I know it hasn’t been a week yet (TBH it almost, has) but I thought this would be a good place to discuss the new Hydroid rework. I’ll leave my thoughts, as usual, in the comment!
Release date: 2014-04-09
Abilities (the wiki wasn’t updated with the new descriptions yet so I’ll do my best and write them myself when applicable):
(New!) Passive: Enemies damaged by Hydroid are more vulnerable to Corrosion Status, with initial status reducing armor by 50%.
Tempest Barrage - Target an area and call down a barrage of liquid fury.
Tidal Surge - Crash through enemies in a ferocious wall of water.
(Old)Undertow - Become a water trap and drown unsuspecting enemies.
(New!) Plunder - All enemies in range affected by Corrosive procs will have their armor reduced permanently while providing armor to Hydroid as well as adding bonus Corrosive damage to your weapons.
Tentacle Swarm - Spawn a Kraken that grabs and holds enemies while applying Corrosive damage and status.
Acquisition: Blueprint purchasable from the market, components drop from Councilor Vay Hek on Oro, Earth.
Plunder + the new passive is insane.
That’s the tl;dr version, at least. Tempest Barrage is absolutely worthless for it’s damage, nothing changed there, but it’s absolutely amazing at applying tons of Corrosive and (with the augument) Viral procs to everything in an area. Tidal Surge is still very much worthless, it’s too fast to reliably control and I found myself crashing into walls all the time and just never bothering to waste 50 energy on it. It does grab enemies very well now, though! Here comes the star of the show, Plunder! This ability is crazy good, but ONLY because of Hydroid’s new passive. The armor buff was enough to make me able to survive rather comfortably with this janky no forma build I slapped together for testing on Steel Path Taveuni, Kuva Fortress with the exception of Slash procs forcing me to heal through them with my Operator. The Corrosive damage buff is straight up insane on anything with decent status chance and fire rate. I brought my Incarnon Torid and proceeded to melt everything, including the Acolyte, like it was a lvl 20 mission. Tentacle Swarm is a lot more useful now, but I still only used it once for testing purposes. It’s an OK CC, but it still makes it hard to shoot at enemies and I would rather have Larva in it’s place instead (or other grouping ability).
Overall Hydroid seems really good now, he’s a classic weapon’s platform frame, with tools to help him survive and buff his weapon damage vastly! Will forma him when I have some time to play during weekend and try him out on a tougher Steel Path mission, like a 20min Circulus run to stress test him some more.
I vastly underestimated Tempest Barrage’s damage potential, for some reason I incorrectly assumed the game surely wouldn’t let you overlap the ability multiple times in one spot. With it’s augment, fast cast time and cheap cost, this thing is deceptively good at killing. It does tend to stagger tougher enemies out of it’s range, but anything other than heavies and eximuses gets shredded by the corroding/viral rain.