In this RAID blog post I share with you my record to date on Hydra Hard reaching 33 million damage with over 150 turns battle.
Below you will find all the related screenshots and info from me. Content:
- Team composition
- Team & Damage pictures
- Champion stats & Equipment picture
- Applicable Hydra rotation / starting Heads
- Role of Geomancer & Tips
- Role of Arbiter & Tips
- Role of Godseeker Aniri & Tips
- Role of Lady Kimi & Tips
- Role of Inquisitor Shamael & Tips
- Role of Mithrala Lifebane & Tips
- Masteries of all Champions
Team Composition:
The team I used was (below the pictures are full explanations):
- Geomancer (team leader) - tanky lifesteal build
- Arbiter - not dedicated to Hydra; Arena build, i.e. main focus to be fast to go first in Arena
- Godseeker Aniri - not dedicated to Hydra; backup reviver / support built for beating Bommal
- Lady Kimi - powerful speed control / sometimes (not often) blocks buffs
- Inquisitor Shamael - not dedicated to Hydra; offensive build I use to snipe tough enemies in the Doom Tower
- Mithrala - new champion for my account with zero books (waiting for CvC), unfinished masteries and not fully upgraded equipment.
Team & Damage Picture 1 of 2
Team & Damage Picture 2 of 2
Team Stats
Here you can see the summary of stats and equipment of each champion:
Hydra Rotation
The current rotation is (starting Hydra Heads):
- Head of Decay (cleanses all debuffs on Hydra Heads)
- Head of Torment (puts fear on you)
- Head of Mischief (steals buffs)
- Head of Wrath (massive damage dealer)
Role of Geomancer & Tips
He has several functions:
- Main damage dealer. In this role he has to never die and keep putting HP Burn on all enemies except Torment. For this you need to build him as a tank and I found Lifesteal gear to be very effective in keeping him alive.
- Team Protector: He protects the entire team every turn with his passive damage reduction. For this to be effective you need to put him in the correct position. I see sometimes players putting Geomancer in the middle of the team or at the end - this is wrong. He can only protect allies who come after him in the team position, therefore try to place him as the leader or at least in the 2nd position slot. This protection is significant, it is like having a 15% Strengthen buff at all times which cannot be removed.
- Other:
- Warmaster mastery is very important. It adds to his active damage as well as being critical in allowing Lifesteal gear to heal him fully.
- Him important stats are SPD, HP, ACC. Players who have better equipment than mine can either boost his HP/DEF or boost RES - both of those will help him survive better.
- I don't think SPD needs to be boosted too much as he is already supported by Shamael in this rotation.
Role of Arbiter & Tips
While the main role of the Arbiter is revive/boost she also has to do a couple of important things:
(my Arbiter is not built for Hydra; she would perform a lot better if she was. She is simply in my fastest SPD gear for Arena, which unfortunately is not fast enough)
- Always attacking Torment no matter what is happening to keep boosting Team damage.
- Cleanse buffs from enemies (my Arbiter is built for Arena with my best speed gear which is not that great so she does not have the required accuracy which is why mine fails to cleanse often, but it is still her role).
- If the battle allows it exceptionally change from attacking Torment to try to place Weaken on decapitated Hydra Head(s).
Role of Godseeker Aniri & Tips
- She is the backup reviver especially for when Arbiter gets eaten.
- Tip: her revive should not be used most of the time. Let Arbiter do the job and keep it ready for emergencies.
- Tip: Her revive also resets skills and this may be needed for Shamael to do his big attack, die and then revive and do big attack again.
- Her heal supports but is not critical to the Team.
- Tip: she should also attack Torment in most cases to support Team Damage.
I think of her as a more "background" champion I don't pay much attention to but who supports the Team to do the job.
Role of Lady Kimi & Tips
Her role is to boost the Team while slowing down the enemy and sometimes put block buffs. She should be used smartly:
- Tip: Don't just use all her skills as they become available.
