Trying to understand the stats noted in the game for this.
By all rights the Hydra Wizard should breeze through super high really high Greater Rifts.
Damage shows 4,181,497
Toughness shows 355,624,352
None of the other builds show anywhere near that kind of stats.
I have to believe those stats really are not indicative of what is really happening.
Other wiz builds can get similar stats. You are right, they are in no way an indication how well you can take a flock of poison darts, when entering a gr or how efficient your damage is stacked. It is an overall stat and it can be high even if there are serious gaps in your defense, like very poor poison res
I love the build as a season starter or when you want to do easy chillax farming bounties/visions during lunch. They are also great in echoing nightmare runs. Unless you really love the build I would not use it to push far beyond gr 120. There are better builds for that
It’s actually an insanely tanky build for HC. In S24 I was running in the low 130’s with it quite nicely. The problem is you have to be very careful in how and where you place your hydras.
For example you need the 60% buff from casting 5 signature spells like Magic Missile on every Hydra you cast. That means when you get to a new floor in a rift you first have to cast two unbuffed ones immediately for the defense… crank out 5 missiles, drop one, crank out 5 more, drop another, then 5 more to cast the blizzard.
If you don’t do that reliably you can lose 80% or 90% of your damage potential quite easily. But if you do you’re reward with a fairly powerful build.
What’s most significant are the numbers on your gear. The damage and toughness are just looking at your stats and not the %'s. Like, going the Guardian 3 set is going to hugely stack your damage just because you have a lot of int. It’s more important to make sure you’re getting the dmg and dmg reduction from your gear active and keeping that up. An example is Halo of Karini, if that buff falls you lose a LOT of toughness.