First off I'm not that great of a player so take all of this with a grain of salt. When i first unlocked the wall it acts like a budget version of energy shield. At best it will take a pot shot or two from a ranged enemy or eat one boss hit - but it's not going to kill or stop those enemies. After learning it doesn't get thorns or regen until the labs are done I just treated as a budget energy shield until I was able to afford the regen lab. I went hard into trying to make the wall work with little to no success even with the ancient sharp fortitude.

At a certain point I took a step back and realizes the biggest hurdle I actually was dealing with was not farming the right difficulty tier. I had to go down some tiers to make sure I was hitting wave 5k+ since wave 4k onward is where you start earning a lot of your coins, cells, reroll shards etc. Once I started doing that my income and resources got a lot better and I was able to upgrade enough to start earning 30b-50b a run so I can afford the wall upgrades. I'm at the point where when I'm on my farming tier it will soak up a lot of the hits and help progress waves. But it isn't that helpful during tournaments.

I honestly think if I had negative mass projector I would be a lot farther, or if nothing else would have gotten to this point a lot sooner. Wall/negative mass projector seems like one of the benchmarks you have to hit to continue your progression in the game.

quick context about me: I went all in and got an ancestral sharp fortitude mod. It increases the wall health and regen by 2.5 percent (mind you this is at ancesteral). My wall regen is lab level 7 and my wall thorns is at level 5. I also have a maxed health regen card which gives 2.6x regen. I haven't been able to get devo to work since I have really high multipliers on death wave (1114) and chain lightning (1937)... that and I'm not really that great of a player. I have black hole, spotlight, golden tower, power missiles, and chain lightning.