- The AOE Slow is used most often but even this you should only use if the Hydra Heads debuff has expired or will expire in 1 turn. So sometimes you don't need to use this skill even if it becomes available and use it 1 or 2 turns later as needed.
- The AOE Boost, on the other hand is much more tactical:
- I almost never use it.
- I observed that Mischief waits for you to use it before he steals buffs. It's like he knows about it (maybe they programmed AI like that).
- When I don't use it Mischief steals buffs a lot less.
- If Mischief steals only 1 buff then I will use it to boost the team and block buff on Mischief.
- If Mischief steals more than 1 buff I will not use it. I will wait for him to spread it to his friends and then I will block buff on all. But this happens very rarely as I explained above.
Role of Inquisitor Shamael & Tips
Shamel has 1 or 2 roles depending on your choice.
Many Shamaels I know are built more tanky and with Toxic gear and therefore they have only 1 role. I did not like that so my Shamael is built as a damage dealer (sniper) with Giant Slayer instead of Warmaster.
My Shamael is not dedicated to Hydra; I built him actually for Doom Tower and I just use him in that build for Hydra as well.
- His main role is to remove the Fear cast by Head of Torment and boosting the Team Leader. Although his skill says he should boost the whole Team there is a mistake in the game so he only boosts the Leader.
- This boost supports the main damage dealer (Geomancer) to place more HP Burns.
- His second role is being the secondary damage dealer and rescuing allies eaten by the Hydra.
- His A1 can either go for damage or boosting. I usually use it for boosting (i.e. Torment).
- His primary A2 target is Head of Decay. That is the worst Hydra Head in the game and is the one you want to kill first. However, if a champion is eaten then Shamael has to redirect to rescue operation.
- When there is a decapitated Head then there is a difficult decision to be made. With 4 buffs my Shamael can do 200k x 3 = 600k damage to Hydra, but this takes damage away from killing other Hydra Heads. So depending on how the battle is going a different decision needs to be made. For example if Head of Wrath is in his "angry mode" it is probably best to attack him as during that time his counter will not rise. Or if Decay is near to death it is best to take it out and not let it cleanse all the debuffs, etc.
Role of Mithrala Lifebane & Tips
Many people have been getting Mithrala lately since everyone started doing Hydra at the same time and after collecting her fragments everyone is summoning her at similar time too.
Mine has no books at all. I will wait for the next CvC to use books (Wait Shadow Legends), so I think I could have performed even better than I did.
Mithralas roles, how I used her / tips:
- Her main role is supporting the Team but this is then broken into 3 roles:
- Role 1: With her A1 she copies Arbiter in only attacking Torment no matter if this is needed or not. We are trying to support Team Damage as much as possible.
- Role 2: Cleanse and protect (her A3). Since she is unbooked I tried to keep this skill for emergencies only as I know it would take a long time until it is ready again. What I define as emergency in this case is (A) if the team is under full stacks of poison + either lower health or other debuffs too (B) when the team is low on health and Arbiter's heal has already been used and/or Wrath is about to hit hard.
- Role 3: Hex and ATK/DEF buffs (her A2). This is broken down into 2 sub-roles:
- (A) if there is no danger or if Mischief has eaten someone: then if I want to target / kill Head of Mischief I will use the Hex allowing everyone in the team to attack Mischief without the random redirection.
- (B) if there is danger: by this I mostly mean Head of Wrath counter is coming to 15 for his big attack. In this case I will use this skill to get the DEF buff allowing me to take much less damage (remember I don't have any ATK down on this team).
So despite her having 5 turn cooldowns without books I did not always use her skills as soon as they were available.
Tip: You can also time Godseeker's buff extension with Mithrala's skills to get more use out of them.
Masteries
Also to share the masteries:
I hope you found this post interesting and useful. If you want other RAID players to benefit from my posts feel free to Like/Share my RAID Shadow Legends blog.