Hydra vs Fireball

Hi, I'm somewhat enjoying the

Hydra sorc (although it's probably not optimal in any way), and want to ask whether it's better or worse compared to

Fireball

Hydra seems to max out at about 4k dmg x 18 heads,

Fireball is about 20k with about 3 yards blast radius.. not sure about the attack / cast rate

Hydra is great for standoff of course, but it's so annoying how many shots miss the mark against moving targets

Or shall I just respect to blizz?..

Hydra is much slower. You must cast it first and then wait for the hydras to fire multiple times. They only cast firebolts with rather low damage.

Fireball's damage is much higher. You can get 15k damage easily with some +skill items, while your hydras will noly do about 3k.

Hydra is a safer playstyle, but far slower and, just in my opinion, boring. A bit like Blizzard, which is strong but also rather slow. But

Hydra is even slower.
However, you can easily combine

Fireball and

Hydra. Tele, cast hydras, then fire your balls.
Cast rate is the same for

Fireball and

Hydra, only some light skills like lightning have a slower cast rate.

mikelessar wrote: 1 day ago

Hydra is much slower. You must cast it first and then wait for the hydras to fire multiple times. They only cast firebolts with rather low damage.

Fireball's damage is much higher. You can get 15k damage easily with some +skill items, while your hydras will noly do about 3k.

Hydra is a safer playstyle, but far slower and, just in my opinion, boring. A bit like Blizzard, which is strong but also rather slow. But

Hydra is even slower.
However, you can easily combine

Fireball and

Hydra. Tele, cast hydras, then fire your balls.
Cast rate is the same for

Fireball and

Hydra, only some light skills like lightning have a slower cast rate.

thanks.. are you sure about the cast rate? because if it's really the same

Hydra is better for single target killing with 18*~4 = ~72k vs

Fireball's ~20k
but I have a feeling my sorc with 105+ CR casts faster than hydras spit..

Only 6 hydras/heads fire at the same time. So only if all 6 hydras fire at the same time at the same monster, the damage is comparable to a

Fireball, but the

Fireball is much quicker becasue you directly attack the monsters and Nihli dies in like 2 or 3 hits.

Your feeling is correct, casting balls directly on the enemy is faster than casting all the hydras and waiting.

AFAIK Hydras has fixed firing rate and that can't be buffed in any way. With

Fireball your FCR is important but even with lower FCR it can still do massive effective dmg. The only thing that FCR does affect with

Hydra is speed of "summoning" them, correct me if I'm wrong.

I really love the

Fireball/

Meteor aka Fire Sorc build. It's waaaay too strong -- one of those builds where you can literally run "naked" and still progress normally thru the game. I had some situations where I teled into nasty packs, died and whenever I came back for corpse and decided to clear everything along the path she could do it without any problems (yes ofc it's slower but you don't get a feeling that you are struggling).

Don't know how

Hydra is dependent on the gear tho...

Tried

Hydra only once and from what I remember they are quite finicky to get to work properly while with

Fireball you can just spam + there's a nice aoe.

ganseng wrote: 1 day ago

but I have a feeling my sorc with 105+ CR casts faster than hydras spit..

Each

Hydra head shoots at an average rate of about ~0.73 shots per second. With all 6 Hydras up, that's about 13.2 firebolts per second. With all Hydras up, the DPS is about 6-7% better than than an 105 FCR

Fireball. But

Fireball also has AoE effect, of course, so it's hard to compare numbers directly when there's more than one enemy.

mikelessar wrote: 1 day ago

casting balls directly on the enemy is faster than casting all the hydras and waiting.

But you don't just wait - you

Fireball after hydras are up. Yes, in normal farming gameplay, it's a bit situational if it's worth it to cast any Hydras or just spam

Fireball directly, but vs single high HP enemies (bosses) it's faster to spawn Hydras and then spam Fireballs, than to only use

Fireball. It depends on what you're up against, how spread out the enemies are, etc, if it's better with

Hydra +

Fireball or only

Fireball. For example, vs dclone, you can shave off several seconds by using both compared to sticking to only

Fireball. And that's including the ~2 seconds spent summoning Hydras.

