Blizzard / Hydra (and Siegebreaker farming)

[LeminaAusa]

Does cold blooded stack with glass cannon? If they do I guess you'll want illusionist/glass cannon/cold blooded now.

[magicrectangle]

yeah it does.

[flAked]

I have a Storm Crow with +6% Lightning damage and I'm wondering how the Lightning Hydra compares to the Venom one, considering the 6% increase?

Regarding crit, I believe the Lightning one does, where as the Venom Hydro does not, correct?

[magicrectangle]

Venom hydra doesn't get yellow numbers, but its damage benefits from crit chance anyway.

Lightning hydra blows. It only hits one target. I can't think of a use for it, ever - maybe in PvP because it doesn't fire a missile with travel time, so it should always hit?

Venom hydra just does so much more damage than any other hydra. The next runner up is arcane hydra, but venom is still better.

[flAked]

Do you know if the +6% count towards a weapon with lightning damage? If not I'm wondering if I should retire my Storm Crow, as the only spell that would profit from it is Shock Pulse now.

It has decent stats with 85int/vit, 3.5 crit, 9 ap/crit and 4% against elites- but I sort of hold back on upgrading my helm slot because of the 6% increase and I don't know if that is justified if I switch to Venom Hydra and only have Shock Pulse buffed a bit.

[Gnome]

Can someone review/update this build in light of the 1.0.4 changes. i.e.e people now saying arcane hydra better than venom.

[galzohar]

Hard to tell without more extensive testing, but other than potentially swapping venom hydra to arcane hydra the build is pretty much the same and plays the same way. Except with difficulty being nerfed over and over, prismatic armor becomes more and more attractive compared to force armor (especially assuming you're farming something you can farm effectively), but as always it's a matter of damage taken per hit relative to your HP.

[Kurki]

I swapped Arcane Hydra into this build (a3 Inferno) to test it a little, it works very well against tight packs of normal mobs, even when they're moving, which is where Venom Hydra can be problematic. Against high HP elites, I think Venom is still a little bit better over the duration of the fight, especially if you don't they're not Fast or Teleport or have some inbuilt problematic movement skill.