Serpent Mistress
Serpent Mistress Champion Loadout
This champion loadout is an attempt to create the best Lady Mikage build we can build for the Hydra clan boss to maximize your damage with her in your team. This build should be viable all the way through the Nightmare difficulty. You're going to want to use Lady Mikage mainly in her first form to take advantage of the Ally Attack functionality in her kit as much as possible and pair her with another damage dealer from the Shadowkin faction. There are many good pairings we will talk about below.
My personal favorite to use with her is Michinaki in a full damage build. Michinaki does a great deal of damage to the Hydra in this boss fight. He is really amazing. Another great option is Harima with her AOE Provoke and Decrease Attack on her A1. Zinogre has a pretty good A1 for a legendary Shadowkin. Genzin, Ninja and Karato aren't terrible either.
For the Epic damage dealer options you could use, Oboro really stands out as the best of the bunch. Her A1 can turn into an AOE if targets are under four or more debuffs. Which can translate to good damage over time. Most of the time you will have at least one Hydra head with four or more debuffs so this works out well for the team composition.
Does this build need books? Not initially to get started but you may like them down the line to get a cooldown decrease at least for her buffs + ally attack A3. Her A2 Ignore RES is kind of nice, too.
Strategy Description
Focus mainly on her A3 ally attack ability with buffs, for extra damage with the Protection set. As well as using her A1 Ally Attack ability that will join another Shadowkin with the attack. It's a pretty simple setup. Very hard to go wrong but very rewarding if done right.
Artifacts Description
With this build we went with a full 9-piece Protection set to get the damage bonus from the buffs. Relentless is another good build if you can't get together the full 9-piece set for Protection since it is a difficult task for some accounts. Obviously the stats are hard to get the optimal versions of for the accessories so just use whatever you have if you don't have the best stuff just yet. The bonus is worth it either way. You may do less damage but you will have more survivability.
* Some artifact sets have upgraded versions available. If you have a better upgraded version of this recommended artifact set, definitely use that instead.
I'm trying to maximize damage with this build and the masteries are no exception. You could go with Warmaster here instead for a PVE build and that would make a lot of sense but I went with Helmsmasher for maximum ignore defense so I could also moonlight in the arena as well from time to time. You could go with whichever you prefer.
I also went down the Defense tree to get down to the counterattack masteries. Extra damage mitigation from the Defense tree will help keep her alive throughout the fight. The offense tree masteries should help min/max her damage contribution. This is a solid build for Hydra but if I were going with an arena build, I might go a different route.
Cruelty
Cruelty
Level 1 Blessing
You should be cycling through the heads pretty quickly so I went with Cruelty for both options just to keep the defense down as much as possible throughout the fight as each head dies and respawns.
Level 6 Blessing
Same as above. Keeping the defense down is important. You will want to make sure your other damage dealers that have six star blessings are using other blessings like Crushing Rend for example so go ahead and keep Cruelty here.