Welcome to the Firewall Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide. This build lets you set the world aflame and watch everything burn. It has very good AoE coverage but struggles against Bosses. It's definitely not the fastest build to clear Nightmare Dungeons, but since there's no clock to race against, you can just take your time and slow bake some demons. As long as you can stay alive, they will burn. Eventually.
This build is essentially melee because if you don't stay next to the monsters they will immediately run out of your Firewalls. Your usual gameplay loop consists of building a giant pyre and then running in circles around it, while chanting ritual spells and/or laughing maniacally.
The Firewall Sorcerer is a very reliable and robust build that doesn't require anything to work. You don't really need any non-Codex Aspects nor any specific stats on your gear to burn everything. This makes Firewall Sorcerer the best for leveling and early endgame, but it also means that it doesn't scale as well as other builds.
In this guide we teach you all you need to know to satisfy your hidden arsonist fantasies. Let's dive into it!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Firewall Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.
Recommended Stones
- Flash of Adrenaline
- Duration
- Tactical
- Initiative
This stone gives us 20% multiplicative damage with 100% uptime. Plain and simple.
- Tempest
- Safeguard
- Resource
- Swift
This stone gives us some damage reduction and generates Mana.
Alternative Stones
If you are lucky enough to get either Evernight or Genesis from Uber Malphas, you want to swap them in instead of Swift and Initiative respectively.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Firewall is our main damage skill. We spam it all the time with or without a reason.
- Inferno helps us with Mana and also groups up enemies. Use it at the start of the fight to benefit from the pull effect. Against Bosses, use it when your Mana is low so that you can regenerate it while spamming free Firewalls.
- Teleport is our main mobility skill, which also serves as a CC break. In the late game it also groups enemies together via Raiment of the Infinite.
- Frost Nova is used to apply Vulnerable and Freeze to enemies, greatly increasing our damage. Use it right after you group up enemies.
- Ice Armor gives us a huge Barrier and a bit of Mana regen.
- Flame Shield provides even more defense, as well as some healing.
- We pick up Greater Fireball to use it in the Enchantment Slot.
Generally, Firewall Sorcerer follows a very simple rotation:
- Group up enemies.
- Apply all debuffs to them.
- Spam Firewalls until debuffs run out.
- Keep enemies inside these buffed Firewalls until they burn to death.
Enchantment Slots
Sorcerers can choose two skills to put into Enchantment Slots, where they provide powerful passive bonuses. Firewall Sorcerer uses the following Enchantments:
- Firewall Enchantment gives us up to 200% more Firewalls per Firewall, which is obviously amazing.
- Fireball simply adds more damage in AoE situations and it's upgrade Greater Fireball combos nicely with Mage's Firewall.
For speedfarming, the first Enchantment Slot is switched to Teleport. In X'Fal version of the build Meteor Enchantment is used to proc more Lucky Hits.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
This build doesn't use a lot of Mana due to Firewall's low cost and attack speed.
Prodigy’s Resource Aspect
This is our main source of Mana in the early game. Apart from Firewall all of our skills have a Cooldown and give us some Mana when activated.
- Always start by casting a Firewall or two before using your other skills, so that the Mana is not wasted
- Don't use your Cooldowns all at once for the same reason
Prodigy’s Aspect is available in the Codex of Power, but you can also find a much more powerful version of it randomly. Important: This Aspect is incredibly rare, so if you find a well rolled one, save it until you have a good item (Ancestral Ring with at least 3 out of 4 optimal stats). It's not uncommon to get all the way to level 100 without ever seeing this Aspect.
Stats on Gear
In the late game with good gear we can get rid of Prodigy’s to play one more Offensive Aspect. To do this we need to stack enough stats:
- 3x Cooldown Reduction (Helmet, Amulet, Focus)
- 3x Mana Cost Reduction (Amulet, Boots, Focus)
- 3x Resource Generation (Ancestral Rings and Focus)
CDR indirectly gives us Mana even without Prodigy’s Aspect by increasing Ice Armor and Inferno uptime. Ideally you want to have all 9 of these rolls, but missing one or two is not gonna be a big problem unless you get into a long Boss fight.
Supreme Inferno
This upgrade to our Ultimate Skill simply makes our Firewall free for 8 seconds. In the late game with maxed out Cooldown Reduction and well rolled Flickerstep we can have it up nearly all the time, to the point that all our other Mana sources become redundant. If you reach that point, you can discard Prodigy’s Aspect for more offensive option.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last six steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
For maximum efficiency, follow the order outlined below. First, level your Glyphs to level 15 and then do a second pass to get them all to 21.