You're right, Doo, FCR only helps with casting the

Hydra.

I also think that

Meteor

Fireball is the fastest and strongest (Sunder) Fire Sorc. You spam

Fireball 99% of the time, but sometimes you cast the meteors for some high life bosses/elites.

For

Baal waves it is the opposite. Just spam the Ground with meteors. The burning meteors on the Ground actually stack and they last like...well, i don't know, a minute or longer? If you can guess where the waves will spawn, you can get 15 meteors on the Ground by then. The waves die from burning even faster than from the meteors. For

Baal: Tele to him, cast

Meteor once (will land in 3 seconds), cast static about 5 times, then spam

Fireball. The

Meteor hit,

Baal dies. Very, very fast and safe Baa kills.

If you have ever played

Fireball

Meteor, you never go back to

Hydra, although

Hydra remains a good ladder start build. But it's not the best fire endgame build. Even DClone I rather want to hit with meteors than with hydras.

thank you all! so it's better to respec the points into

Meteor I guess and only cast hydras when I need extra dps on boss or kill some nasty stuff like souls from a safe distance.. but is dps from

Fireball /

Meteor sufficient to just stand and spam e.g. last two

Baal waves? i only have -12% fire resistance on my Flickering Flame atm..

Hydra also has a noticeable target acquisition delay.
Furthermore, you can't spam

Hydra, as your current attacks disappear when you exceed the limit.
And considering how many of their attacks miss fast-moving targets, they're only good at the beginning. If yours sorceress are currently your only character, and without proper gear, the goal isn't to kill quickly—it's to kill safely, albeit longer.

Fireball

Meteor is sufficient even with low minus enemy fire res. But for beefy monsters like Diablo,

Baal you should definately begin with static until you have 50% of the monster's life down. And as I said,

Meteor's burning helps a lot with

Baal waves.

If you have some "money", buying or making a Phoenix shield would be huge (much more damage and survivability)

Thanks again to all - now I can confirm first hand that

Fireball feels much faster and more gratifying. Damn shame Trang\Ouls + 18 to

Fireball doesn't apply to sorc - seemed like such a clever idea
About static - if I have to choose due to slow handling between static and

Lower Resist, what is better?
And what lvl do I have to be to buy a

Wand with lvl 3

Lower Resist charges?

Sorceress doesn't need

Lower Resist.

ganseng wrote: 1 day ago

Thanks again to all - now I can confirm first hand that

Fireball feels much faster and more gratifying. Damn shame Trang\Ouls + 18 to

Fireball doesn't apply to sorc - seemed like such a clever idea
About static - if I have to choose due to slow handling between static and

Lower Resist, what is better?
And what lvl do I have to be to buy a

Wand with lvl 3

Lower Resist charges?

Trang Oul's set bonus for a sorc is +3 to

Fireball. But that's not worth it. If you really want to prioritize damage, go for a +3

Fireball

Ormus. Otherwise, a simple Vipermagi or a CoH, if you can afford it, is much better because of the better defensive stats.

I wouldn't like to wear a

Wand on offhand, that's where I'm holding my CTA. So I have never tested it. Static is very reliable but your range as a fire sorc is not big, so will have to get close.

It really depends on what you're after. Or if you want to truly maximize your capabilities..just go for both.

Hydra is one of the safest (lvling) builds in the game, simply because you can reliably kill just about everything before it even knows you're there. Precious few other classes/builds compete with, let alone exceed that level of safety (trapsins being one of the few even safer alternatives).

Adding to that, a well built

Hydra sorc is one of the strongest single-target DPS builds out there. Even in a hybrid approach (i.e. gearing to properly cover FB as well) you can easily push past 5k per hit damage with >50% -res, not yet counting your merc's Infinity.
Against a target actually worth going after (e.g. DClone) that gives you typically a bit over 7k per hit damage after resistances. "AI pausing" tends to be negligible against such isolated targets, leaving you with the default (and unchangeable) 12+15=27 frames per attack per head. Or right around 6.7k DPS per head. With 6 Hydras and 3 heads each, that's ~121k DPS single target or a dead DClone in just over 5 seconds (plus summon time since you can't pre-cast for that one).
And since

Hydra does that without you casting anything, you're free to throw in

Static Field and/or

Fireball to speed things up even further, then giving you a dead DClone in ~2-3 seconds.

