There are 7 Hydra chests, they are:
Hydra Chests
- Novice – Hydra Normal Difficulty -- contains 2 Artifacts
- Adept – Hydra Difficulty: Normal + Hard -- contains 3 Artifacts
- Warrior – Hydra Difficulty: Normal + Hard + Brutal -- contains 3 Artifacts
- Knight – Hydra Difficulty: Brutal + Nightmare -- contains 4 Artifacts
- Guardian – Hydra Difficulty: Brutal + Nightmare -- contains 6 Artifacts
- Master – out of scope for this post -- contains 6 Artifacts
- Grandmaster – out of scope for this post -- contains 7 Artifacts
Naturally, the higher the chest the better the rewards, and, on top of that, sometimes it is better to get 1 higher chest than 2 of lower ones (with 1 exception):
The Cut off points – chests to target:
Novice chest is the worst, not because it is the lowest one, but because it can drop 4 star equipment, which is completely useless. It has 25% chance to drop a 4 star Rare and another 18% chance to drop a 4 star Epic. This chest exists only in the Normal Difficulty.
The next group is Adept and Warrior chests. These have a 22% to 25% chance to drop 5 star equipment and another 27% to 30% chance to drop 6 star equipment. That means roughly half the time these will give Rare equipment which is not ideal. However, they do start dropping 5 star and 6 star legendary equipment at 5% to 10%. Still, the chance of Rare is very high and makes these chests less desirable.
These 2 chests exist in Normal, Hard and Brutal difficulties.
Knight chest is the next “gamechanger” because it no longer drops 5 star rare equipment, although, it still maintains the chance to drop 6 star rare equipment. However, this, alongside the small chances for Mythic (0.75%), an 8.21% chance to drop 5 star legendary equipment and a 2.99% chance to drop 6 star legendary equipment makes it significantly better than the previous chests.
If you have a choice to go for 1 Knight chest versus going for 2 Adept or Warrior chests I think it would be better to go for the Knight one.
An exception to this is if you are still collecting Mithrala fragments in which chase the quantity of chests is important. Adept and Warrior would drop 1.9 fragments while Knight would drop 2.38 so in this case 2 smaller chests are better than 1 higher one.
You’d need 20.4M damage on Hydra Hard or 19.6M damage on Hydra Brutal to get the Knight Chest. This is very much doable once you understand how Hydra works and build a dedicated team for it.
Lastly, the Guardian chest is the main goal to reach for most players who are able to do Hydra up to Brutal (Currently not many (out of the entire player-base) are able to do even Brutal, so Nightmare difficulty and it’s Master and Grandmaster chests are out of scope for this article).
What makes the Guardian chest special is the complete removal of Rare equipment pieces. This chest will drop only Epic and Legendary items with a slight chance of Mythic. The majority should be Epic pieces because it has a large 34.45% chance to drop 5 star Epic equipment and 46.22% to drop 6 star Epic equipment. Together that makes it a little over 80% chance that the player will receive Epic equipment.
When it comes to Legendary items there is a slight increase versus previous chests:
- 5 star lego: Adept 4%, Warrior 8%, Knight 8.21% and Guardian 10.08%.
But there is a much bigger increase for 6 star lego drops:
- 6 star lego: Adept 1%, Warrior 2%, Knight 2.99% and Guardian 6.72%.
The remaining couple of percentage points is for Mythic equipment.
You’d need 29.4M damage on Hydra Brutal to get the Guardian Chest. This is much harder to achieve than the Knight Chest but it definitely can be done.