go for 60 strength.

Dexterity: Keep this at 25, and use wands/scepters with fastest cast.

Energy: 150-200, depending on what level you are planning take your sorceress to. For under lv60, 150 energy should be enough, while for over lv60, go for 200 max.

Vitality: All of the other attribute points go to vitality. As a PvP Sorceress, you want as many hp as possible. Even though barbarians get 4 hp per vitality while sorceresses get only 2, think about it this way: with a high enough energy shield (60%+), 2 hp can take 5 damage, which means a sorceress gets a better deal for each point invested in vitality than any other class, provided you have enough mana to take the hit.

Right now at lv84, I have 60 strength, 25 dexterity, 225 vitality, 200 energy - with my equipment, I have 802 hp and 1060 mana for PvP.

3. Skill Point Allocation:

Fire Tree: Ignore everything except for maxing out warmth. There are many debates on whether to max out warmth, but for PvP where you cannot drink potions, max warmth is a must. Hydra and firewall are variable PvP strategies but usually cause too much lag to be considered as "legit dueling".

Cold Tree: 1 point in ice bolt, frost nova, ice blast, glacial spike and blizzard. Max out frozen orb. At least 15-16 points in cold mastery (80%-82%), and if you are building a high level sorceress, consider maxing out cold mastery later on. I have no points in any of the cold armors, because they are not effective in PvP at all - the chilling effect is too short for the points invested, and any decent player will have death's guard or something similar to prevent them from been chilled when fighting sorceresses.

Lightning Tree: 1 point in charged bolt, telekinesis, lightning, chain lightning, teleport, and lightning mastery. How many points in static field depends on which level you want take your sorceress to. 1 point if your sorceress is going to be under lv60, since you need save every point for other useful pvp skills. Having only 1 point static field with a few +skill items could be a real pain to level, but under lv60 it isn't very hard to level either, so it will work out. However, if you are going for a high level sorceress, put 10+ points here early. For energy shield, I recommend you get it to at least lv9, (51%), and later on maybe lv16 (61%, with my lv16 energy shield and 800 hp, I could take over 2000 damage before dying - better than even most of the barbarians :)).

As for Thunder Storm, I have no points in it. There are a few reasons behind this:
a. Thunder Storm requires way too many skill points to be effective (15+), thus lowering the effectiveness of frozen orb or energy shield.
b. Thunder Storm is not a "always hit" skill, there's too many times I've seen lightning bolts coming down at me while I take no damage.
c. Max lightning resist is easy to get, and lightning mastery does not reduce lightning resist. With a lv20 thunder storm doing an average of 240 damage, it will become 60 damage VS. max lightning resist, which isn't much at all for the 20 skill points you invested.
d. You may think 60 damage per second or so isn't bad, but thunderstorm just can not do 60 damage per seconds in most of the PvP situations, because it has a very limited striking range. I think it's just a little over 1 screen. In a PvP situation, you usually don't stay within that range of your opponent for more than 2 or 3 seconds, else one of you would be dead and the duel ends. So within this short period of time, and taking misses into consideration, I do not believe thunderstorm to be a worthwhile skill for 20 skill points invested.
On a side note, sometimes you do stay with a necro or bowzon on same screen for a while when you chasing them down. I can see usefulness for thunderstorm here, but spending 20 points just for those situations isn't as good as improving a more "general purpose" dueling skill such as cold mastery and energy shield.

For my personal skills, I have +4 to all skill levels from items and my main skills are: Lv24 warmth, frozen orb, cold mastery, Lv16 Energy shield, and Static field. I will be improving static field if I gain more levels, so I can be more effective at PvM (Really hard to gain levels after 80). Using a high level static field harassing people is also a good PvP strategy; it works better than thunderstorm IMHO.

4. Sorceresses VS. Specific Classes

Before we start this section, there is something you need to be successful with a PvP Sorceress: a good connection and computer (I have cable connection, P-933 with 128 MB ram). Even with that computer, I experience lag during weekend peak hours, and lag is a really bad thing for a PvP Sorceress. It makes teleport unusable; often times you find yourself displaying the teleport animation 2 or 3 times before you actually teleport during lag, and by the time you see yourself actually teleporting, you might already be killed by a whirlwind or swarm of bone spirits. The strategies listed here assume you are playing in a no lag situation, please note on that.

