[1.3] Fire Witch Racing Guide

Generally Armor > Evasion > ES in normal difficulty. Armor is guaranteed mitigation, evasion is helpful but not godly without ondar’s, and ES is pretty garbage without ES nodes.
Weapon
Get a +1 fire gem weapon ASAP. There’s a fire gem recipe - A magic item, an alt, and a ruby ring. If you can use the recipe early on, put it on your starting wand. R G B is ideal for boss races since you put Searing Bond, FT, and flameblast on it. If you get it later, consider getting it on a Quartz Sceptre instead - they give the highest added damage for your spells.
Also, you almost definitely want to dual wield. You don’t get an MS penalty for dual wielding unlike shields, and the added damage is identical.

Boots
Prioritize getting movespeed over anything else. Any increase in ms is helpful in races.
Body Armor

For this slot, I just get the best armor/evasion chest I can wear at the time. Remember that body armor gives you a movement speed penalty, so take it off if you’re not doing anything risky.

Helm
Same advice as body armour, except there’s no MS penalty from this slot.

Shields
Generally don’t use these unless you absolutely must. You get a speed penalty for using shields.

Jewelry
If you can get a jade amulet early on (pre level 9) then you can skip practical application and get more damage.
Make sure you have the right rings for every area. Since this is essentially a self-found run, you’ll never be able to max out your resists without lucking out. Grab sapphire for merveil, topaz for sins/vaal/a3 sewers, and ruby for most of a3.

Run straight to hillock, don’t kill anything along the way.

In Lioneyes, ID things you get from hillock and sell useless stuff, check to see if vendor has boots with movespeed on them, and check if there's a +fire gem wand from nessa. If they don't have either of these, grab a coral ring. As for the spell to take, tendrils is probably the best overall spell. Freeze pulse is also okay, but tendrils will give you more AOE and similar dps.

Once you’re set, head to the mud flats way point. Try to not kill anything on the way - you can make up the lost exp easily later on.

Once you’ve obtained the mud flats waypoint, go back through the coast to get to tidal island. We want to get the medicine chest for a quicksilver and fire trap. You want to kill enough stuff here to get lvl 2 on yourself and freeze pulse/tendrils. Once you get your lvl 2, you should be strong enough to kill hailrake. The fastest way to get to hailrake in my experience is to start heading down the right side. If you see a cliff (keep your minimap fullscreen for this), turn around and go left. Hailrake hits pretty hard, so feel free to back up and heal up if you run into problems. Once you have the medicine chest, log out for a free tp and do your stuff in lioneyes.

Submerged passage
I don’t have much advice for pathing through this area, just run through it a few times and get comfortable with the various layouts. You want to be level 4 by the time you finish both levels. Kill the small spawns and zombies for exp, skip crabs and the zapper dudes. If you find the waypoint back, grab firestorm if you can. NBD if you don’t find the waypoint, just go back on the ledge waypoint.

Ledge
Try to be level 4 by the time you get here. You can kill more here than you do with the other areas, most enemies here are pretty wimpy and good exp. Skip kuduku, he sux. I think lvl 6.5ish is a good point to exit the ledge at.

Climb
This place has worse density than the ledge, but there’s always going to be a huge clump of enemies near the unique. If you’re hurting on levels a bit, you can spend the time to kill this clump, but otherwise just firetrap and run like always. Close to lvl 7.5 is a good level target.

Prison
I hate running through this area. I don’t have any tips regarding pathing. Nothing here is particularly threatening, except maybe chatters with a huge blue pack next to him.

Brutus
At minimum, be level 8 for this fight with a medium flask. Pretty straight foward fight, just FT and tendrils/pulse when it’s down. Log out after killing him for efficiency - you get the prisoner’s gate waypoint for free.

Prisoner’s Gate
Before advancing, grab flameblast and check vendors. Look for sapphire rings and MS boots. When you do get to the zone, just stay away from the big fire dawg and you should be good.

Ship graveyard
Shit area, just run through as fast as possible. Waypoint back if you still need sapphire. Remember to equip flameblast, you should be lvl 10 by the time this area’s done.

Coves
Throw fire traps at zombies and crabs with no shells. Ignore avian wretches, they’re pieces of shit anyway.

Caverns
First floor is pretty easy, second floor watch out for explodey dudes. You should have some fire resist from your tree at this point, but if you feel really uncomfortable with it, you could grab a ruby ring from the vendor.

Merveil
Minimum Req: Lvl 12 + sapphire ring + medium mana flask or portals.
Flameblast is OpieOP

Once you’re in town, check the vendor for a topaz ring – you’ll want it to avoid taking too much damage from lightning in the chamber of sins.

