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Is Hydroid considered bad or weak?


mosaickle
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20 minutes ago, Atylia said:

Or just 'boring'? Apparently he has a rep of being boring

He's both weak and boring. 


His first ability doesn't do any damage, doesn't have any meaningful special effects and is pretty much random / inconsistent. Even if it wasn't random it's damage still is hilariously bad. 
His second ability - totally pointless with parkour 2.0. 
His third ability - useful here and there, but pretty much forces you to AFK and nullifiers is massive inconvenience and a random factor for this ability. 
His 4th abiltiy - would be good if it actually worked. Most of the time tentacles can't even hit the target. And even if they visually hit them then there is no damage. 
Best abilities - 3 and 4. 3 - AFk. 4 = buggy. Nothing much to use besides those. And even then it's mostly for stationary gameplay. In running missions his usefulness decreases. 

Edited by WingsOfGryphin
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I personally think Hydroid is kinda fun to use, but objectively he lacks any form of scaling, and as stated above he is incredibly inconsistent.

Additionally, I don't think there is anything that his abilities do that another frame doesn't do better (and why use an augment for loot when Nekros does it already).

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He is bad only because his skill kit is just badly executed. Barrage hits too randomly, tentacles often rise in the places they should not be. Puddle deal non existant damage and is nuisance to teammates that could not help him killing those who drowned. Dash wave is only emergency gtfo ability, and it suffers when you mod for 1 and 4 to be more efficent by cutting the range.

And he is not ugly. I like his seaweed pirate design.

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I really, really like Hydroid. He is not weak, nor is he bad... The problem is usability. I (like most players) separate/use frames considering the mission involved, and unfortunatelly he does not excel at anything. He is fair in a multitude of tasks, but not optimal for any specific one. Ence people tend to leave him behind. But, because I love his Undertown ability, I tend to use him in Interception missions... Unfortunatelly he does "nada" while in that form. Also, I love to "UNLEASH THE KRAKEN" on those Corpus Nullifiers. :D

I think that a decent rework and a cool deluxe skin would make him more "atractive" for the majority of players.

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Hydroid is actually one of the better frames in the game. Hes my 3rd favorite frame (behind volt and atlas respectively) and Ive spent a lot of time trying out different playstyles. For me, he works best as a melee oriented frame with CC abilities. Tentecles/barrage lets you cut off doorways with decent CC, his 2 can barrel through an entire hallway letting you clean up with finishers, and his 3 is just a nice break from the action. His weakness tends to be wide open areas where you cant cluster enemies into his powers.

My only real complaint about him is since hes such a good melee frame he is a little squishy for that role but that could easily be changed with an armor boost

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Bad? Weak? No.

Squishy? Imo, Yes.

He's a high skill cap frame that could use some extra synergy/diversity in his powerset and probably won't get it because Undertow exists. 

That said, Undertow is beastly... If that's your thing.

Put simply, If you like Undertow you will like Hydroid imo. If you don't like Undertow, the challenge in playing him rises dramatically and you may question why you are bothering. 

Personally, I don't like Undertow and think that most of his abilities have been tuned to account for it which makes it a rather large bottleneck for playstyle diversity.

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23 minutes ago, Volinus7 said:

"Obsolete" is more appropriate.

I agree with this. Hydroid can do some pretty cool stuff, but the game as it is now doesn't really reward any of the things Hydroid can do (namely his special breed of enemy harass).

That, and our ol' pirate frame could really use some ability synergy.

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He is sortie viable, so cant be that bad at all. 

His tentacles do finisher damage which bypasses armour entirely. As for reliable CC, if it always CC'd every enemy - it would be in the realms of super cheese abilities. As it is, I find it pretty decent CC if you dont go max range, plus you can combine it with his barrage. You would be surprised how much damage a maxed power strength build can do against sortie grineer, ive out-damaged the rest of the squad quite a few times.

His healing augment is amazing - and his pool has perfect synergy with certain weapons like Tigris Prime. You still reload as you turn in and out of a puddle. Its instant cover and medikit in one - and as for not damaging enemies, popping them in and out knocks them all down. Its great CC and cover for team mates as it heals them too.

Never need to use his wave surge thing, its fun for movement I suppose, but his other abilities are just better CC.

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Hydroid is in a bit of a strange place, imo. Personally I tend to rely on weapons for damage with him and cast mostly his 2 and 3 for the temporary invincibility, which usually makes up for how squishy he can be. His 1 and 4 are okay CC, but not exactly great, and Pilfering Swarm (the only reason some people even played him) is not as useful as it used to be.

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Other folks have covered a lot of the issues faced when dealing with Hydroid already, but I'll throw my own analysis on him out into the wild.  Now it isn't that he's not an interesting frame, rather on a conceptual level his abilities actually sound very cool, however they suffer some glaring issues when you actually start to really use them during missions.  Also, taking a step back and looking;  What precisely is Hydroid, as a frame?

