Hydra heads max?

Sorcerer
1

How many hydra heads can you have with patch 1.5 PTR?

You have 2 baseline hydras
You have 3 hydras with the aspect
4 heads while healthy
You have 4th hydra by enchantment , 5 headed
You have a 5th hydra by winterglass
But how many heads?

Per temper you get 2 extra heads.
I guess you may have this stat on wand and focus
2+2 heads and what if wand and focus master worked 12/12 on hydra heads and you hit the 25% increase on this temper 3 times?

Is it then 4 heads on wand +4 heads on focus ?
So extra 8 heads per hydra?
So if you have 4 heads while healthy + 8 heads it makes 12 headed hydra?
While 5 hydras active it makes 60 heads?

Conjuration - Weapon

  • +1-2 Hydra Heads on Cast.

Conjuration Fortune - Utility

  • +X% Hydra Lucky Hit Chance.

Hydra

  • Base damage increased from 14% to 16%.
  • Summoned Hydra
    • Burn damage increased from 60% to 100%
2

Is this a weapon temper?

If you tal rasha (yes, you tal rasha) then you have room for 1. If other items can roll it, idk. Interesting temper tho.

3

it shouldnt work for enchant. Read it, and u know why. and yes its a new weapon temper.

4

Thanks, thats one decent add for next patch. It will likely be one of several mistakes i make in an attempt to rebuild what we’re losing from BI/ES caps, both of which kill everything ive done this patch lol.

Yeah one look at the wording and i know it wont count for anything but direct summon.

Conjuration fortune is probably a moot add, unless it hits like 150%, because baseline is 2.5 not counting the dot-direct split or increased duration from aspect (i think this affects the lucky hit on some dots, but im not sure with hydra) If they want us to have lucky hit procs on hydra, the devs should probably address the thing this temper is applied too, but digress i guess.

Increasing baseline damage might help battlecasters aspect do… something maybe, because atm its hard to justify.

9 points in hydra = .25 baseline weapon dmg, currently the aspect brings it up 5% to .3, which doesnt seem to measure up to stormswell/shredded/attackspeed, maybe concieted; idk if increasing the base skill will change skillpoint scaling.

5

i mean theoreticly hydra with 12 heads have a decent lh then. if u couple it with some AS its not bad. but still only single target.

BL in s2 had the best lhc, because of the shear amount of hits it did, even if the base was pretty low lhc. But that hit count got reduced quite a bit.

anyway what we dont know how these extra heads play out, maybe they divide that small number onto each head, making it even worse. they did such mistakes in the past.

6

Increased hit does alot for sure, but ill need to see it on a mw 12 item to trust it more

That sounds like blizz. Ihave a sneaking suspicion that the dot option, extra heads, and duration all affect lucky hit rate per shot negatively but def never tested thoroughly enough, i dont know how to do it aside from raw tracking but f that.

7

probably. thats why they want us to test in PTR.
and then some jokers will pop up and crybaby about hydra sorc is OP.
bliz listened to it and nerfed the hydra.

it happened on FO before. bliz playing word trick to announce that trigger is not casting, thus FO has been nerfed by half.

8

Hydra’s should shoot firebolt instead of their own projectile, that would be awesome

9

Been wanting Hydra to work in the end game since season 1. But have been very disappointed each season, minus season 3 which I skipped.

Currently got Hydra up to plus 8 heads on a staff. Which unfortunately is dot damage now. But spawning 12 x 3 rings of hydras is fun. And with fireball enchant it still does the same stuff as before. Blowing up helltides faster than any other class or spec. But fail in pit. Even 100nm. Salvage all the gear I maxed on live season 4 so I could roll and roll and miss miss on max Hydra masterwork. Ended up hitting it once. Thousands of mats. It goes to 8 if you hit it once, at 12/12. Not sure if hitting it more than once will make it go higher.

Have tried a burn heavy build, a direct damage build, and currently on a lucky hit proc build with andariels. They all still fall short of 101 pit clear like my ww barb. Gonna try rolling more into a tyreals might build and focus crit dam and vuln. Maybe try new helmet vs shako. And Uber ring.

The lucky hit chance of 3% with 36 heads out is technically over 100% per however fast you can get them to hit things. And they proc alot of andariel. And alot of frost nova. Seems to very rarely spawn firewall. And occasionally meteor.

It seems stacking any lucky hit. Including the new Hydra lucky hit temper only gives you x% of the 3%. Which basically means if you stack 100% Lucky hit. Hydra has a 6% chance to proc. It’s not great.

The tyreals build is ok but at that point you just want max hydras to make more tyreals bolts. Maybe not roll Hydra damage temper and go crit/vuln

Anyway. Don’t think in current ptr state that Hydra will be endgame viable but still in a much better place than before.

Maybe if they’d let us get scaling burn damage on Hydra to it’s damage when it hits and not the tiny base damage. And if they’d let us use grandfather. And they removed the cap on legendary Paragon. And gave us back frost shield. And teleport CD. Maybe it could one day many seasons from now run a pit 101.

