Hydra Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Hydra Sorcerer Endgame Guide! Season 9 introduced a brand new Hydra-focused unique: Ophidian Iris. This item seems absolutely insane at a first glance, with a fully upgraded Ancestral weapon, your Hydras can have up to 18 heads so this item turns that into a 15x damage multiplier! However, your Hydras also now have 6 times less heads and, compared to a Legendary Amulet, you are missing an offensive aspect and potentially 3-4 ranks to a good passive. With all of the above taken into account this item only buffs the damage output of your Hydras by about 50% but it also does one more thing. It makes your Hydras shoot explosive projectiles that deal AoE damage!
Serpentine Aspect is another major source of damage for the build which also determines your playstyle. You need to stack a lot of Mana and then cast a single Hydra, consuming it all. Then you kinda just run around supporting that Hydra and regenerating your Mana until you're ready to cast the next one. Since you can only have 2 Hydras at once and they last 10 seconds, this results in a fairly slow and relaxed playstyle where you don't have to press that many buttons if you don't want to.
Hydra Sorcerer is not very dependent on any Unique items. Obviously Ophidian Iris is great, but early on even the base Hydra is pretty good.
Requirements for this build
- Conjuration Augments manual (any rarity)
- Serpentine Aspect
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Sorcerer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Season Theme
The Season 9 theme is the Sins of the Horadrim. This season allows you to craft unique Horadric Spells using three different components: a Catalyst, an Infusion, and three Arcana. You earn Catalysts and Infusions through the Seasonal Questline, and Arcana can be found while exploring Nightmare Dungeons. You choose a Skill as the trigger for your Horadric Spell. Once in Torment I or higher, Horadric Jewels can be crafted, which replace the Gems in your Jewelry, adding additional power to your build.
Endgame Horadric Spell
Catalyst
You use Disintegrate as it has a long duration, short cooldown and is incredibly reliable. As long as you are positioned between the enemy and the Disintegrate, it applies its effects to the target.
Infusion
You use Smoldering Ember as the Infusion to transform Cold or Lightning damage bonus we get from Enchantment Master into Fire.
Arcana
- Tranquil Stone - This Arcana gives you access to high uptime on Unstoppable "for free".
- Fractured Core helps you deal with extremely annoying damage reduction Champions, which is especially important for this build because you can't directly choose who you attack.
- Bloody Charm is effectively a damage multiplier that works on everything besides bosses.
Optional Arcana
- If you're killing enemies too fast to make execute effect from the Bloody Charm useful, you can replace it with Floaty Bobble for more mobility.
Best-in-Slot Horadric Jewels
- Idol From Below - Offers a terrific stat line and periodically spawns Elites for additional Pit progression.
- Scornful Light - a straightforward 1.2x damage multiplier.
- Reverie Horn - an excellent jewel for any Summon build when you kill enemies fast.
- Tyrant Bane - an excellent Jewel for any DoT build when you don't kill enemies fast. Since Hydra Sorcerer is both a DoT and a Summon build, you can swap between the two depending on the content you face.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Hydra is your main source of damage. To be even more precise, the Roaring Hydra upgrade is where most of your damage comes from. This build focuses entirely on the Burning damage because it has better multipliers and can completely ignore Crit Chance.
- Inferno is another key skill that groups up enemies, makes them Vulnerable, and boosts your damage by 50%.
- Teleport is your mobility spell. Unfortunately there's no place for it on the skill bar, so you can only use it via Enchantment.
- Ice Armor and Flame Shield are standard defensive spells, with the former also providing some Mana regen and damage via Storm Swell Aspect.
- Invoked Familiar gives a small damage bonus.
- Finally, Ice Blades give you some extra attack speed.
- Since these last two spells are also Summons, they give you more Primordial Binding stacks to buff the damage of the Hydra.
Skill Rotation
- Use Ice Blades and Familiar as often as possible to keep up Primordial Binding stacks.
- Keep Ice Armor active at all times.
- Save Flame Shield for emergencies.
- Once you find enemies, cast Hydra and Inferno on top of them.
- Don't cast Hydra again until your Mana fully regenerates.
- When your Mana is full cast the next Hydra. Keep going through this cycle while also spamming Inferno until enemies die.
Enchantment Slots
- Teleport Enchantment provides extra mobility. It's always nice to have, regardless of the build. Since this build doesn't have Teleport on the skill bar we need it to use this spell at all.
- Ice Blades Enchantment gives you more Ice Blades, which means more Attack Speed from Invoked Ice Blades and more Primordial Binding stacks.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Sorcerer Class Overview.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Hydra Sorcerer Endgame Paragon
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Tactician
- Flamefeeder
- Conjurer
- Pyromaniac
- Elementalist
To Level 46
- Conjurer
- Tactician
- Elementalist
- Pyromaniac
- Flamefeeder
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Hydra Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Nagu + Ohm - gives 15% damage with 100% uptime.
- Igni + Thul - gives 15% damage and activates Hoarfrost passive.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cir, Cem, and Lith are fairly good Invocations that you can use as a substitute.