Level 15
- Destruction
- Control
- Adept
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Torch (PLACEHODLDER DO NOT LEVEL)
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Adept
- Exploit
- Reinforced
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Gear & Skill Progression
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee, that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Prodigy’s in Witchwater (Hawezar)
- Control in Sunken Library (Kehjistan)
- Incendiary in Tomb of the Saints (Kehjistan)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Edgemaster’s in Oldstones (Scosglen)
- Storm Swell in Onyx Hold (Dry Steppes)
- Shared Misery in Oblivion (Hawezar)
- Bounding Conduit in Komdor Temple (Dry Steppes)
- Snowveiled in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Put this on an item you are least likely to replace and move one of your Codex aspects to your Weapon.
- Engulfing Flames: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Incendiary when your Mana is good enough.
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with Obols!- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Zir)
- Replaces Snowveiled or Shared Misery
- Godslayer Crown (Duriel)
- Replaces Shared Misery or Snowveiled
- Flickerstep (Duriel)
- Replaces Bounding Conduit
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet (Duriel)
- Replaces Incendiary or Prodigy’s
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- Replaces Prodigy’s or Incendiary
- Esu's Heirloom (Varshan, Beast in the Ice), Starfall Coronet (???), Tibault's Will (Duriel)
- These items are used in the X'Fal-focused endgame variant.
- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Zir)
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest: replace Godslayer Crown. This item provides a similar damage increase and much more survivability and utility.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- Storm Swell goes on the amulet for extra damage.
- Prodigy’s and Incendiary are Resource Aspects so they must go on a Rings.
- Pput Edgemaster’s and Control on your and Gloves and one of the Weapons.
- Bounding Conduit can only be imprinted on Boots.
- It's best to put Disobedience on the Pants because you can only put Defensive Aspects there, and Disobedience is the one Aspect that stays in every variant of the build.
- Shared Misery and Snowveiled go on Chest and Helmet.
At this point resources are scarce, so only upgrade items that have Mana Cost Reduction or Cooldown Reduction rolls on them.
Skills
Without Raiment of the Infinite we need some other Source of Crowd Control so we get Crippling Flames instead of Potent Warding
We also don't have consistent Barrier generation yet, so we drop some Teleport ranks for Warmth.
With more level, better stats on items, and better rolled aspects our build can progress further. In this version we do a bunch of changes to our gear, skills and enchantment slots. See below to find out when and why each change is made.
Gear
- We add all our non-Codex aspects. It's best to put Engulfing Flames on a Ring because it will be replaced by a Unique later.
Skills
Move points from Warmth to Teleport when you can spam skills often enough to have perma-Barrier.
In this setup, you have access to all Unique items, and Legendary Aspects. This allows you to pilot this build at its peak efficiency. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make and when to implement them.
Gear
The final version of our build uses 5 Uniques:
- Raiment of the Infinite
- Godslayer Crown
- Flickerstep
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
Each of them can be used as soon as you find it and it will give you a nice boost. Just make sure to keep Prodigy’s until you have Flickerstep and 40%+ CDR.
Skills
With Raiment of the Infinite we no longer need Crippling Flames. Extra points are used to get Potent Warding, since Resistances become more important in high World Tiers.
Gameplay
Raiment of the Infinite changes the way you use Teleport. You need to be more careful and try to never Teleport into the unknown. First, walk up (or Evade up) to the enemies until you can see all of them, and only then Teleport in the right spot to pull everything together.
Uber Uniques
Some Unique items are very rare and only drop from Duriel, King of Maggots with approximately 2% chance. If you are one of the lucky few to have these items, here's how you can use them in this build:
- Harlequin Crest - this is your Best in Slot Helmet. Use it if you have it.
- Andariel's Visage - this item is a decent alternative to a normal Legendary helmet but loses handily to both Unique alternatives.
- Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander is quite bad, it makes you lose a lot of damage and CDR and the random Shrine effect is not even that good most of the time.
- Melted Heart of Selig is a good defensive Amulet but defensive Amulet is usually not something we are looking for.
- Ring of Starless Skies is quite good but it's weaker than both Unique Rings we are already using. Only equip it if you somehow find it while you're still using Legendary Rings.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons below Tier 45.
