- Firebolt as an enchantment as it works on hydra
- Crit build as hydra can crit and also trigger on crit abilities
- Attack speed as it effects hydras attacks per second
- There is a paragon board and glyph that buff congurations
If you have this type of build hydras work very well
Side notes:
- If you don’t have this type of build hydra will not do well for you prob should not use it with other builds
- If you have the above build firewall will suck as it can not crit, can not trigger on crit effects, does not benefit from attack speed, and can’t benefit from firebolt enchant.
In short there are 2 types of fire builds crit based and dot based. Firewall belongs only on the dot based and hydra belongs only on the crit based
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In the beta I tried fire Sorc and I would throw a hydra in a room before I went in just to :1) see if there were enemies in there and 2) to soften them up. Lotsa fun. But I’m not fire anymore….
in the earlier beta hydra could solo the game for you lol
You mean when level was capped at 25 and people had 3x legendary drop rate? If you aren’t seeing endgame Hydra builds then were the nerfs really warranted because of the beta? I personally don’t think that makes any sense.
Expect more Hydra nerfs if people manage to make Hydra builds. Same as possible necro minion nerfs
The designers didn’t seem to ever intend us to make builds based on minions or “totems” but only for those to serve as some support abilities or something.
How does Hydra interact with Lucky Hit? I’m having problems getting it to proc immobilize from the passive or Meteor from the Meteor enchant.
It also almost never seems to proc Firewall from the Firewall enchant despite causing a ton of burn ticks from the burn passive (I’m using Hydra in a burn build, oh no).
Why waste an enchantment slot with Firebolt just to have your hydras apply burn when they can already do that with one of the perks? The whole point of playing a Fire build is so that you don’t have to take Firebolt as one of your enchants. But everything else is pretty much on point.
The one thing I want to caution against is leveling the conjugation glyph early on as there are much better options unless you’re running a straight up conjuration build and not just Hydra. That said, the conjuration glyph scales incredibly well and off of intelligence rather than dexterity or willpower.
I also highly recommend Ancient Flame on a staff. The 100% extra attack speed turns your hydras into machine guns and their lucky hit chance goes through the roof.
The 57% lucky hit chance you seen in the skill? It’s actually an estimate. It estimates the chance that one cast of Hydra will proc a lucky hit for it’s total lifetime if all projectiles hit.
Translation: each hydra fireball has a ridiculously low chance of lucky hit. Enjoy!
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Given the emphasis on Crit, I’m guessing this is running with Esu’s Ferocity as well as the Hydra crit upgrade rather than the Burning one.
Firebolt enchantment would be a must-have in every Fire build for me if it actually did any damage. Or even perhaps if Combustion functioned. I just want to set everything on fire as a Fire Sorc, but you can’t fulfil that fantasy at all without Firewall spam. How we even have Firewall, a stationary LINE damage-over-time effect in this series almost 30 years after D1, I’ll never understand. Spell felt bad to use in D2, and it feels bad to use here.
Okay that makes sense. Though I’ve noticed that if I dump a Hydra directly on an enemy, it seems more likely to trigger a Lucky Hit immediately as it appears.
That would explain why Hydra isn’t popping Meteors left and right.
Its not a waste its super powerful and is also works with fireball and meteor they all gain that huge extra burn damage…and it makes sure everything on the board is always burning triggering all burn effects. Right now that enchanment is putting an extra 11K burn before burn buffs on everything I hit with non dot damage…and yes the fireball enchant triggers the firebolt enchant lol
I mean other classes can hit one button and the room is cleared so… not sure the issue honestly.
Bliz is slowly getting rid of the exploit builds 1 by 1 with nerf corrections…its just they got rid of the 2 for sorc 1st before hitting the others
I mean these are not exploits it’s the fact that other classes have huge potential and sorcery is pretty much garbage. Unless you want to exploit conjuration, swap weapons / skills in and out to kill Lilith. Literally 10 years and they make insane rash decisions to nerf but not actually fix gameplay. For example who ever though it was a good idea to load all sorcs damage into a vulnerable / stagger is literally lazy / out of touch. Dumbest design I’ve seen In any Diablo game. 95% of the skills are trash, paragons are borderline trash as resistances do not work, and damage reduction clearly is not calculating properly. This is evident in 60-70 nm sigils dungeons.
I run a Meteor build with Shattered Star so my meteorites apply a burn and I take the hydra burn perk and since those are the only two damaging spells it seems kinda pointless to me. I run the Fireball and Teleport Enchantments and I don’t feel like I could give up either. Now if only we still had 3 enchantments slots… 
That’s right. But if you run double hydra and the ancient flame aspect when it procs (which is pretty much all the time) the hydras are guaranteed a lucky hit. That said, I don’t really rely on the lucky hit mechanic because I find it to be too unreliable, unless you’re running something like an orbital Ball Lightning build with its crazy number of hits per second.
If you’re using hydra you should be using meteor and nova enchants
Meteor burns anyways. That aspect really reduces your damage. There is a glyph to increase the size of meteor. Youd be better off using the aspect that increases meteor crit damage vs healthy for example.
Ran Firewall/Double Hydra for proc Meteor/Frost Nova (from DOTs) n soften the target, or to deal with those distance targets. Meteor as the main damage dealer. Firewall/Hydra (apply burn) > Teleport (gather/stun) > Meteors.
And no frost nova?, what does in that build apply vulnerability?. I think using frost nova as a enchantment could be usefull if you are going a conjuration build (at least hydra/ice blades). But then we face the problem that frost nova as an enchantment only works with lucky hits (and tbh didn’t test it, but we could have plenty of LH).
And then we face the other sorc problem, the one where you MUST use the other 3 nearly BIS spells: teleport, ice armor and flame shield.