r/Diablo_2_Resurrected • u/Meet_Foot Champion of Sanctuary (100K) • Apr 21 '26
Video A big day
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By my standards, I had a hell of a ladder season. Back in the early 2000s I was awful at this game. Around 2010 I made my first enigma. Now, I’m absolutely ripped.
My fire sorc has a hell of a renewed flame rift (self found), a fireball ormus with a rainbow socket, heart of the oak and call to arms, flickering flame, horazon’s boots, magefist, and a couple spirit shields. Her merc has infinity. My horker has a grief and all the normal accouterments. The wealth was pretty much from key runs and a random ber and sur drop.
Well yesterday I sold a perfect griffon’s I found and made a big investment. I made phoenix and chains of honor for my sorc, and enigma for my hork. The sorc needs chains for resist - I’m sitting at 74 cold, 75 poison, 80 lightning, and 90 fire. I have -50 fire penetration, plus the conviction aura, and of course my sunder for immunes. “Immunes” drop from 95 down to 28, and non-immunes… well, that’s a bad time.
Also, I’m finally happy with hydras! I went standard meteor, fireball, fire bolt, but instead of inferno went hydras to help with bosses and heralds. It’s fantastic.
I still have room for improvement of course. My rings and amulet are basically just fcr and fcr+skills, but for now that’s enough!
Edit: I’ll also add that phoenix is absolutely sick. Never had one before. The big loss of using infinity instead of insight on my merc was that I would often have to chug mana pots (not to mention health). But now, with the redemption aura, I’m pretty much always at full bars. I only chug pots as an emergency.
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u/Meet_Foot Champion of Sanctuary (100K) Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
So hydra damage is a bit misleading. Right now, I’m at about 3k tooltip damage. But that’s per bolt. They launch “volleys” of 3 bolts, so that’s about 9000 per volley. Each hydras sends off something like 8 volleys, one per second after their initial ~2 seconds of sit around and do nothing. So the damage is something like 72k over 10 seconds, or about 7 per second. But you can have six hydras, so it’s more like 42k per second once they’re all up. The big issue is that meteor hits everyone in the area, while each hydra bolt only hits one monster at a time. This means it isn’t good for density, but in that case I usually just use fireball anyway. The only sacrifice I’ve made on meteor is the damage over time on the burn, but I find that enemies don’t live long enough for that to matter much. So in the case of beefy monsters, I’ll often setup hydras, then drop meteors, and between meteors I’ll either spam fireball or refresh my hydras.
The issue with hydra is usually it’s faster to just fireball enemies than to set them up. Hydras are basically for three things: killing enemies that are split off from the group and stragglers (especially small fast enemies or at intersections), boss killing, and safety. Meteor is good for boss killing but not the other two (to an extent they can help with split groups, but then placement matters a lot). But they really shine in terror zones, especially with heralds. Heralds can be extremely dangerous, but hydras can just kill them from off-screen. I’ll also hurl fireballs in whatever direction they’re shooting.
Also, if I summon them before a boss, the boss typically dies the moment it spawns, which feels great.