Do you think hydra would be viable on the next season?
Hydra dmg 14% ->16%.
Hydra burn 60% → 100%.
New weapon temper for + Hydra Heads
Combustion burning 20% → 40%
Staves changed to 40% dot dmg.
That plus the serpentine aspect, allows you to have like 30 hydra heads. What do you think?
Keep in mind that it currently burns for 60% of the Hydra’s teeny tiny base damage. Now you could lightly assist the Hydra with stacking some firewalls and an a little incinerating. That would give you something to do to keep you entertained.
Sometimes I like to stand behind my Hydra casting frost orbs and pretending like my Hydra shot them due to fractured winter glass.
Than again you could go for like a role play torture mage. “Ha Ha Ha Fallen, you thought you had survived the chain summoning of the Hydras! I assure you this 4th Hydra will be your doom before it despawns!” Than from three miles away you’d here the clickety clack of the Shamans staff.
Yes, I think it will be viable. It’s hard to say where it’ll top out; I am not so bold as to state it’s going to be S tier, but I’ll be surprised if it’s not at least reasonably competitive, and I won’t be surprised at all if it’s actually quite strong.
First, no staff. You give up half your extra heads if you use one and that’s a far stronger multiplier than the lame 40% DoT additive in the staff. Temper extra heads on two weapons and masterwork them up to 3 at least, 4 of you can manage it, for 12 headed hydras x 3. Then put Hydra damage tempers everywhere that takes them and +Hydra ranks on helm.
I envision doing it out like a pretty standard Burn build, but throwing in Fireball as a spender with the skill that makes it do 10% of total burning applied as additional direct damage. Run Lightning Spear and Frostblades and stack Conjuration Mastery. Run Frost Blades and Fireball enchants, drop three Hydras, and spam Fireball as much as your mana can take it. It’s possible Firebolt spam would be better than Fireball for the +25% burning damage; needs testing.
Isn’t tempers 100% stronger on 2H weapons, so the same number of heads?
I didn’t think so but I might be wrong. I’m pretty sure my Ice Spikes Damage temper n my staff this season was the same strength it was on every other piece I put it on.
I did a pure conjurer build this season, ran a 91Pit with it at the highest.
Everything except the cap for Elemental Summoner is a buff, and it just has to be seen how strong the new +heads mods will be. But as far as i can see - S5 Hydra will be fun to play again. (as was this season, to be honest, but it was still missing the whole sizzle)
Yes. You can use it once, per 2h staff, or 2 times with half of the numeric value for onehand and focus
BI is a hefty nerf if you were using a burn focus.
i think is viable, still need to consider supplement tactics such as freezing, stun, immobilize, slow… kind a holding mobs away skill to allow hydra to fire.
Never played a burn build except for leveling with Incinerate. I dont play Hydras on burn, if you are inferring to Burning Instinct.
Just my opinion, but I think that’s where the real damage will be at. It effectively doubles Hydra’s base damage, then scales that half with all the burning goodies. Since Hydra burns actually stack a DoT (unlike other “Burn” skills like Firewall and Incinerate) I think it could be pretty mean if you use Engulfing Flames and Greater Fireball with it.
I did some napkin math last night with my eternal Firewall Sorc testing Hydra and I think you’ll be able to scale the DoT into the millions, which could power your Fireball crits into the millions too. It will plateau somewhere eventually, but not sure where. Like this isn’t going to give Bash/Flay Barbs from this season a run for their money (at least I don’t think it will) but it should be a solid build.
Thats good for you 
I will play it with direct dmg nonetheless.
May we both get to our respective goals! May the best hydra win, i guess. Its a head to head race… 
Burning instinct, yes, with combustion key passive, endless pyre/conjuration mastery stacking, hydra can hit decent burn dmg.
They are 100% stronger on 2 handers. Fair warning they attack slower with a 2 hander. To it also felt like they were much slower at acquiring and commiting to a target with the 2 hander as well. They can actually kill stuff too but just don’t play necro pets on an alt, ever, if you want to feel like Hydra has any power.
I’m sure more heads = more dps in some way. I’ve never seen more than one head fire at the same time so the power of adding more heads is not as straightforward as it looks like on paper. Also keep in mind they buffed it to only 16%, for comparison, a Necromancer’s shadow mage can buff it’s own damage and the players 3% per mage, has piercing projectiles (huge AOE differences), has tempers to cast twice or the ability to cast twice every other time it casts, has endless duration, comes in packs of 3 - 5 (aspect adds 2 of each skeleton type). It does all this and, unlike the 16% of Hydra, it starts out at a 51.6% while also having passives that ramp it up 20% per skill point, and a now nerfed passive that multiplies that again by 10% per skill point (used to be 15%). Not to mention theres the aspect of ferocity which lets them ramp up their attack speed to 45%, Reanimation aspect that gives them another 40% damage multiplier, (nerfed) grasping veins which will still be able to pump up their crit chance by 20%, triggering the skeleton priest gives them another 30% damage multiplier (51% ish with bloodgetters aspect), and finally unyielding commanders aspect that gives them another 150% multiplier.
Now they removed holy bolt interaction and will be nerfing what they are capable of doing min/maxed by a huge 50% but in the process they killed many non pet builds as collateral damage. It’s not just raw damage that sorc needs, it’s lots of beefy stacking multipliers and much bigger base numbers to begin with.
Similarly on Necro I’ve seen players with like 300,000 sheet damage for corpse explosion that even with black river giving like 5x multiplier it just become insignificant damage (like maybe 1/20th) to t100 pit trash compared to the proc damage of the ebon piercer unique necklace. Things scale crazy weird in this game.
