Hydra Prepping

Jeslyn

I've been trying to get this question answered for a couple days now and I thought I'd try here, but I'm new to Druid and even newer to prepping. As a priest, I could get away with just using afflictions to get a kill, even as a beginner, but it is hard to get one as a new unartied Druid. I'm fairly decent with flight and curing, but that won't win a battle. (I'm also tri-transed and have survival/weaponry maxed.)

 My question is how do you do hydra limb prepping -effectively- to get a kill? My desire is to prep, bind, freeze, and then pound. My method right now is flame, snap, and prep with clamp × 3 each limb and then try to break, bind, icewyrm freeze × 3, and then gorilla pound. I know this is hard to accomplish, but I'm new at this and like to try to stay away from the typical mauling someone to death. Thanks for the help!

Edit: also like to add, I tried the method before twice above and it goes to shit. I have no idea how to get it to work!

Mishgul

@Rom you got this buddy

Rom

Okay so you know that 4 clamps equals a limb break, so that's a good start. I'll start by saying that you will want to avoid freezing entirely as a beginner strategy, freezepound is no longer an instakill and the sort of 'priority manipulation' required to do it without diadem/bracers takes a lot of awareness and knowledge of salve timings, not to mention whatever other issues it faces like your opponent simply touching tree or walking away. It is not meant to be used as a main kill strategy and is mostly something you can threaten on top of other kill methods once you are more experienced.

Also! Hydra binding while someone is already prone and has their legs broken is not useful for what you're trying to do, so we'll avoid doing that for now.

Now, as a Druid you are gonna be pumping out DAMAGE! Druids have a lot of ways to deal damage, and lots of damage to deal with those ways. Once you've mastered that and can manipulate your balances perfectly you can start looking into Reclamation Embrace which is awesome but is best put aside until you can seamlessly use weaponry and other items weaved in with your third head.

So, damage, always keep your bees with you and attacking your opponent; they are like health sip killers, they are monstrous.
Use your Reclamation! If you have time to reclaim a room before you start fighting, do it! You want to use lash and poison spores for more damage, these combined with bees are practically untankable for a lot of people, they will just be operating at a total health loss if they stand up to you.
Back to preps and pound - you were on the right track with those just ditch the freezing. Prep both of those enemy legs (you can bypass parry EASILY by either swinging staff and instantly clamping a parried limb -OR- by biting prefarar roaring and then clamping a parried limb, both of those methods cause the enemy to be prone when the clamp hits them and a prone person cannot parry) then break them sequentially while proning and bust out some POUNDS. You will easily pound them twice with this method, which has some big upfront burst damage especially if you are rocking mongo strength. This is your bread and butter, the beginning of success - damage damage break break pound pound.

Maybe prep them, throw down a maul or two at some unprepped limb like their head to soften them up but not scare them enough to flee, then you sweep them on the ground and break their legs and show them pain.

Wyvern flamey mauling also has a lot of damage potential but I never really messed with it, ignite`incinerate will always be amazing though.

General stuff:
Use your Bind to save your ass, sometimes you have to know when to walk away in Achaea to survive, you can't stand and fight everything. When that situation arises, bind/walk and bind/fly are two of the most broken 'I'm out of here" things a player can manage - you're not gonna kill anyone if you die before them!
Use serverside aliases or command separator, having all three heads hit simultaneously is a big deal a lot of the time.
Panacea and Vigour are INSANE, remember them remember them remember them.
You can reclaim while flying, so if you can't manage to get a room down to start with try it in the air.

Probably a lot more stuff but I gotta go for a bit, I don't know where you're at right now outside of what you posted so I'm sorry if I told you a bunch of stuff you already know. You can ask me any questions or pitch me any ideas here or ingame or PM or message or whatever, and I know I took what you asked and then suggested to do something totally different.

Jeslyn

This was seriously a lot more information than I was anticipating! Thank you! I will try implementing it when I get back into my normal system after this weekend. 

(Multi-command Aliases are definitely my friend after a year of priest. I make it a point to see how much I can shove in a three letter command. I could not even imagine surviving more than a few seconds without it!)