This skill is a prerequisite for Meteor. Firewall is the most damaging magical skill in the game, and help from Fire Mastery can make it even stronger. Does that translate into making it the best skill? Yes and no.

Firewall has two critical weaknesses: limited area of effect and severe strain on your CPU/Video. The first problem is not always a problem. In some situations, firewall's limited area of effect doesn't matter, and in these situations the skill dominates. I'll come back to that later. The other problem is framerate, and this is indeed a serious issue. Casting a few slvl one firewalls is not a problem. But with added skill points, the width of the wall increases, adding more sprites to the display, and also the duration of the flames increase, just as with Blaze. But unlike Blaze, you can multi-cast firewall. You can stack many firewalls on top of one another, or spread them around the screen, and it takes only moments to cast each one. When the length of each firewall extends for dozens of yards, each casting is adding that many more sprites to the display. With Blaze, there is a limit to how many sprites can be added per second, and the framerate problems have to do with how long the flames burn and how many total you can end up with at one time. But that problem is vastly multiplied with firewall. You can literally stack so many high level firewalls on your screen that even a brand new state of the art PC with the best available video, sound, RAM, and hard drive can't keep up, and it gets much much worse for anyone with low RAM, or running D3D or software rendering instead of Glide. With firewall, most of the problem actually lies in the spell effects itself, but not all: some comes from the blood spatters, which pile up and bog down the frame times. Remember that you can erase blood spatters by moving them off your screen, then returning. This can help to some degree.

If soloing, in single or multiplayer, you can get away with pushing the limits more. In coop situations, you must restrict how many firewalls you cast at once. How many you can get away with depends on how high you've pumped the skill, and the hardware of you and your coop partners. There are going to be some players who can't or won't want to play with you if firewall is your main attack, particularly if you show no restraint in its use. You will just have to accept that.

Firewall is one of the most situationally dependent skills the sorceress has available. In some situations, nothing can compare to it. Nothing. In others, it's so inefficient as to make you want to cry.

There are two philosophies for Firewall use: situational and all-purpose.

If used as a situational skill, this generally means you keep the skill at a modest level (both for framerate purposes, and because a low level of the skill is all you will actually need for situational applications). Exactly how much firewall you want for situational use, will depend on your style and whether or not you are playing any coop. Taking the skill up to about slvl 5-7 is fairly well safe for fps purposes, and you won't have to be stingy: you can stack it at certain times or lay down a field of flames. You might want to take it higher, though, for longer duration, and also for wider lines. The skill functions by stretching out a thin line of flames that is perpendicular to your character at the time of the casting. One useful aspect of this is that you can reach around corners with firewalls, to hit things out of your line of sight, and the higher your skill, the longer your reach. Only practice can tell you how much will be right for you.

Situations where firewall dominates include stationary turrets (garg traps, fire and lightning towers), shamen types, and most ranged attackers. For something to attack you at range, it must stop and go through an attack animation, launching its missile or casting its spell. During that stationary time, if it happens to be standing in one or more massively damaging firewalls, its life expectancy can be measured in moments, unless it is either very strong or highly resistant, or both. Terrain can also be used to good effect with firewall, as any terrain features that allow you to cast firewalls on targets that can't reach you and are either trapped or fairly well stationary, can mean some very quick kills. Some such situations will naturally present themselves, such as rivers and platforms. Unfortunately, many such situations that would seem ideal, do not allow you to target as needed -- for example, across most ravines in Act 4. This takes a little of the potential out of Firewall, and could perhaps be viewed as a bug, but so it goes. You must have a direct playfield line of sight to your target area, with no intervening walls, columns, closed doors, buildings, etc, in order to be able to cast.

Stationary targets make the best firewall fodder. However, shamen types, maggots, oblivion knights, archers, don't always sit still. What should you do? Open up a new firewall under them again and again until they finally die? Sometimes you may have to, but generally you won't if you use the CRISSCROSS attack. The Crisscross is a maneuver where you cast one firewall directly on the target, then circle around a short way and cast another firewall, at a new angle. This presumes that you want to cast more than one firewall at all, which won't always be the case. You can usually kill weak targets like maggots, flayer blowdarts, most skeleton archers with a single firewall. But shamen and some other targets often take more. A crisscross is sort of like a crossfire. If the target fails to move, it's just as effective as a straight stack, because the flames ARE still stacked at the intersection, where the target is standing when you attack. However, if the target picks up and moves, then chances are they will move OUT of the flames if you stacked them. But... if you crisscrossed them, then they will most likely still be under attack by one of the firewalls. A double crisscross can be made into a triple, with three firewalls at different angles. At that point you've almost made a pinwheel of fire on top of the target, with full coverage. 4x crisscross provides definite full coverage, and chances are you won't need or want to stack more than four firewalls on anything besides a serious boss. And what's more, the monster AI -appears- to behave differently when it is under direct attack. In my experience, it seems that crisscrossing not only helps clean up monsters that move around, but also seems to make them move around less often. Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV).