Also, some those strategies in here will work much better with a sorceress build following section 1-3 of this guide, but most of them will work with any PvP sorceress. Please note that all of the strategies here are coming from my personal PvP experience, so they have been proven in battle. Some of them may not be new to you if you are already a good PvP Sorceress, but they should help if you just starting or preparing to start a new PvP Sorceress. And lastly, I know beforehand this section could be subject to heavy debates and flames. No matter what, keep them coming so I can make this guide better. :)

Sorceress vs Paladin:
Generally there are two types of dueling paladins. First type uses charge/vigor/holy freeze and a very high damage weapon such as martel - we call them chargedins or chargers. Holy freeze can be ignored by a sorceress since it does not affect casting speed and you can use teleport instead of walk/run. One of a chargedin's main strategies will be having vigor as aura, charge as left mouse click, and click on you then hold down left mouse button - they will afterwards charge to you non-stop till either someone dies or he runs out of mana (this is called charge lock by paladins). This type of paladin could be deadly since they have the possibility of killing a sorceress with 1 charge at a super fast speed. However, as a sorceress with 3 faster/fastest cast stacking, your teleport will be faster than his charge + vigor if there's no lag in game. What you can do after a paladin charge locks you is teleport to one direction, and keep an eye on the distance between you and the paladin. If the distance is safe enough for you to cast 2 spells before his charge can reach you, fire 1 orb right in front of you then cast next teleport to the same direction. For less confusion, let me give an example in here. A chargedin is charging at you from directly north, and you cast 2 quick teleports to the south direction. The paladin is charging after you but cannot reach you yet, so you cast an orb to south direction and teleport to south again. Depending on his vigor level, you may need to cast 2-3 teleports south before you can safely cast 1 orb. The nice part about this is if the paladin keeps his charge lock, he will charge straight into the orb you fired, and take much more damage than a normal orb fired toward him, because this time he stays inside the orb's fire range longer. Another strategy chargedins may use is running around you and trying to get you to teleport close and attack him. Be careful about this type, because if you teleport in and didn't expect a fast charge, you might end up dead before you know what happened. The best way to counter this is to stay about 1 screen away from the paladin and fire orbs at his direction. Even though most of the orbs will miss, some of them will hit and do damage and eventually force the paladin to come to you. Of course, if you are skilled with teleporting, you can teleport in and out and a paladin's charge just cannot hit you at all.

The 2nd type of paladin is the blessed hammer/concentration/fist of heaven user - we call them hammerdins. They usually don't use a high damage weapon, but instead a +2 skill scepter with +mana/fastest cast. They will also heavily invest in energy and vitality instead of strength and dexterity. This type of paladin can kill you really fast if you did not expect what's coming. Blessed hammer can do over 500 damage per shot easily, and rapid casting of fist of heavens when you have zero or negative lightning resist can kill you too. To counter blessed hammers, you need to note that the  hammer's range is much shorter than frozen orb as hammer only covers 3/4th of a screen, while orbs can cover nearly 2 screens. So keeping a distance from a hammerdin and casting orbs at him will work very well since he has to stand still while casting hammers. Never ever teleport next to a paladin who is casting lots of hammers, no matter how good you are at teleport, for the spinning hammers will have a very high chance of hitting you. 2 or at max 3 hammers later you will die. On a side note in here, blessed hammers are physical attacks and can be blocked by shields, so you could live through a few hammer hits if you are lucky enough. Never take shield blocking for granted though, for the best way is not to get hit by hammers at all. Fist of heavens would be one of the most powerful PvP skills if it were physical based instead of lightning based. If a paladin locks on you with fist of heavens, no matter where you go on the map except back to town the lightning strike will come down and hit you. With a low lightning resist and not so high hp, you could get killed pretty fast by fist of heavens. However, if you get more than 50% lightning resist, fist of heavens becomes much less dangerous. I had a friend test his lv22 fist of heavens against my 56% lightning resist, and it could only take 30-40 hp (after energy shield) per shot. Most paladins cannot fire more than 7 or 8 high level fist of heavens in a row before they run out of mana. High hp always helps here, for if you have 500 hp with a decent energy shield, even with zero resist, it's not likely that paladins casting fists can kill you before they run out of mana. Another thing to note when playing vs. fist of heaven users is not to panic when endless lightning strikes hit you no matter where you are. When they are casting fists, they have to stand still and that's the perfect time for you to cast orbs on them too, and you could trade blows with them and show how a "real mage" beat a "half-way mage" (j/k). :) Anyhow, this is one of the few situations where you will need some lightning resists in PvP, so keeping some resist items handy is a good idea. Conviction + fist of heavens would have been a really nice combo, but it has been verified that conviction does not work vs. players at the time of this writing (V1.03 of Diablo2). So you don't need to worry about getting more resists to counter a Conviction/FoH Paladin.

