Would like to get people’s opinions on ideal firewall gear and enchantments for PVP. I have some questions, but, let me state some assumptions first:
a.) Critical Strike Rate is not important because DOT damage (ie: firewall) isnt impacted by crit RATE; however, critical strike DAMAGE does impact Burning Instinct Legendary node.
b.) We are a ranged build, and given that Barbs are so tanky (and some of them having thorns), we need to drop Raiment. Barbs can break the stun effect very easily and quickly negating the stun damage
Questions:
1.) Should we use Spear of Lycander, Occulus or a Regular Staff? With Lycander in PVP, you cant take advantage of 24% crit strike rate and the random shrine effect, so the only value to Lycander is 30% attack rate, 50% damage, and 42% chance to stun. If we drop Lycander, we lose our main source of CC. Only other source of CC is Crippling Flames and frozen orb enchantment. On the other hand, if you get a regular staff, you can get +intelligence, damage to close, damage to distance, mastery skill + Engulfing Flames Aspect.
2.) Which boots should we use? Esu’s boots, flicker, or regular boots? Mainly we use Esu’s for crit rate, but since crit rate is not important anymore with Firewall build, we have to dump Esus. Flicker step give us the damage reduction, but that’s about the only useful attribute for a FW . My hypothesis here is that the best boots are your regular boots with +3 evades and exploiters aspect because you get 20% CC, and for unstoppable opponents, you get 40% damage increase. We need this against barbs because they always break our CC, so we’ll always be doing 40% damage increase
3.) For Gloves: we can drop the crit rate. We just need attack speed, mana regen as mandatories. I propose lucky hit chance as a 3rd (for CC and mana), and for a 4th attributes, either intelligence, all stats, or fire over time damage
4.) For chest, we need to stay away from Barbs and fellow BLs, so we need to drop Raiment and go with a regular chest with Snowveiled aspect. Snowveiled will give us a 3rd way to break CC which is important against Barbs
5.) For rings, we don’t have a choice. We have to use both Tal Rasha and (XFalls or starless).
6.) Amulet: one thing I’m not seeing across any builds is the attribute of speed though some of your highly skilled barbs are SO fast in PVP. Obviously we need cool down and mana reduction. For 3rd we need mastery skills. For 4th, endless pyre or glass cannon
Enchantments:
Firewall
Frozen Orb (for CC and vulnerability)
For Paragon boards, I looked at 6 different existing paragon boards. The first three and the 6th were labelled by the authors to be PVP. The latter are general FW builds for all use cases. Here are my observations and evaluation criteria:
BOARDS
- Must Haves Boards: Searing Heat, Burning Instinct. Based on the rare nodes found within these, I don’t think this needs to be explained why. Enchantment Master is also another must-have due to all of the non physical damage nodes
Glyphs
- Must Have Glyphs: (a) Adept (20% increased mastery area and mastery damage). (b) Destruction because otherwise you can’t take advantage of the Burning Instinct Legendary node (c) Reinforced if you use Occulus
- Shouldn’t use: Torch because it relies on multiple enemies to be around to get the multiplier. So essentially this is a PVE glyph as opposed to a PVP glyph
Conclusions on Paragon boards
- Based on the must-haves, we can eliminate A & E because they use a useless Control aspect. You cannot control anything against Barbs
- Board B doesn’t use nodes optimally (ie: wastes 27 nodes in its Enchantment Master board chasing unnecessary stuff). It also doesn’t use flame feeder; only uses 5 paragon boards whereas others use 6
- Board D uses control (bad), only uses 5 paragon boards whereas others use 6; it also doesn’t use Adept glyph which is an oversight. This is why I never use Icy-veins since the game came out.
- Board C looks OK and it covers all of the must-haves. It also uses 6 boards. I’m not the biggest fan of using Elemental Summoner board (as this one does) due to the lack of useful PVP nodes, and the fact that it uses Torch because Torch relies on there being multiple enemies around
- Board F looks great, covers all of the must-haves. You can remove points from static surge that direct you to the lightning resistance rare node and put them in other boards (extra mastery damage, burning damage, vulnerability). Alternatively you can get Frigid Fate legendary node.
a.) d4builds.gg/builds/de1fcab4-c621-4135-87f9-6ea095c32dae/
b.) d4builds.gg/builds/dab7a70a-3104-43cd-9275-2989515ee259
c.) mobalytics.gg/diablo-4/profile/821346a1-3b50-47db-9a04-2a6c7425bed3/builds/b32492d1-08a2-4e23-a375-6bcdaf33112e?tab=paragon-board
d.) icy-veins/d4/guides/firewall-sorcerer-build/
e.) maxroll.gg/d4/build-guides/firewall-sorcerer-guide
f.) maxroll.gg/d4/planner/3x8ix0d9