The exception to the Crisscross tactic for ranged attackers is when the target is backed up against a wall or other terrain feature that cuts off half the movement options. In this case, position your sorcie perpendicular to the obstacle, if possible, and stack firewalls parallel to it. Chances are the target will move along the wall instead of moving toward you, and this keeps them in the flames and they will die very quickly.

Word of warning: the Quill Rat types and the skeleton mages have annoying movement patterns. They don't move far, but they move OFTEN, and often enough to force you to recast firewall several times to clean up a weak opponent. More direct means, such as Fireball, Meteor, Glacial Spike or Chain Lightning are more effective against these pests. Firewall will certainly work, but they'll make you waste mana.

Firewall is NOT strong or efficient against melee opponents that charge right at you. That doesn't mean you can't make it work -- far from it -- but other skills will get the job done quicker and easier. UNLESS... you have other players to "tank" for you. If you are cooping with melee-based allies, or with necros/amazons who use expendable minions, these forces can serve to draw the attention of enemy targets and "hold them still for you". In this situation, you can make firewall successfully apply to ANY opponent; however, this requires cooperation from others and a multiplayer situation. You can TRY to do that, solo, with hired mercs, but you will find that an exercise in frustration, not a viable tactic.

Firewall works wonders against Mephisto and Diablo, and against any Council you can get stuck on some terrain feature, but is much tougher to employ against Andariel, Duriel and Hephasto.

Using firewall as an all-purpose skill in a solo situation (or a multiplayer situation with no "tanks") is one of the most serious tactical challenges you can undertake. There are only three options:

* Intense Tactical Use of Terrain Features
* Combine With Other Skills
* Bathe The Screen

Using the terrain involves either finding impediments or working with corners. The idea is to force opponents to stand in or walk along your firewalls. You will have to pick your battlegrounds carefully and force opponents to fight you on your own terms whenever possible. Teleport skill can assist greatly with this and open up more options and more safety, but is not strictly required. However, without teleport, you will have to do more corner work because some impediments are like Sorcie Roach Motels: you can check in, but you won't check out. Getting yourself trapped is a good way to die for a Hot Babe. In dire situations against nasty bosses, you might have to lure them into a trap, TP out of there and return via waypoint, in lieu of teleport. The corner method comes down to laying firewalls at corners then leading chasers around the corner, and thus through the firewall. Clearly, I'm talking 270 degree corners, not 90 degree corners. You can find corners anywhere, albeit some are easier to work with than others. But even in wide open spaces there are huts, ravines, oases, statues, rocks, rivers... always something to work with. Good luck.

Combining with other skills would technically include Teleport and Telekinesis, but mainly here I'm referring to Static Field, cold tree skills, Blaze, Thunderstorm, etc. With enough help, you move out of the range of all-purpose and back into situational use of firewall, but there is a middle ground where firewall is still essential to virtually every kill but you are combining it with other skills.

Bathing the Screen is anything where you cast a bunch of firewalls in open area and then try and run monsters through them with various kinds of maneuvers. Firewalls can be stacked or spread out, cast parallel or crisscrossed. No matter how you do it, it's going to be inefficient and wasteful. Even so, there are some tactics you can try and use, and most of them are variations on Blaze tactics I outlined when discussing that skill. The down side to Bathing the Screen in Flames is twofold: extreme mana wastefulness and extreme framerate slaughter. You're going to kill more fps than opponents with this tactic. Even in single player you are going to have incredibly choppy (single digit) frame rates, and you really DON'T have a multiplayer option with this, except in very strict moderation, as allies will desert you if your "firewall lag" is getting them killed. Remember, the higher level your firewall skill, the worse it lags frame times PER USE. At maximum level you'll lag badly even with just a few firewalls. It's really too bad, because this skill would be so much more fun (and popular) if it wasn't broken by TOO MUCH EYE CANDY. So it goes.

If Firewall happens to be a prereq for your Meteor, it's still quite useful at slvl 1 to help get you through to clvl 24 -- certainly better than slvl 1 fireball, for that purpose. You may find, though, that Firewall and Meteor apply so much to the same situations that it would be redundant to add to both. Choose one of them and go with it, then choose other skills that shine brighter in the situations where firewall and meteor come up short, and your sorcie will be more well-rounded.

Firewall presents quite the mixed bag, but in some situations it is so strong, you HAVE to take it seriously. The low number of prereqs makes it attractive to a multi-tree character, and the high returns for situational use with only modest skill point investment only adds to its attractiveness in that regard.

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