[Flame Vixen was a member of the USEast Elemental Strike Team led by Sirian. See Sirian's Diablo II page here, and his page for the Elemental Strike Team here. Flame took the role of fire sorceress, and as such was limited exclusively to skills in the fire tree, and prohibited from wearing any item giving fire resistance.]
I decided early on to develop Inferno as Flame's primary attack for the
early part of the game, and this worked well through normal and much of
nightmare difficulty. From about midway through nightmare, Flame switched to
using Meteor for her primary attack, but she still found Inferno to be
useful for specific situations right through to the end of the game.
Inferno produces a lot less visual clutter than Meteor, which was useful
in situations where the team was pretty much in control of the situation
and needed more to avoid slip-ups caused by on-screen confusion rather
than being in actual danger from the monsters.
With Meteor, Flame discovered the delights of massive fast cast :) It had never been my intention to go for a fast cast setup, but Flame was using Magefist anyway (for the +1 fire skills), and the team found a Wall of the Eyeless which nobody else wanted to use, and with her fastest cast scepter and a couple of fast cast jewellery items, she had a full tweaker rig without ever really trying. Also she had a blue pot habit that lasted through the rest of the game. With Warmth, and ridiculous levels of Meditation from the team paladin (yay!), Flame could sustain Inferno indefinitely, but fast cast Meteor would empty her mana bulb in nothing flat. It was hellacious fun, though :)
Fast cast also proved suprisingly useful for Flame's other high-level spell. I hadn't been intending to develop Hydra, but put a point into it on principle (the principle being that a fire sorceress should know every fire tree spell). Experimenting with it initially in the deserts outside Lut Gholein, Flame discovered that Hydra was actually really really useful against anything that was difficult to target manually (leapers! And in high lag conditions, pretty much everything). A typical hell difficulty monster would laugh at a single hydra, but a stack of 30+ sending out a continuous stream of firebolts is another matter entirely. This worked especially well when the team's lightning sorceress was spamming Static Field right across the screen :)
Having no fire resistance was pretty much irrelevant in normal difficulty, but became more noticeable in nightmare, and the blood lords in hell difficulty would kill Flame if they so much as glanced in her direction. Going through hell difficulty with -50% fire resistance, you really notice how just about every second monster type has a fire-based attack. Act 1, shamans and their firebolts, probably the first elemental attack you meet. Act 2, straight down into the sewers with all the burning dead, out into the desert where you're relatively safe for a bit, then down into the arcane sanctuary (eeek!). Act 3, more shamans, and the afore-mentioned blood lords. And in Act 4 there's the pit lords (and their kin) and the multi-talented knights.
Flame Vixen would like to thank the other members of the EST team, without whom she would have had to do a lot more running away: Leader-EST (necromancer, played by Sirian), FrostyBeer (cold sorceress, played originally by Espy Lacopa, later by Charis), StaticField-X (lightning sorceress, played by CHUKLES, who sadly had to miss the finale), Trefflix (elemental bowazon, played by zParticle), and Cy_Cleric (paladin, played by Cyrene).
Flame Vixen made Baroness at level 50 with the stats shown. Strength
at 60 (enough for gothic shield and plated belt), vitality raised enough so she
wasn't dying quite all the time, and everything else to energy. Skills
at this point (with +2 bonus from normal equipment) :
Normal equipment setup:
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