2-Piece Bonus: Spells cast by your Mirror Images will deal 50% of the damage of your own spells. (Mirror Images also cast Hydras.)
4-Piece Bonus: Double the duration of Hydras and increase the number of heads on multi-headed Hydras by two. Damage taken is reduced by 8% for each Hydra head alive as long as there is one available. Each time you take damage, a Hydra heads dies.
6-Piece Bonus: Hydras deal 1000% increased damage for each Hydra head alive. Enemies affected by Blizzard take 50% more damage (multiplicative) from Hydras.
Numbers need tweaking of course and supporting items some buffs.
I imagine that the playstyle this will result in might actually be a terrible, dissatisfying one. Probably on a similar level of how Firebird plays. Let me explain.
There are many instances where you take smaller amounts of damage regularly, which basically will cuase the Hydra heads to die off almost instantly and with it your damage reduction.
You can mitigate that with Energy Shields, but they also have the problem that they do not start to replenish unless you have not taken damage for 4-5 seconds, so that would suffer from the exact same issue as the vanishing Hydra heads and the damage reduction that is tied to it.
Furthermore, this playstyle will likely be that all you do the whole time is to spam Hydra over and overa gain to keep the bonus up and restore the lost Hydra Heads, but that will not be a satisfying playstyle and it will be made even worse when you combine it with Energy Shields, since your damage reduction would drop of when you loose your ES and you couldn’t easily bring it up again since you would just run around to avoid damage instead of spamming Hydras.
From the way of how I understand and imagine how this set works and plays, it will play about as bad as the Wizard’s Firebird set. Bad in a different way, but still bad.
I had this reservation at first but assumed that shield damage would not be counted towards reducing your DR. But if it works the way you said, then yeah, it’s another badly designed set like FB ended up being.
I’m seeing a revival of lightning Manald Heal Hydras with this set though.
I think they completely should drop the mechanic that Hydra heads die when you take damage and instead make your damage reduction based on how many Hydras you have active.
Also, you should be able to have 2 or even 3 Hydras active at once with the base skill, and not just one.
Then the set could also give you +2 maximum Hydras and Serpent’s Sparker gives you another +1 max Hydras, which will give you a total of 5-6 Hydras that you can have active at once.
If your damage reduction would be based on how many Hydras you have active at the moment, and each Hydra would give you 10% damage reduction, you would gain 50-60% damage reduction with it and the Hydras would not die when you take damage, so the DR is more permanent.
If they move to a permanent but slightly lower % of DR, I’d prefer it to be given all up for just having at least one Hydra active. Having to cast all your Hydras from the get go to just have max DR would suck.
I can understand their original idea especially if Hydras are doing all the damage and all the player needs to do is dance around the carnage but I think we’re all concerned the gameplay will be cr@p.
2-Piece Bonus: Double the duration of Hydras and increase the number of heads on multi-headed Hydras by two.
4-Piece Bonus: Damage taken is reduced by 8% for each Hydra head alive as long as there is one available. Each time you take damage, a Hydra heads dies.
6-Piece Bonus: Player deal 1000% increased damage for each Hydra head alive, and Mirror Images deal 100% of your own spells.
I feel that the damage buff shouldn’t capped on Hydra skill alone.
To be fair, the Necro has a similar mechanic in the Pestilence set where he also needs to stack his DR first, but you are right, what you suggest might be better.
2 piece effect: Mirror Images gain the Duplicates rune and last until they die, and spells casted by Mirror Images will deal 50% of the damage of your own spells. Mirror Images will summon a Hydra whenever you do (only one hydra will be summoned by Mirror Images).
4 piece effect: Increase the number of heads on multi-headed hydras by two. Damage taken is reduced by 10% for each Mirror Image and Hydra active. Mirror Images take 5% reduced damage for each Mirror Image and Hydra active and half of your shield effect extends to your Mirror Images.
6 piece effect: Deal XXXX% increased damage for each Hydra head. Mirror Images will cast channeling spells whenever you do.
While I fundamentally disagree with the general set design in D3, I think it is nice that the set only increases hydra dmg. If you turn it around, and the hydras increase other dmg, then it just becomes yet another build that uses whatever skills are the strongest already. It is no longer a pet build.
If they want to make it more active than just hydra spam, you can add something like; “hydras deal 100% more dmg to enemies you are also hitting” (making you to use some channeling or dot skills on enemies at the same time - such as casting Blizzard).
That said, yeah, including mirror images in the set could be interesting. Doubling down on the pet build theme.
I kinda like the concept of losing a hydra when you are hit - something new at least. But yeah, it seems like it would work really terrible in reality. Maybe max 1 head lost per second?
That can be solved by having the set add another damage boost that would be specifically for Hydras or introduce more legendary powers to ensure that hydras deal the most damage out of the build.
Same with Rathma too… and same with Firebirds. It’s the worse way to implement damage and damage reduction buffs with 20+ stacks of small increments. There’s a good reason why I don’t play any of these sets.
Having to lay down one Hydra to have your DR would be similar to DMO’s requirement to lay down a bubble to have DR but less annoying as we won’t need to hit enemies with a bubble to get the damage buff.
Whilst I agree that the worse thing they could do is to end up using Hydras to buff some other skill damage you do (similar what happened to M6 and what recently happened to the Sader’s AoV set before it went live), the devs are the ones ultimately in control of how the interaction works and which skill does the greater damage.
EDIT: Take AoV… at the last minute, they change the 2pc to have FotH buff HF, and they add HF to the 6pc at the same level of damage buff as FotH. Given that HF has got multiple legs buffing it already, one of which keeps increasing the damage done the more you use the skill, and that the set adds more damage to HF than FotH, it’s no wonder that what started out as a FotH set ended up being more of a HF one… the devs ought to be able to foresee this or at least let the PTR go long enough for this to be brought to light.