Side note- I wouldn’t go and farm the necklace, blight builds will be running at an estimated 31% power after the nerfs.
Yes, your plan will absolutely make your Hydras considerably meaner but, I suspect they will plateau crazy fast. One edge you’d have as a Hydra summoner over a necro is the fact that they technically can lucky hit. The tooltip says 3%, but it’s actually 2.5% lucky hit for Hydras. You can kinda think of the elemental summoner node as double dipping, that 30%x multiplier is nothing to sneeze at and you’d have to have to have a combined fire, cold, and lightning damage of 600% to hit it which also means you’d be hitting harder. I would still be nervous about trying to scale the burn damage of Hydras because they used the term “base damage” key phrases like that is what makes thing like the firebolt enchant make them do much more damage than the Hydra summoning skill. The term that wrecks the enchant is “up to” which tells us that the firebolt enchantment scales with lucky hit.
Ha, I just realized that when I use firebolt enchantment I bet my ice blades 15% lucky hit of 25.74% weapon damage which would be 3.861% weapon damage vs Hydras burn 60% of 14% weapon would be 8.4% burn. Whew, I was wrong. For a minute I thought my Ice Blades with firebolt enchantment might outburn my Hydras. However what is Hilarious is that using firebolt enchantment while casting Frostbolt would give me 10.3% burn damage…lol…currently frostbolt burns more than Hydra and that’s Hydra’s only job. If I could shoot 3 frost bolts at once…that’d out burn a pack of 3 Hydras.
The good news is when they buff Hydra to 16% it will almost hit as hard as a skeleton defender 18.2% and be able to burn for that 16% again over 6 seconds which should tick at 2.6% per second per stack. So with just 1 brun stack it would out dps the defender but defenders can taunt (staggers bosses fast for some reason), act as meat shields, and inherit your thorns. But the next upgrade to warriors, reavers can cleave, lower your cooldowns, and have a wind up attack that hits for 50.4% damage.
The math is pretty funny and sometimes it is in the sorcerers favor. My rogues form of teleport comes with a backstab that starts at 72% weapon damage while mystic teleport explodes for 500% weapon damage, but my rogue can pull it off every 4 seconds unless he kills a mob with it (aspect) and than he can instantly chain it again, but I just use it as an opener because the aspect also gets an extra charge and you have to be on top of something to hit them with all 8-9 arrows of barrage. Sadly teleport used offensively does not play nice with controllers without raiment.
Forgive me, I get distracted, been played through the night trying to get avalanche to proc, just once with frozen orb. I think the key passive is actually broken but so bad that sorcs didn’t realize it stopped working completely.
They are buffing the Hydras but that humble starting point of 16% is going to really, really hold them back. Especially considering their current AI. I could be completely wrong. In fact, I want to be completely wrong. It’s going to take a really cranked up aspect or unique to make Hydras capable of much once you start pushing past stuff like hell tides that basically replaces or works despite Hydra’s inherit weakness.
They have to have some huge stuff in the works for Sorc, maybe not next season, but eventually. I’m pretty sure they have some big nerfs planned for rogue and barb before they buff the sorc. They are just trying to figure out how to get those insane numbers under control first. Heck if they don’t watch it the one spec they didn’t completely wreck for necromancer has the potential to get out of control as well everything else they have, well, except maybe the new OP bloodwave should actually be weaker than current firewall, incinerate, frostorb, etc. I think they are giving us some token nerfs, that are significant and sting, because it’s better PR for when they lay the hammer down on the out of control stuff.
So this season I’ve been leveling with a hydra/firewall/incinerate/meteor build, and it’s fun as hell.
With Hydra getting buffed, I could see it being similar to D2 (finally) in most respects. Time remains to be seen how badly the survival nerfs we’re getting will impact us with the number adjustments on the fire skills, but I guess I will give it another chance on PTR and see for myself how it feels.
My build is very viable fwiw but I have not reached cap and cannot do any pit levels yet, so how viable it is is up for debate.
It certainly seems they’re trying to make fire sorc the “meta” sorc build for S5.
The “token nerfs” ticked a lot of us off for the better part of a week, until we realized none of the rest of the community cares about sorc and just makes fun of us for complaining.
It’s kind of shady to diminish an already weaker class just to justify diminishing top performers. Feels almost political.
Barb big. Best boi. Punch girl. Girl small. Barb feel better about 2 IQ.
-Inner dialogue of blizz class balance dev, circa 2024
Ya know I hadn’t thought about it that way. What’s funny is I hadn’t considered higher end stuff where those tiny little dots could stack to crazy numbers eventually. Oh wait, the dots only last 6 seconds. I’m thinking they’ll plateau pretty quick considering max number of Hydras in the field at a time and how quickly they apply the dot. The fireball interaction sounds fun as heck though. Has anyone tested if it counts all the tiny dots as separate burns or if they count the 3 Hydras and conclude you have only 3 different instances of burn.
Burn damage tics are summed together as burning damage. Tics 2x a sec.
Right but you’ll eventually bottle neck at the burn lasting 6 seconds and the number of times 3 hydras can apply the burn. Just like a blight necro stacking potentially endless pools the duration and how many pools you can make in a certain time frame limit you. Now if all those DoTs had endless duration…well…blizzard better not be that dumb.
Correct on the burn, this is where you really see the difference in multipliers for burning, and why the BI cap at 40% is just a pro-barb change.
Increasing hydra attack speed is probably next best place to look for more damage, too bad pyro attack speed only affects the rate of cast, not hydras attack speed. Yet another interesting implementation by bliz.