I did some tinkering around using the maxroll character planner to check out some damage comparisons between a meteor build and a hydra build to see which one actually will be better at boss killing(what they excel at)
My character build for the following comparison is level 85 and runs full Tal’s set, Spirit shield, torch, no SoJs, no skillers. The enemy target I used was Hell Mephisto.
Hydra Build - 20 hydra, 20 fireball, 20 firebolt, 20 fire mastery(10 skill points leftover)
Hydra dps - 11,846 (maxroll counts 5 hydras max - 2.4 dps with 6 hydras should be 13,794)
Fireball dps - 7,236
Rough additive dps = 19,082 (21,030 for 2.4)
Meteor Build - 20 meteor, 20 fireball, 20 firebolt, 20 fire mastery(8 skill points leftover)
Meteor dps - 20,884 (due to maxroll calculation flaw, this should be 6492)
fireball dps - 12,568
Rough additive dps = 33,452 (closer to 19,000)
According to flawed maxroll - (Hydra does roughly 57% of the dps that meteor does. The meteor build’s fireball dps alone does more than the hydra’s. Seems to me the one thing Hydra excels at, boss killing, it still falls short when compared to Meteor(which is by no means a meta build). And with the global cooldowns removed, I believe Meteorb builds will be better than Hydrorb.)
I still think they should buff the Hydra synergies slightly to help it come closer to taking on Blizzard!
You have 6 Hydras that spew fire bolts constantly vs meteor that you have to wait seconds to fall after casting. Tough one of the synergies should go back to 5% dmg buff for Hydra.
Hydra is the better singletarget dmg, Meteor is the better AoE-Skill. Dmgwise firesorcs always did fine, only reason they arent meta is the massive amounts of immunes. Dmgwise hydra is in a fine spot and has a place in the game now.
in your example Hydra should be roughly 50k. You have 6, each shoots roughly 2.2 times a second
Once hydras are setup, you can also just spam fireball for ~8 seconds instead of 2/3 Fireball + 1/3 Meteor → Your Fireball DpS should be higher
→ These two points already means that you outperform Meteorbuild by a lot in regard of singletarget-dmg
Your example is lvl85, a lvl 98 sorc can just max both (1frozenarmor, static + tele). At 93+ as a pure firesorc, you will deal massive amounts of dmg compared to live. I mean melt P8 baal in less than 10 seconds kind of dmg (granted, needs better equip than what you posted here, but 7 skillers for example arent expensive)
My merc doesn’t use infinity in my testing, and it is against Mephisto who has 60% fire resistances… not sure how you are getting 50k dps
It still takes about 2 seconds to set up hydras and reset them when they run out, and fireball is much weaker in a hydra build… so not sure it makes a huge difference.
Sure, better gear equals better damage for both hydra and meteor. Sure you can max both, but most people that will be using these builds will most likely be farming for endgame gear and not 93+.
**I will admit, I think the dps in maxroll is off a little from the 2.4 changes because it seems to be calculating 5 hydras max instead of 6… so the dps should be 13,794 for the 2.4 hydras
my bad, didnt see the meph part, i looked at targetdummy. I`m not exactly sure what they calculate for Hydra dps, but it should be higher than what they display (~13k). Also 10 leftover points means you can have 7 points in meteor as fireball synergy. I think 21-24k is fair for this build on meph. 20k if you want to keep your leftovers
On top of that, take a closer look on what Maxrolls Meteor dps is. They have a “Burn” Value of 15000 in there. This applies if you stack the fires of ~75 meteors on top of each other (probably max meteors you can fit in their burnduration). you reach that after roughly 90 seconds. → Not really a realistic value
For Meteor we roughly have a 8k impact and 4k/Fireball. That adds up to ~16k + the burn that slowly builds up
I did not realize that… if that’s the case, then this does become a lot closer of a comparison.
It seems the impact damage per second is 5836 and burn damage per second should be 656, so initial dps is 6,492 and increases by 656 dps for each successive meteor
This makes the rough additive dps for meteor about 19,000, which the 2.4 hydra actually should outperform at 21,030 dps
yeah its an awesome tool to plan out stuff, but not in a state where you can blindly trust it. Molten Boulder for example can deal dmg in every single frame, so they display like 300 dmg/sec for a lvl1 boulder, while in reality you can be glad if it deals its dmg 3 times.
Great discussion and polite, the way all things should be.
Id like to add that both meteor and fireball could use an improvement in mechanics in fact, because dmg may not be the problem, as pointed.
Hydra having 20% chance to cast fireball could be a nice improve, meteor having faster burn adding and faster animation drop, with the hit dmg going 50% phys at least, would be amazing.
But those builds are 80pt builds - I thought a level 99 character could achieve 110 skill points to spend?
Can’t you start as a Meteor sorceress and fully synergise it by about level 75-80?
Then you can put your remaining points into Hydra, and get FREE DAMAGE ON TOP OF A NORMAL METEOR BULD?
So if you combine your calculations and add the meteor sorc with the hydra sorc, the meteor sorc is now 57% stronger than it was before patch 2.4? Sorcs must be very happy about this, no?
You compare the fire sorc to the fire druid, she still is much stronger, no?
It’s the same situation with frozen orb and blizzard. With the changes to the casting delay, rather making skills like hydra and FO more viable in place of blizzard and fireball. It actually made the already powerful builds even more powerful because of the shared synergies. Blizzard and fireball can basically spec into hydra and FO with no compromise to their build because they have these spell’s synergies already. It’s not hydra vs fb/meteor or F/O vs blizzard any more. It’s those spells damage on top of the fb/meter and blizzard damage. Any buffs to Hydra and F/O at this point is a buff to fb/meteor and blizzard, I think that’s why they decided against buffing the damage of these skills. The shared synergies would have to be changed for any damage buffs to happen.
Maybe the casting delay should be kept between spells of the same element to prevent the buffing of existing builds and promote cross element hybrid builds.
I can’t believe the main streamers have been whipping up the community into a negative frenzy about the return of Hydra’s synergy bonus back down to 3%…
These streamers play D2R as a career, and Nephalem’s comment totally call’s them out. The streamers should be explaining this logic to the community, not winding them up and encouraging them to get crappy with Blizzard’s balance decisions…
The requests all through this forum for Blizzard to buff Hydra and Frost Orb seem completely irrational to me… Don’t listen Blizzard, you’ve done a great job removing global cooldowns, Sorc is better than ever
I don’t think they care if they imbalance the game, they’ll just have more content to complain about later. People should understand just because a lot of people watch them doesn’t mean they’re right, they’re just looking for more content to post about.
This is a good video by old school game snob showing how you can mix Hydra or Frozen orb into your standard Blizzard/Fireball sorc to achieve higher DPS than ever before. I Think it’s a good showcase why FO/Hydro shouldn’t be buffed:
You said it perfectly mate 