Gear
Our optimized endgame build is already pretty well-suited for speedfarming most content. If you have enough damage, you can drop Edgemaster’s to put Aspect of the Bounding Conduit on your Amulet.
Skills
The only thing we really care about is Teleport ranks so we take one point out of Potent Warding to max it out.
Enchantment Slots
Replace Firewall with Teleport. With implicit roll on your Boots and Fireball Enchantment you can spam Teleport with virtually no cooldown, as long as there's enemies to kill.
The Nightmare Dungeon Push setup allows you to dive much deeper into Nightmare Dungeons where the difficulty increases significantly! It aims to get as much damage and tankiness as possible.
AVOID THESE Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions
Before we go into what you should change on your build, take a look at Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions that you HAVE TO avoid for a successful push:
- Monster Fire or Crowd Control Resist, Melee Defenders - These afflictions simply reduce your damage output by a lot. In some cases your push is limited by survivability rather than damage so these don't do much to stop you, but in most situations they should be avoided.
- Stormbane's Wrath, Lightning Storm, Drifting Shade - These afflictions just add one more thing for you to worry about on top of nearly every mob being able to kill you in a couple of hits.
- Armor/Barrier Breakers - These afflictions can be absolutely devastating in higher tiers and ruin our strategy of facetanking enemies to keep them inside Firewalls.
Gear
The only change we need to make is getting Total Armor roll on our Amulet and/or Iron Skin Elixir to reach the Armor cap (13,200).
Skills & Enchantment Slots
Replace Fireball with Greater Frozen Orb for more consistent Vulnerable application. This also lets us use a different Tuning Stone in place of Frigid. For example Fortify or Breaking.
Gameplay
Pushing Nightmare Dungeons with Firewall Sorcerer is mostly limited by your survivability. You apply Crowd Control and Vulnerable, deploy Firewalls and then you need to wait for enemies to burn while they are trying to kill you. Take on smaller groups of enemies and try to save your Flame Shield for as long as possible.
This version of the build uses X'Fal's Corroded Signet as its main damage source. Instead of stacking Burning Damage we invest into Crit Chance, Lucky Hit Chance and Direct Damage multipliers. We don't care how strong our DoTs are we just want to spam as many as possible to proc X'Fal more often. Overall this version does more damage but it's a bit slower, needs some time to ramp up, and the damage can be inconsistent when fighting few enemies.
Gear
We use 3 different Uniques:
- Starfall Coronet to proc more Meteor DoTs
- Esu's Heirloom for extra Crit Chance
- Tibault's Will to boost the damage of X'Fal procs
Since we lost our Defensive Aspect on Pants, we move Disobedience to the Amulet and additionally get a Total Armor roll on it, letting us easily reach the Armor cap (13,200)
We also replace Edgemaster’s (which only buffs Skills and doesn't affect X'Fal) with Ancient Flame to spam more DoTs.
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fireball with Meteor to get more DoTs.
Skills
Since we no longer care about the damage of Firewall itself, we remove 4 ranks from it. We lose Elemental Dominance, Endless Pyre and remove points from Fireball. We replace Frost Nova with Wizard's Meteor. With all the points we now freed up we can pick up some useful passives: Devouring Blaze, Precision Magic, Elemental Attunement, and Icy Veil. Finally, we switch our Key Passive to Esu's Ferocity.
Gameplay
Our gameplay stays largely the same, except we now have a Meteor button, which we can press to bring in extra heat.
Paragon Board
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Put Flame Shield into your second Enchantment Slot.
- Focus more on Defensive rolls on your gear, such as Damage Reduction on the Amulet, or Maximum Life on Rings.
- Use Royal Topazes in armor instead or Royal Rubies to prevent worst case scenarios.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). This is the most important stat for any Sorcerer build. What good are our skills if we can't use them because they are on cooldown? In purely offensive terms, CDR gives us the following:
- More uptime on Vulnerable and Freeze from Frost Nova (about a 3x damage buff)
- More uptime on Barrier from Ice Armor or Protection, activating Conceited and Storm Swell (1.625x damage buff)
- Mana. We continue to chase our philosophy of being able to use skills = good. The next skill we want to use is Firewall, which has a Mana cost instead of a Cooldown. We need to stack enough Mana Cost Reduction and Resource Generation to spam Firewall freely, but not to the point where our Mana is always full. Letting it slowly drain is completely fine because we have Supreme Inferno to bail us out.