The obvious limitation is that

Hydra shots don't have an AoE effect, leaving you with exceptional damage but only against single targets, making it kind of bad for general farming. Not only due to the lack of AoE clearing but also because every time you move, you need to re-cast them. That's especially obvious in places like the cow level. Plus with more targets, you tend to get a bit more AI pausing on top.

Fireball on the other hand leaves you a bit lower on the single target side of things (albeit still quite high) but adds an AoE effect and requires no pre-casting setup, giving you an actually worthwhile way to clear herds of cows and the like. It still doesn't compete with proper AoE builds like javazons and such but it is up there.

Combining the two (which you absolutely can as a sorc) tends to give you all the goodness of

Fireball while also granting you an exceptional boost in single target DPS for the few targets that do make that worth it. Or just a more chill play-style alternative for when you feel like it. Ultimately, that leaves you with one of the best single target and small group clearing builds but still has you lacking against larger, more spread out groups (again, mainly cows) due to the limited AoE range of

Fireball.

Schnorki wrote: 1 day ago

It really depends on what you're after. Or if you want to truly maximize your capabilities..just go for both.

Summed up perfectly. At clvl 94 you can have all

Fireball synergies maxed and

Hydra maxed with all the same synergies. Unless you are going for two types of damage, then you can max both and use them situationally. You can drop a bunch of hydras around a corner to start clearing iffy sections or when a bunch of souls show up, drop some hydras and bail.

Hydra is also great for dolls.

I've been doing

Key and

Baal runs a lot recently with a pure fire sorc and it just melts both. Set up the hydras, drop a bunch of meteors and when the wave spawns, spam fireballs. In Hell P1 the first couple of waves drop before you even start fireballing.

Unless you're going for split damage, max both and play a little to see which one is better at a given time.

At first glance I was a bit confused about the title, since I would argue that you use both

Maybe the most versatile sorc you can make - in my oppinion - is the

Hydra / fire ball version.

Not the strongest. Not the fastest. Except when you go boss killing

Go for dps and you will lay waste those

Meteor and blizz builds - I have no idea why this build ranks so low in terms of density killing - fire ball wrecks monsters just as fast as any

Meteor or blizz build on p8 - combined with the support of hydras ofc.

And the bonus is that none of the others comes even close to killing bosses like

Hydra sorc.

For me, the most important thing is to make the best DPS you can get your hands on - reaching the 105 FCR and 86 FHR breakpoint.

My setup is pure DPS and I love this build more than my trapsin - because it provides so much more "action" than the laid back trapsin.

You dont need to put up all 6 hydras for every 30 yards you move forward - its all situational if you ask me. Use 2-3 hydras while you advance and then just evaporize with that insane

Fireball dmg -

Ormus +3 fire ball is the one you want.

This is the only build i use

Holy Freeze merc on.

This is one of many builds that has survived my rigorous testing - the final "cut" was between trapsin - which i have hold so dear for so long - but the action you get from playing this

Hydra sorc is just much more fun.

I call this build "a trapsin on drugs"

I still have all the GG trapsin gear and it may be revived ... for the ... I dunno know, maybe 5th time

Kudos for playing

Hydra !

For me it's

Hydra + orb (if you want tri-element counting

Static Field, i.e. before sunder) or

Fireball+

Meteor (if you want max damage single element, i.e. after sunder).

Both are fun. First is better for leveling, second is faster in endgame.

I wouldn't add

Hydra to a

Fireball sorc since nothing lives long enough when properly geared but I haven't tried it, so I might be wrong. I find other things more valuable, e.g.

Enchant for Merc or energie shield (read 20 in

Telekinesis and ES from Memory or CTA staff).