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10

There seems to be a bug in Hydra in the PTR that spawns a crapton of hydras. Probably has something to do with the tempers. Nobody has published how it’s done yet, which is good, if it survives the PTR and gets to S5, I will play S5.

Of course Rob has already “showcased” the build so high chance it gets nerfed.

11

according to his standard, druid, rogue, and sorc are able to deal billions of damage = crazy stuff. while his barb hitting 1billion = underwhelming.

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12

Well he’s not wrong, because that’s how Blizzard balances this game.

13

Okay I’ve done some testing. I have not managed to crit my Hydra Temper heads, but based on what I’m seeing in video son YouTube the maximum is +8 heads, meaning you can have a 12-headed Hydra per cast.

Now, note that you can at maximum have 3 cast Hydras. That’s it. no more.

So the temper will only benefit 3 Hydras maximum with Aspect, for 36 heads.

Your Enchant has a cap of 3. You can actually have an extra 3 Hydras with 5 heads each from the Enchant, if you have enough mana regen and attack speed to do it, because they don’t last long (don’t benefit from Conjuration duration bonuses for some reason). So that’s at best 15 heads. Again, these hydras are not cast so they don’t get extra heads.

Winter Glass caps at extra 2 Hydras, 3 if you have Aspect. As they are not cast, they do not benefit from extra heads and will only give you 3 heads each. So that’s a total of 9 heads.

So your maximum number of Hydra heads theoretically is 60.

I think. I am not sure if you can get more Enchant Hydras, but I have never gotten more than three.

Because the Tempers don’t give the Winterglass Hydras any extra heads, I’ve come to the conclusion that Hydra builds should not use Winterglass, and use an Amulet with a big damage multiplier aspeect instead.

14

Cm and dB, specifically.

Now that BI node sucks, i dont think burn will be the best focus for enhancing the dps, rather just attack speed, searing heat, and other standard damage increases. Could be incorrect, but i dont see how you would accommodate burn damage effectively enough with everything else you need.

Do you think it would be better to use talrasha + 1 elemental surge temp, with hydra on other weapon or 2 hydra tempers (or hydra temp on 2h)?

15

Definitely Hydra head. If you use Tal’s you should only use 3 elements. It might be better to just use a Legendary Ring with Attack Speed. Not sure. Will do more testing but I ran out of MW mats. LOL.

16

Hm. we can get close to 100% with 1 GA attack speed (18-20%), advantage 2 elixers, ancient flame, and the 9% attack speed from conjure board (92%, very roughly. Also i am assuming these are all the same attack speed bucket) so maybe not lose tals all together; lots to check tho.

17

BTW we have Creeping Death Aspect back, that on a staff might actually be the ticket if you go Burn.

I’m doing burn route right now but the results are crappy with the BI nerf. So I am hunting for a good Creeping Death Aspect and I’ll see where it goes. Right now though the damage is super bad so I might go back to pure Direct Damage.

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18

Sucks to hear but i thought it would be a rough go to make burn happy again, so thanks for confirming suspicion lol.

19

Hmm. Well Burn isn’t so bad. I was able to Masterwork up to 8 now for my gear, and got +3 heads on both weapons. So now I have 10 heads per cast, for a total of 30 Hydras.

That’s close to what I would be doing with Winterglass – my old Winterglass Hydra build gets up to around 31 heads more or less - 12 from the hard casts, 10 from Enchant, and 9 from the Winterglass Hydras.

However, the Winterglass Build benefits from getting up to around 15-19 stacks of Conjures, on a +6 Conjuration Mastery build, so that means around 90%x-114%x multiplier.

The new Hydra build I have a +4 amulet for Conjuration Mastery, and I get around 9 stacks of COnjures only beecause I only have 3 Hydras + maybe 4 Ice Blades and 2 Lightnign Spears out at a time. So I only get around 49%x multiplier.

But I get to put Control on my Amulet for some 53%x multiplier, which works out to around 220%x multiplier total I guess? Better than Winterglass I think, but I don’t need to spam Frozen Orb all the time which is a big relief, so actually I like this build better. It feels like a real Hydra build and not a Frozen Orb build.

Anyway, did Pit 71 so far and was able to get ticks up to 6M before boss died. The burn isn’t great but it’s not so bad, and it works real world and I don’t need to spam stuff, I can just drop hydras, then cycle cooldowns (Ice Blades, Ice Armor, Lightning SPear and Teleport) and shoot Firebolt for 25%x burn multiplier every now and then. I get to spend more time kiting and not getting killed, which is good.

All in all not so bad, I’ll see if I can work my way up to Pit 100 with this.

I am still looking for a Creeping Death aspect, I think it’s the key to unlocking the power of this build.

20

Creeping death I think could be good, it’s just a shame firewall and hydra have such bad lucky hit chances - and those lucky hit CC tempers are probably one of the only ways to get a bunch of different CC effects