Sorceress vs Barbarian:
From what I can see, there is only one kind of barbarian. They will have a high damage weapon, a high increased speed skill, high hit points, and whirlwind. A super fast 1 hit barbarian's strategy is usually simple: "run up and whirlwind," and the way to counter this is simple too: "teleport away and orb." However, learning the method of a barbarian's fighting style and predicting when, where, and whether to teleport or fire orbs takes a while to master. In a 1 on 1 no potion duel, a careful sorceress can always kill a barbarian if both sides made no mistake. Just stay far away, cast orb, and a barbarian will die slowly. But since most of the dueling games we usually play are free for all based, lots of barbarians tend to run back to town for healing if they get hurt - which is allowed in free for all games. When fighting these types of barbarians, you need to "throw out baits" and lure them to the baits. And sadly, the bait will be yourself. :) Try to run on the map while a barbarian is approaching; fire orbs at his direction, but don't teleport away till he gets very close and he thinks his whirlwind will hit you. Then, teleport away, and hopefully the barbarian will be whirlwinding the air, which is the perfect time to fire 3-5 orbs to kill/damage them - timing is very important in here and if you are still practicing with teleport, don't use this strategy. Also, do not be target happy after the barbarian misses his whirlwind, because chances are he will end his whirlwind and go for another one really quickly, killing you while you're still standing there and firing orbs. However, a very skilled dueling barbarian will not cast whirlwind unless he knows he will hit for sure; be careful when fighting this type. There is also a bug (feature?) of whirlwind, that if a barbarian clicks on his target to cast whirlwind, he will get stuck in whirlwind mode and follow his target non-stop till he hits his target or is stopped by an obstacle (trees, walls, houses, town) on the way. As a sorceress, we should use this to our advantage. If you ever find a barbarian whirlwinding at you non-stop, do not panic or teleport into a house right away. Try to stay in the open area and use teleport to keep the distance between you and the barbarian. Cast 7-8 orbs toward him when it is safe, or more if he's of very high level. Once you are confident that the barbarian's hit points are all gone, teleport in a house or to the other side of a wall. The barbarian will die as soon as his whirlwind ends. Lots of barbarians will leave the game as soon as they realize they have got stuck in a whirlwind lock though. Pretty hilarious. :)

Some barbarians use leap attack to knock back/stun you and cast whirlwind right afterwards; if you try to move away from the leap attack, you may get knocked back and become unable to recover before the whirlwind hits you. To counter this strategy, teleport to the back of you every time you see a barbarian start leaping, then shoot orbs toward the direction you were standing (where the barbarian is leaping toward). Since leap attack takes so long to land, you will have enough time to teleport away and cast 2-3 orbs, and the barbarian will be damaged/killed by those right after he lands.

Sorceress vs Necromancer:
Been the two spell-casting classes of Diablo 2, sorceresses and necros both have a decent ranged attack for PvP. Frozen orb covers a large area, is fast, and has a chilling effect. Bone spirit is slower, but it auto tracks its target, has a much longer range than orb, and turns invisible during lag. They do about the same damage - bone spirit does more listed damage, but orb can hit someone multiple times. Good necros will have just as many fast cast items as sorceresses, and they could be deadly because they can cast 5-6 bone spirits within a very short period of time. Getting hit by this swarm usually results in a dead sorceress. However, with teleport being the "most mobile" movement skill and bone spirit being such an "immobile" damaging skill, you should be able to manage to dodge all of the spirits and get close to the necro. Keep in mind that necros regen mana much slower than sorceresses, so a good necro won't be firing 30 spirits in a row and become defenseless. Most of the time they will fire a few spirits. If you get close, they fire more, and if you move away, they stop firing. Since bone spirits have a pretty short life span, one way to counter this is to lure all the spirits he fired near you while walking away from the necro, and cast a few fast teleports to the back of the spirits to cover the distance between you and necro. This will usually make those bone sprits following you timeout before they can get near you again. Once you get close to a necro, and if you followed section 1-3 of this guide to get high enough hp/energy shield, you can trade blows with him and win. High-level necros should have about the same hp as high-level sorceresses, while a sorceress' energy shield enables her to take more than twice as much damage. Good necros will probably start running at this point to avoid trading blows. The next thing to practice would be chasing necros with teleport/orb combined. Try always keeping 1 or 2 orbs right behind the necro, so they cannot stop and cast spells without taking more damage than they could have done to you. This sounds easy in theory but takes lots practice and good necros can still find ways to cast without taking damage. But then again, if they do have a chance to cast spirit while running, they won't have time to cast more than 1 or 2, and you can dodge those with teleport pretty easily. One fact to keep in mind when fighting necros is that their bone spirits do not turn invisible right after casting, but will sometimes turn invisible after traveling a distance (due to bug/lag?). So try always keeping your distance close to necros - just opposite as the way you should play vs melee classes. That way you won't get hit by nothing and die. I don't consider dying to invisible bone spirits unfair though, since it is avoidable.

