Shield Tank Shard Cannon Cutter vs. Hydra - Basic Ammo | Raw Footage | Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

Timestamps:

0:00 - Heart 1
1:09 - Heart 2
4:38 - Heart 3
6:03 - Heart 4
7:52 - Rearm / Repair | Heart 5
12:45 - Heart 6
13:59 - Heart 7
14:48 - Heart 8
15:53 - Boom Goes the Hydra

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6 Medium Salvation Shard Cannon Shield Tank Cutter Build:
https://edsy.org/s/vvAgEX7

I exported my current loadout as reported by INARA to EDSY, so there may be some oddities in the stats of my modules.

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I finally got my hands on a full loadout of Salvation Shard Cannons and figured I'd test them out on a shield tank build at those Planetary Port AX CZs I'm so fond of. They both performed excellently... until the Hydrae dropped in.

I figured that fighting a Hydra would be a great opportunity to stress test the capabilities of the Basic Ammo Salvation Shard Cannons and my shield's strength. How did it fare?

Well... meh, I guess.

This is only the second time I've fought a Hydra 1v1 to the end, and the first real fight with one in my Cutter - at least, sans-swarms. The ~3.7k MJ Bi-Weave could tank quite a bit of incoming Hydra fire on just two Pips to Systems, much to my surprise, and its regen rate refilled the majority of its capacity while I waited for my SLF to burn down the Hydra's Panic Shields between damage phases. It doesn't last forever under the withering fire of the Hydra's main guns... which brings me to the Shard Cannons.

The Salvation Shard Cannons work very well for everything up to a Hydra, but they struggle with the Hydra's high Hull Hardness with just Basic Ammo and their high Thermal Load. I could barely manage to avoid overheating with just three SSCs firing at 4 Pips in Weapons while under heatsink cover, so I was under constant fire for the duration of my attacking runs. I also had issues with landing consistent shots on the exposed hearts, though a part of that was due to me being unable to really see them at first (which is why I had to scan the Hydra... and lost quite a bit of HP in the process doing so... probably should have scanned it first - not really use to that 🙃)

The first few hearts were definitely rough, to put it mildly, so I did rearm/repair mid-fight out of an abundance of caution. As I grew more comfortable with the setup, successive attacking runs were much faster and more consistent; at some points I was only losing about 15-20% of my Shield HP per attacking run.

So, yeah - it's possible to shield-tank a Hydra, but I'd need to Git Gudder with the Cutter and optimize my strategies more (such as loading Premium Ammo). That said, I'll still say that Cold Orbiting is absolutely the way to go versus a Hydra; it's better to avoid that incoming fire than facetank it.

...But I wonder how Plasma Chargers would do in this setup? 🤔