Hydra Headhunter

emo posts aside... before Dynamis-Xarc we decided we wanted a crack at Hydra. We thought it might be a 30 minute fight, ended up being about an hour. It was a fun/annoying fight. The fun came in that I had never fought Hydra much less seen him in game. The annoying part was actually fighting the stupid thing.

First off he's immense. I can't even begin to explain his size. Someone long ago took his model and Vrtra's model from model viewer... let's just say Hydra's tail is a tad bigger than Vrtra's entire body. Hydra is big. He had 3 heads, and he hits fast. We landed elegy a few times but not much else. I came on RDM/WHM to help out with the curing/hastes/refreshes and boy did he keep my hands full. On top of curing the PLD/NINs and hasting them I had to poisona, paralyna, and erase the curse put on by Hydra's AoE. The weird thing about Hydra is he's huge, his AoE hurts BAD, but his AoE range is very small. The only time I got hit by AoE is when he drew me in.

The fight itself is like Ultima. Pretty much the first 70% is a breeze. Once you get into the 30s and 20s he starts spamming these AoE moves, some of which erase all your buffs. Not fun. We took him from 100% to 8% in about 27 minutes, but then he spammed some stuff too fast, mages were low on MP, and all our tanks died. Some people spoke of coming back tomorrow but the leaders said screw that, and we stayed. He regenned (while we were lightly using melee/DoT on him) from 8% to 42% before tanks were unweakened. When he re-grows his heads the regen speeds up exponentially. We started back up and went back at him. With about 10 minutes we had him to 15%. Due to real life issues the main tank's RDM had to afk so I jumped in the tank party and refreshed the PLDs, BRD, WHM, and NIN/DRK. Because of this I didn't watch Hydra's HP all that much but it seemed that Melena on WAR was doing some serious damage because he was getting more cures than anyone. Before I knew it people on Vent were saying "8%, now we push" and the WS's started coming out.

He was down to one head and with each WS we were taking off 1%, and eventually it took a Mighty Strikes to finish him off. This was the 1st kill for many of us there, myself included. People say Hydra is worthless and all, but his synthable stuff seems to have some value. Drops were everything. Hydra Fang x2, Hydra Meat x2, Hydra Scale, and a Berserker's Torque... hell even the Sirius Axe dropped. No one will want that stupid torque (Latent so far is -50HP for +1TP) but that axe isn't half bad for a BST in a party. The DMG base is 43 and increases +2 for every person in your party capping out at 53. That's a awesome axe, only matched by the Guttler (final BST relic axe).

Oh yeah, I forgot to give a big congrats to one of our PLDs, a good guy named Zartan for getting his Shadow Mantle last night. Grats bro. LightSpirit!