One other strategy for necros is that they can put up bonewalls to block the damage of frozen orb. This has to do with a bug of orbs that if an orb completely goes through a hostile object (be it a monster or a section of enemy bone wall), it will stop doing damage - even when the shard animation is still displayed as if they are shooting out. Bonewalls do not work in normal mode since 1 orb will take down multiple bonewalls due to their low hp in normal. In nightmare and hell mode, there is no way you can damage a necro with frozen orb who has walled himself in on all sides. A high level firewall works well in here. Since I don't recommend leveling up firewall for PvP, there are ways to counter this with frozen orb too. First of all it takes time for the necro to cast bone walls, depending on the cast rate and the placement of bonewalls. This may take 2-5 seconds. Keep in mind, your orbs will do more damage in nightmare and hell mode, so try to quickly teleport near the necro and kill him within this time - with some practice this isn't hard to do. If the necro placed bone wall around himself with large space inside between the walls with him, teleport in those space and start casting. The worst case would be a necro bonewall himself solid and you have no way of damaging him from any direction with orb; I usually would just teleport a few screens away and tell them "now stay home and be a good boy." :) The necro will not be able to move until the bonewalls timeout, repeat this twice and he will get bored of bonewalling himself. :P

Sorceress vs Amazon:
Theoretically, there should be three types of amazons: Javelin wielding, pike wielding and bow wielding. I've only seen 1 javazon in dueling games, and only lv30 or so. Considering none of the skills in the javelin skill tree are powerful in pvp, and javelins do so little damage, I assume you can consider javazons as a low damage, non-guidearrow bowzons and use strategy vs. bowzon in following paragraphs.

As for pikezons, most people will probably agree they do not have a good chance (or should I say no chance as all?) vs Sorceresses, so I won't discuss it in here. Actually I've never seen any lv60+ pikezon in dueling games.

A skilled bowzon, on the other hand, could be a sorceress' worst nightmare. Swarms after swarms of guided arrows filling the air, stun locking you, hurting you, killing you, and slow missile make you unable to do any damage unless you can get close. Sounds scary enough? :) The first thing you need to do when fighting amazons is to get close to them; do not teleport to them if they are standing still and shooting guided arrows because you will take 4-5 extra arrows before you get there - if you ever get there alive. :) Instead, find yourself some cover behind a wall, some trees, or a house. Make the bowzon come closer to you. If you see the bowzon moving on the mini-map, that means they are not firing arrows, which is a good time to teleport out. Usually, 3-4 fast teleports could cover all the distance between you and the bowzon, and they shouldn't have enough time to shoot more than 2 arrows even with the fastest possible shooting speed. OK now, you are close to the amazon while they are shooting at you, which brings up the most "evil" part of amazons - The Stun Lock. The worst thing about fighting amazons is the stun lock; sometimes you will find yourself under a shower of arrows while unable to walk/run, nor can you cast any spells. You may block some of the arrows, but many still hit you and your health still keeps dropping until you are dead. One of the things that will help you here is having a fastest hit recovery item. Fastest hit recovery will not help you to shorten the stun lock caused by blocking (I think culwen's point helps that), but it will help you when you failed to block one of the arrows and take damage. At that point, you have a moment of time where you can choose to fire 1 or 2 orbs or teleport a safe distance away. I had two fastest hit recovery items on my sorceress, since I heard they stack. But after testing with a bowzon friend, I found one fastest recovery is good enough and I cannot see a noticeable difference between having two stacking fastest recoveries and having only one. Another way to counter stun lock is with high hp. It seems that the length of stun lock is determined by damage done over your total hp, so an arrow doing 100 damage will stun lock you longer if you have 300 hp, while shorter if you have 600 hp. Once you can effectively counter the stun lock, amazons will be put on the run too since they cannot stand there and trade blows with you. Chasing an amazon with slow missile cast on you requires some practice, but it is usually not hard as soon as you get the idea how to do it: corner and trap them with slowed orbs. Fire 1 or 2 orbs behind them, then teleport in front of them and fire 1 or 2 orbs. This will sometimes kill them if they run into the orb, but most of the time it will just make them change direction. Then, you should teleport in front of them again and cast orbs. If you can do the teleporting and casting fast enough, they will soon have nowhere to run because the air is filled with pure white ice shards shooting out of slowed orbs - it is a beautiful sight to see, too. :) Last note on amazons: they are about the rarest class to be seen in dueling games, and many sorceresses avoid fighting them with the fear of their arrows in mind. What you should try is challenging every bowzon you see, and practice fighting them. With enough practice and a good character setup, you will be able to take down bowzons.