The answer?  At his core he's a Crowd Control frame.  Without augments his 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all effective only as CC-based powers.  However his CC pales vastly in comparison to many other frames' powers in that realm with the standout there being Vauban.  Often times when discussing Hydroid with others I call him a "discount Vauban" because that's all he really is without augments.  A CC-focused frame whose CC just isn't as flexible nor as reliable as Vauban's, but a frame that is much easier to get than Vauban.

With augments he has a few interesting options that crop up, instant Corrosive procs on his 1, a surprisingly decent heal on his 3, (boring, but useful) looting on his 4.  Even his 2's augment lets you do partial support by clearing and immunizing status effects on yourself and your allies.  Sadly having to bog down your build by stacking these augments up just causes him to lose out on other stat boosting mods, rendering him as a notably weaker frame for it.

Playing to his augments allows Hydroid to be a modestly viable frame, despite his still apparent issues.  However the downside here is that he is a frame that is fully reliant on augments to be considered relevant.  Without any augments at all he's just second-rate.  A frame that at default has no redeeming qualities when viewed alongside his peers.  He could benefit by having his 1st, 2nd, and 3rd powers' augments just honestly built directly into his powers at base.  This would give him 3 worthwhile traits without having to expressly rely on augments for him to be actually relevant as an individual frame.  It would open up build space for other mods, and it would allow for 3 new augments to be created and actually flesh him out as a proper frame.

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1 hour ago, WingsOfGryphin said:

He's both weak and boring. 


His first ability doesn't do any damage, doesn't have any meaningful special effects and is pretty much random / inconsistent. Even if it wasn't random it's damage still is hilariously bad. 
His second ability - totally pointless with parkour 2.0. 
His third ability - useful here and there, but pretty much forces you to AFK and nullifiers is massive inconvenience and a random factor for this ability. 
His 4th abiltiy - would be good if it actually worked. Most of the time tentacles can't even hit the target. And even if they visually hit them then there is no damage. 
Best abilities - 3 and 4. 3 - AFk. 4 = buggy. Nothing much to use besides those. And even then it's mostly for stationary gameplay. In running missions his usefulness decreases. 

As a man who's played an excessive amount of Hydroid, he's a frame designed around Area Denial, ala Vauban, except with more RNG and buggier physics involved that DE refuses to work on.

1 - Is the coolest ability from a thematic standpoint. Run high range, high duration with the augment and dump it all over an area. Not only do you get the impact knockdown procs, but you get corrosive procs across an entire area. It's highly unlikely, statistically speaking, that 1 will miss any given enemy that walks through the area, and this low chance is already greatly lessened with higher range because of it affecting impact point radius.

2 - Is not a mobility device. It serves two purposes.
Firstly: It corrals enemies towards a given area, like an anti-pull. This is good for shoving things that aren't good to have in a given radius of people or objects away from them, like particular Eximi or splitting up healing ancients.
Second: Its augment allows for a status immunization and removal, like a Saryn molt.

3 - Serves three purposes.
First: Clean up an area of melee combatants and provide a large barrier that others cannot pass. (Enemies register swallowed enemies as physical objects and cannot path around them
Second: Its augment allows for some beneficial healing to team members and the hydroid using it, which given there's a short supply of team members that can effectively heal and the Trinity range nerf, this can be useful in some emergencies.
Third: Releasing enemies from the pool means they have to get back up off the ground, giving you plenty of room to reorient yourself or kill them

4 - Serves a similar purpose to his barrage. It's a radial area denial, they're just really poorly designed and have a tough time actually grabbing targets that pass over them. With pilfering swarm and a nekros, you're running triple drops.


It's less that he's weak and more that people don't realize that he's actually a support frame in the effectiveness of an area denial frame. He's not intended to do damage, he's intended to slow down an area. And if you think not doing a ton of damage makes him a bad frame, you've essentially said Trinity and Loki are terrible frames.

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15 minutes ago, LeifKlover said:

He's not intended to do damage, he's intended to slow down an area. And if you think not doing a ton of damage makes him a bad frame, you've essentially said Trinity and Loki are terrible frames.

Except that every other CC frame has better CC capability and every other support frame has better support skills. 

ALL of Hydroid's abilities are borderline useless without augments, that's 4 mod slots gone just like that. 

And even augmented, 3 out of 4 fail horribly when compared to what other frames can do. 

His only viable use right now is a walking loot booster for ODD runs. And even that is partly thanks to DE being adamant at keeping a godawful mistake which is Hema research cost. Need something other than extra loot? Other frames can do it better and with less of a hassle. Hydroid sorely needs a complete rework, not praise. 

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Hydroid is beast. I can not wait for a primed version.

I think people listen to youtubers way too much on whats "the best". People tend to flock to what they say. Hence why everyone thinks "Akkad" is the best leveling spot.

 

Hydroid falls off around level 80-90 enemies, but up to there he is really good. 

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