Hydra

[hoywolf]

Hydra

Hey i was wonder if instead of making a Metreorb sorc you can make a Hydraorb sorc, the points are around the same, although your using hyrdas instead, the concern is that, are they fast enough or useful enough to kill in hell. With a holy freeze merc you could buy yourself time for your hydras to kill things, as well as throw frozen orbs. how many hyrda can you have also out at 1 time?

 

[Tacothedeep]

Re: Hydra

both are cast with a timer, so hydra/orb is going to be a bit less effective, because damage per second wise you will spend more time standing around waiting for a timer to end than a meteorb, who is spewing fireballs in between the timered spells.
Also, hydra has no direct synergy, and frozen orbs synergy is not powerful enough to warrant spamming, so you would have no easy way to gain a powerful spammable spell for the time you spend not casting.
That being said, hydra is one of my favorite spells in the game. You can have 4 going constantly, they scout ahead for you, and in many ways are the safest spell in the sorc's arsenal. They took a big hit in .10 though, because they didnt get a synergy like most every other effective spell, yet the monsters got tougher. if you are set on playing with them (just because they are less effective doesn't mean they aren't viable), consider a fast cast freezing spell to keep the monsters in place while circling them with hydras.

 

[Afitch]

Re: Hydra

Hydra does get 2 synergys at 3% each from fireball & firebolt.

 

[Tacothedeep]

Re: Hydra

Hydra does get 2 synergys at 3% each from fireball & firebolt.

doh!
10chara

 

[lumpor]

Re: Hydra

Since fireball synergizes, you get a halfly synergized fully mastered (max fire mastery) fireball. Not as good of a ball as a meteorb but fair enough

Hydras are very good. You can get over 5000 listed damage. May not sound like much but that's for every bolt, and a hydra shoots 15 bolts in a life time (3 bolts at a time at an interval of 1 second over 5 seconds). 5000 x 15 = 75000!!!
All bolts won't hit of course but that's still hell viable as hell.

Another advantage is how fun it is. Sit there and watch all the hydras do everything for you while you lay back and sip your cocktail watching a fallen trying to run away from a hydra but gets a fire bolt in his back and dies.

 

[Arek]

Re: Hydra

Hydras are nice and definately hell viable (without synergies). But it's not as easy as it seems . You have to be careful not activating many monsters at a time. Hydra just can't do many monsters, that's a serious drawback. Later hydra doesn't do good even to a few monsters, but with a little patience it's doable (understand act 4 and later). Basicaly you use just orb or just hydra, depending on the immunities. I don't see any advantage using them both at a time. You can have 4 hydras at a time (the fifth one dissapears really quickly, so i don't count it).

@lumpor: 5000 hydra damage, wake up neo! One can be happy with 1k damage. I did it with 500 and haven't big problems finishing the game.
Btw fallen is fire immune

 

[lumpor]

Re: Hydra

Infiniteh

Even though it's not as effective on a fire sorc as on a light sorc it's still great, and hell fallens only have 100% fire resistance

 

[hoywolf]

Re: Hydra

Well as long as its hell viable i think ill give it a try, its probably not as strong as Meteor but the play style is different so im sure there are some instances where Hydra will be better than Meteor.

And i think with a HF merc, it can help hold the mobs in place for the hydras to burn em down. Thank you all for your input, i greatly appreciate it.

 

[Respect My Authority]

Re: Hydra

With mid level gear: Occy, spirit, shako, viper, 2 skill ammy, magefist, anni and torch you can get about 2.5k hydra damage along with a 7k fireball. If you don't fully synergize your hydra you can still have 2k dam with a decent orb for fire immunes. Seems like it could work in hell

 

[lumpor]

Re: Hydra

I would focus more on hydra and ditch the +2 skill ammy for a volcanic ammy