Sorceress vs Sorceress:
And lastly, sorceress vs sorceress... A skilled sorceress has more potential to kill another skilled sorceress than any other class, IMHO. One key word for sorceress vs sorceress is "DEFENSE." It is usually the case that the one who plays better defense wins, unless one sorceress has much better pvp skill than the other - and the more skilled could still be killed if she decides to play offensively and make a small mistake. The way to play defense is basically keep a distance away from your foe, shoot orbs at your foe's direction, teleport backwards if orbs coming your way, and shoot harder if your foe is coming your way. Having both sides play with this style usually results in an extensively long fight, sometimes more than 10 minutes. It is a contest of controlling, skill, and more importantly, patience. However, if you do decide to play more offensively, here are a few tips, and I don't recommend them for beginning PvP sorceresses. Teleport AROUND your foe, so she will have to cast frozen orbs in all directions in order to defend you - this wastes her mana. After a while when she realizes her mana reserve is running short, she may stop firing and it is your chance to teleport close - there are ALWAYS risks involved in here; having higher hp helps because you can afford to take more risk. If you do get close and see orbs coming at you, do not stop to cast anything, just teleport right out. You may get hit by 2 or 3 ice shards but hopefully you won't get killed. If there's no orb coming at you, stop and fire 1 or 2 orbs at you foe. Try not to fire straight to her, but either to the left or right of her. This enables you to predict where your foe will be teleporting in order to dodge your orbs. A good prediction, a well-timed teleport, and 2 or 3 more orbs can sometimes win the battle for you. However I consider prediction of where another sorceress teleports as the hardest thing to learn for a PvP sorceress, so do not try this till you are confident with your teleporting skill or you might end up dying every time. And again, I must re-emphasize the importance of defensive style; you can take down sorceresses who are much higher level and maybe even more skilled than you in PvP if you can play defense well and have patience.

For the resistant part, here is a test I did for high-level cold mastery vs. very high cold resist. I downloaded a trainer program that enables me to edit items. What I did was edit the following items: full Irathas set, Hawkmail, boots with 49% resist, 2 rings with about 45 cold resist each (the trainer wouldn't let me put prismatic prefix on rings so I could only get around 45), a wand with 37 cold resist, Bverrits Keep. With those items, my total cold resist went up to about 250% and cold resist cap has been raised to 95%. I also made my char a sorceress with max cold mastery and frozen orb (146-149 damage, reduce resists by 85%). Then I logged on open battle net, joined one of the games titled duel, and asked a barbarian to help me with my tests. I give him everything I was wearing and let him wear them, then tested lv20 orb/mastery by shooting them at the barbarian 1 at a time. The damage was around 130-150 per orb, and it did 228 damage for one of the orbs.

There are other people who did similar tests and got similar results, so I could conclude here that high cold resist does not help a lot for PvP vs. Sorceresses if they have good cold mastery. Maybe high resistance can reduce each shard's damage by 20-30%, but it is not worth it to sacrifice other useful equipment for it.

Besides orb, there are other skills used by PvP sorceresses, such as firewall and hydra. Those skills usually cause more lag than the damage they do in PvP though, so it's not often used. And if someone really spams an area with firewall/hydra, just teleport a few screens away.

As for thunderstorm users, I've always found other sorceress' thunderstorm useless on me. They don't do much damage against my "ok" lightning resist (about 56% in hell mode), and miss a lot when I'm teleporting. And lastly, since 2 sorceresses usually will not stay close within thunderstorm's strike range for more than 2 seconds before someone dies or teleports away, there isn't even a lot of them coming down from the sky. Do note this is another situation where some lightning resist could be useful though.

I think this pretty much concludes this guide. If you play a PvP sorceress and have tips/tricks/strategies and would like to share them, please do so :) You can reach me by my email.

Lastly, I'd like to thank VenomousVixen, Evil-Kawi, Djgonzo, Someguy, and -Raven_poe- for some of the suggestions.

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