- Ceh is very useful when you don't have enough CDR to maintain 10 Primordial Binding stacks just by spamming Conjurations. It's also nice in the early game for Vulnerable application when you can't just Inferno everything you see.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Subo
Subo passively gives us a maphack which is so nice to play with it's hard to use any other merc after trying it once. On top of that he provides some extra damage through Scorched Earth.
Reinforcement: Raheir
We choose Bastion with Injured trigger for its massive damage reduction which can save our life in sticky situations.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Hydra Sorcerer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed, and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 10+ Extra Hydra heads
- 200+ Maximum Mana
- 10 seconds or less Inferno cooldown
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 75%+
- 6,000+ Life
In order to reach the above stat thresholds it might be necessary to use consumables:
- Elixir of Resourcefulness II
- Song of the Mountain
- Soothing Spices
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Hydra Sorcerer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Hydra Sorcerer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 75+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
- You don't have a lot of CDR early so spamming Ice Blades and Familiar won't get you very far. Instead, Ceh rune combined with any good Rune of Ritual such as Cir will give you all the Primordial Binding stacks you need.
- This leaves you with 2 free skill slots, letting you get a second Teleport button and Enhanced Firewall in case you need some extra damage. Familiar Enchantment lets you benefit from the Invoked Familiar buff without having to cast the skill.
- Since early leveling is generally speedfarm-y in nature you might find yourself running out of Mana often. Poc Lum runeword and/or "Chance to Restore Primary Resource" roll on your gloves or weapon can solve that problem.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 75%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- This build uses several Unique items. Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Ophidian Iris are self-explanatory, but Axial Conduit looks a bit out of place since this build doesn't use Chain Lightning in any way shape or form. This item is used only for its "Resource Generation and Maximum" stat which can greatly increase the potency of your Serpentine Aspect. Damage Reduction, of course, is also nice but it's not super important. All the other stats and the unique effect itself are completely useless and should be ignored.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- The most important Mythic Unique for this build is Harlequin Crest. It gives you obscene amounts of CDR letting you switch to the endgame setup with Ice Blades and Familiar on the skill bar. This gives you tons of Attack Speed from Invoked Ice Blades and more damage from Ohm rune that replaces Ceh.
- Shroud of False Death simply provides all-around useful offensive and defensive bonuses and doesn't change your build.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
Flickerstep is a very good item for any serious Sorcerer speedfarming build. What makes this item so good is not the stats on it and not even the unique power but the implicit roll that makes your attacks reduce Evade cooldown by 2.5 seconds, which is 1 second more than what you can normally have on Boots. However, that 1 second makes all the difference. With enough CDR, Teleport Ranks (and sometimes Enchantment Master board) we can reach a point where we can Teleport after every attack!
Aside from that, speedfarming version of the build goes back to Ceh rune to max out Primordial Binding and replaces Familiar with Teleport.
Unfortunately, Hydra is not well suited for speedfarming because each cast consumes all your Mana. A roll of "Chance to Restore Primary Resource" on your Gloves can somewhat mitigate that issue, but even then if you spam Hydra too much it won't attack immediately upon spawning so you just can't go as fast as other Sorcerer builds. That being said, it's still a Sorcerer build so it can speedfarm very well, but it can't quite reach that point of "Teleport 3 times per second while oneshotting everything on screen as you go". On the bright side, it deals more damage than other Sorcerer builds so if you're farming the Pit for XP you could go for a higher tier.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
In order to maximize the damage output of the build you need to do several changes:
- Hail of Verglas replaces Harlequin Crest. This item gives a lot of Intelligence and double damage. Since this build has a lot of downtime between Hydra casts, it's easy to shoot Ice Shards here and there in order to keep up the buff.
- Without extreme amounts of CDR you can't really rely on Ice Blades so the almighty Ceh rune comes back once again. In place of Ice Blades you put Ice Shards to proc the helmet and instead of their Enchantment you use Firewall for a bit of extra damage.
- Finally, you can replace Flame Shield with Glinting Fire Bolt for another damage boost.
Paragon
To maximize your damage replace Enchantment Master board with Elemental Summoner.
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:
- Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
- Use defensive consumables.
- Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
- Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.
- Replace Scornful Light with Horadric Crest.
- Replace Fractured Core with Invigorating Helix.
Hydra does not get extra heads from Weapon Temper or from Ophidian Iris's implicit stats. It always spawns with 5 Heads, or rather 3 Heads and +200% extra damage. This alone makes it 5 times weaker than your regular Hydras. On top of that it has a conflict with Serpentine Aspect because it spawns after you already spend all your Mana and doesn't get any bonus damage.
Mechanics
Each Hydra head will attack the closest enemy at a constant rate that scales with the player's Attack Speed.
Hydra attacks immediately upon spawn but casting Hydra repeatedly doesn't make them attack faster than they normally would.
Summary
The Hydra Sorcerer offers a slow and relaxed way to play Sorcerer. While a fully optimized playstyle can be as involved as any other build, you can get 70-80% of its efficiency simply by pressing 1 button every 5 seconds. If typical for a Sorcerer high-octane 400 APM gameplay is not for you, give Hydra a shot!
Credits
Written by Northwar