There’s a few ways you can approach this. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

Once you’re in town, go left towards riverways + blackwood waypoint. You should pick up a level or so while doing this. Once you get to the waypoint, go back to town and head right towards crossroads waypoint. Head up for chamber of sins.

Chamber
First floor should be a breeze. On the second floor, save a quicksilver charge for running away from the black widow. On the third floor, take care for lightning damage. If you get shocked at all, you’ll take a shitton of damage. Once you kill fidelitas, grab the gem and logout (you don’t need to talk to Helena)

Blackwood
Generally, I go for the western forest waypoint before doing the weaver. If you happen to find the weaver’s chambers before getting there, lay a portal down outside the chambers and keep going.

Weaver’s
Easy area, and pretty straightforward fight. Flameblast makes this fight a joke.

Vaal Ruins
Not much to say about this area. Just run through and get the oak waypoint.

Bandits
You want to kill alira and krait. Ruby ring is nice and safe for alira, but the fight is doable without it. Krait is a joke with flameblast. Grab free health from oak.

Caverns
Not much to say.

Pyramid
You just run corner to corner for each of the stairs.

Vaal Oversoul
Try to be level 21-22ish when you fight him. Flameblast makes this a joke.

If you’re doing a timed race, you can typically head straight to docks after hitting 24ish from city of sarn. You don’t need any quest progression to get there.

If you’re doing a boss race, just run city of sarn once and progress.

Slums
Easy enemies, but I hate the layouts. If you find the sewers before the crematorium, put a portal outside it. You can do the crematorium before you find clarissa btw.

Crematorium
It shouldn’t take too long to find tolman, even if you hit a dead end or two. Put on topaz rings before fight with piety and it’s very easy. If you put a portal outside sewers, run back to the waypoint and take the portal. Otherwise, log for ez tp.

Pick up searing bond after rescuing clarissa and getting tolman’s bracelet.

Sewers
I’ve had nightmares about dischargers. I’ve died to them at 50% lightning res, so it might actually be worth having double topaz + lightning walker here. Remember to pick up waypoint in warehouse district sewers.

Battlefront
Nothing to say about this one. Grab ribbon spool here.

Docks
Ruby rings and go. Read modifiers on blue dogs if you can, but you should probably have enough fire res by now.

Solaris
Home of the worst troll layouts in the game. Frogs can be dangerous, but other than that I think this area’s not too bad.

Ebony Barracks
You *do not* have to kill gravicius, but he’s a very easy kill for this build. Flammability, searing bond, and flameblast kill him in less than a minute if you want to bother with him.
If you’re running dominus, head to imperial gardens and grab the waypoint there before going through lunaris.

Lunaris temple
Level 1 is pretty easy, just avoid charges and it’s easy to skip most of the content. I’d still recommend killing as much as you can, searing bond cleans up soldiers really fast. Level 2 is where things start to get rough. Fire res is probably the most helpful one here, since titty bitches do half fire and half phys (AFAIK) and those summoner dudes use corpse explosion. Kole isn’t that bad on normal, but I wouldn’t fight him anyway. Level 3 is when shit gets real. You will likely desync if you try running past too much stuff. If you want to kill titty bitches with searing bond, let them fire at you first before putting a totem behind them.

Piety
Basically, searing bond/flameblast is OpieOP

Imperial Gardens
todo

Sceptre of God
todo

Upper Sceptre
todo

Dominus
Searing bond is a pretty good spell.

These races are pretty hard! Take extra care to make sure you have good enough gear for every single fight.

For these races, I think muling is absolutely required, regardless of what build you’re doing. The 3 wisdom scrolls you get are absolutely necessary to get a coral ring in addition to whatever else you need. You should also do the tidal island quest for spark - that spell makes the brutus fight significantly easier. Also chest pieces are almost required to help reduce boss damage.

On brutal, remember that each enemy does 20% more damage, so they’re more likely to stun you. This is particularly significant against Vaal because if you’re sloppy like me and leave a monster or two, they could potentially stun you while Vaal’s trying to lazer you.

I’m just mainly noting things down as I play more of these races

Act 1
There’s quite a few shrines with lots of enemy density on the coast and on the climb. Be careful of the diamond shrine at the climb - goats can do lightning damage and shock you. However, if you grab it, you can easily kill the unique skeleton archer for some exp.

I’ve typically had very poor density in the prison, so I’d recommend killing more enemies in the climb if possible.

Areas leading up to merveil aren’t too spectacular or anything.

Act 2
You never have to hit the black widow on the second floor of chamber. Other than that, not much to say about this act.

Act 3
There’s a corrupted zone at the bottom of the docks. They have an area level of 33, so it’s probably worth it to do it when you get a few more levels. The enemies inside are fairly dangerous.