- Offensive Stats. We want most of the normal offensive stats: Firewall Ranks, Weapon Damage, Attack Speed, Intelligence, and all kinds of Additive Damage, in that order of priority.
- Critical Strike Damage. This stat becomes useful after we get the Burning Instinct Node, ranking somewhere between Attack Speed and Intelligence.
- Lucky Hit Chance. Becomes an important offensive stat with X'Fal's Corroded Signet.
- Critical Strike Chance doesn't directly buff our damage because Firewall can't crit.
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). As with our damaging skills, our powerful Defensive Skills are not doing much if we cannot cast them. Flame Shield makes you immortal and Ice Armor is Flame Shield with 3x the duration at best or a protective layer that almost doubles your HP at worst.
- Barrier. Mostly coming from Ice Armor, it is our main defense outside Nightmare Dungeons. With our high and consistent damage output, the Barrier will instantly refresh as long as it's not broken in one hit.
- Damage Reduction (DR). We stack as much of it as possible, mostly going for Damage Reduction, Damage Reduction from Close/Distant Enemies and Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies. A lot of these stats can be found on Chests, Pants, Amulets, and some of our Paragon Boards. If we can stack enough to make our Barrier survive a hit then everything is easy, as we can just cast Ice Armor and not worry about anything for 6 seconds.
- Armor is the major source of Damage Reduction against Physical damage. We naturally get Armor just from having high Item Power gear, and we further boost it with Skulls in Jewelry and Defensive Aspect of Disobedience. It's extremely important to reach the Armor cap for the current level of monsters as the last few points of Armor get exponentially more effective.
- Resistances give us damage reduction against Elemental damage. Similar to armor it should be stacked as close to the cap as possible for full effectiveness. As a Sorcerer, we get lots of Resistances from our high Intelligence and our Paragon Boards, letting us almost reach the cap without sacrificing any stats on gear.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
- Helm: Godslayer Crown, look for high damage roll and CDR
- Otherwise Look For: Shared Misery
- Cooldown Reduction
- Total Armor
- Maximum Life
- Lucky Hit Chance while Barrier
- Intelligence
- Crowd Control Duration
- Chest Armor: Raiment of the Infinite, look for high Stun Duration and Close Damage/Int rolls
- Otherwise Look For: Snowveiled
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Life
- Gloves: Edgemaster’s
- Attack Speed
- Intelligence
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Resource
- All Stats
- Pants: Disobedience
- Ranks to Firewall
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Maximum Life
- Boots: Flickerstep, look for high Movespeed and CDR rolls
- Otherwise Look For: the Bounding Conduit
- Movement Speed
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Ranks to Frost Nova
- Ranks to Teleport
- Intelligence
- Amulet:Storm Swell
- Cooldown Reduction
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Ranks to Mastery Skills
- Movement Speed
- Ranks to Glass Cannon
- Ranks to Elemental Dominance
- Ranks to Inner Flames
- Rings: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop & X'Fal's Corroded Signet, look for high CDR and Unique effect
- Otherwise Look For: Prodigy’s & Engulfing Flames
- Resource Generation
- Maximum Life
- Critical Strike Damage
- Close Damage
- Fire Damage
- Off-Hand: Control
- Cooldown Reduction
- Resource Generation
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Intelligence
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Main Hand: Conceited (Wand)
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Critical Strike Damage
- Close Damage
- Mastery Skill Damage
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Assault Elixir, Expertise Elixir, [d4-item id=701935]Iron Skin Elixir
- Incense: Song of the Mountain, Sage's Whisper
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Why don't you use Imbiber?
Why no Incendiary Aspect?
Why no Aspect of Engulfing Flames?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Firewall
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Summary
The Firewall Sorcerer is a fun and flavorful build, capable of dealing great AoE damage while covering your entire screen in flames. It's very strong early but doesn't scale as well into the late game. Still, it can definitely clear all the endgame content, be it World Bosses or Nightmare Dungeons, it will just take some time.
- Spam Firewalls to bring down enemies' HP and set off a chain reaction of Fireball explosions.
- Don't look at the explosions.
- Stack Cooldown Reduction, Mana Cost Reduction, and Resource Generation to spam Firewall without a care in the world.
- Use Ice Armor, and Flame Shield to stay alive.
- Build a big fire under your enemies and then dance around it (literally).
Credits
Written by Northwar
Reviewed by snail