- "Keep killing it until it dies"
- ―"Zombie Hydra" medal description, EBF2
The Zombie Hydra is a boss in Epic Battle Fantasy 2, and an optional boss in Epic Battle Fantasy 4 since the Battle Mountain update.
Appearance
It appears as a multi-headed skeletal dragon with two, three or four long necks, numerous spines, and a spike-tipped tail (which only appears during certain attacks). The heads count as separate enemies, but have identical stats and abilities.
Overview
In both appearances, Zombie Hydra mainly favours powerful physical attacks and Dark magic, as well as Fire magic in EBF4. Its signature ability allows it to revive its heads when their HP is depleted - only by slaying all of its heads at once (or in a short period of time) can this be averted.
In EBF2, Zombie Hydra is the penultimate boss of the game, appearing in Stage 19. It has a balanced set of attacks, including physical, magical, and status-based assaults, as well as Grim Reaper — the proto-Instant Death spell which deals over 99999 damage to one of the players if it hits, killing them. Hydra's physical damage output and the Reaper will likely get the player a habit of using Auto-Revive, extremely helpful for the rest of the game.
In EBF4, Zombie Hydra is located in the western tomb of Graybone Cemetery, and can only be reached with the Winged Boots. Unlike most optional bosses, there is no reward for killing the Hydra appart from the enormous amounts of experience and ability points accumulated from its reviving heads, and as such can be fought as an experience farm.
Unlike many returning bosses, the Zombie Hydra has undergone significant changes in appearance and abilities. It has three heads instead of two (likely to compensate for the increased player headcount), can cast Fire spells, and now has twice as much Instant Death abilities. Each head can also deal enormous physical damage, well able of killing one of the players at full health if caught off guard. Additionally, if any of the heads suffers from a powerful attack, it will detach from its spinal cord, permanently increasing its Evade by 50%. Much like its EBF2 counterpart, the Zombie Hydra is able to regenerate its severed heads, requiring all three heads to be killed within one or two turns to be defeated.
A four-headed Zombie Hydra appears as the final opponent of Battle Mountain's Miniboss Marathon. Oddly, the first head to be destroyed will not be revived, while the other heads revive normally.
Statistics
Epic Battle Fantasy 2
(insert data here)
- This section is incomplete. You can help Epic Battle Fantasy Wiki by adding required information to it.
To do: Most of EBF2 stuff.
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
|
Zombie Hydra | EBF4 |
|---|---|---|
| Uses dark, fire and instant-death attacks. Summons more Zombie Hydra Heads, when others are killed. Evade increases if decapitated. | ||
| Statistics | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base Statistics |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Exp | AP | SP | Gold | Hit2HP |
| 1666 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 666 | 25 | 50 | 260 | 50 | |
| Elemental Resistance |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
| -100% | - | - | - | 200% | - | - | - | -100% | 200% | |||
| Status Resistance |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| - | 80% | 100% | - | - | - | - | 80% | - | - | - | 80% | |
| Debuff Resistance |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
| - | - | - | - | - | - | |||||||
| Item Drop Rate | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Icon | 
|
|
|
|
|
- | - |
| Name | Solid Spike | Bottled Darkness | Dark Matter | Burger | Orange Juice | - | - |
| Chance | 100% | 20% | 10% | 10% | 10% | - | - |
| Status Damage | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Damage taken from status effects, in % of maximum health (per turn), including elemental resistances: | |||
| Burn
|
Poison
|
 Doom(if Death fails) |
 Regen
|
| 14% | -3% per stack, up to -27% |
25% | -33.(3)% |
| Final damage is randomized by ±5% (except for Doom) and rounded down. | |||
Attacks and Abilities
Epic Battle Fantasy 2
(insert exact data here)
- Bites a player for medium physical damage, with a chance to debuff their Defence.
- Bites a single player 3 times for high physical damage without side effects. On Epic difficulty, the number of bites is limited only by luck.
- Stabs a player with the tip of its tail, dealing extreme physical damage.
- Casts Haunt, hitting both players several times for moderate Dark damage, trying to debuff all main stats. Is available only on Hard and Epic difficulties.
- Casts Dark Flare, hitting both players for moderate damage and a chance of Syphoning them.
- Casts The Dead, hitting both players for moderate Poison damage and a chance of Poisoning them.
- Casts Grim Reaper, which inflicts 99 999 999 damage (displayed as 99999) to either player.
- Revives the other head with full health and resets any statuses it had.
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
| Attack List | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attack | Target | Power | Type | Element | Status Effect | Acc | Crit | RdF | ||
| Bite | Single | 70 |
|
---- | -- | -- | -- | 100% | 10% | 10% |
| Triple Bite | Single | 140/3 |
|
---- | -- | -- | -- | 100% | 10% | 10% |
| Tail Crush | Single | 180 |
|
---- | 100% | -- |
|
40% | 10% | 10% |
| Notes: On Hard and Epic difficulties, accuracy is increased to 80%. | ||||||||||
| Hellfire | Single | 45 |
|
100%
|
50% | 3x | 
|
100% | 10% | 10% |
| Fire Spin | All | 45 |
|
100%
|
100% 50% |
5x 15% |
|
130% | 0% | 10% |
| Antimatter | Centered | 80 |
|
75%
|
-- | -- | -- | 120% | 10% | 10% |
| Grim Reaper | Single | 30 |
|
50%
|
100% | -- |
|
40% | 10% | 10% |
| Revive | Dead head | -- | -- | ---- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| Notes: Revives a head with full health and clears any (de)buffs and status effects it had, including the Evade boost. This ability requires a turn to passively "charge" it, separate for each alive head. Charge and usage condition is "less than 3 foes are present" — thus, the first head to be slayed in the Battle Mountain variant of the battle will stay dead. | ||||||||||
Battle logic
The following describes general logic of the enemy and attack patterns, with chances of each attack to be used. Conditions are listed from highest to lowest priority unless specified otherwise.
Epic Battle Fantasy 2
(insert data here)
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
- Berserked or/and Syphoned → Triple Bite;
- Decapitated → Bite (2/8), Triple Bite (2/8), Hellfire (1/8), Fire Spin (1/8), Antimatter (1/8), Grim Reaper (1/8).
- Normal → Bite (2/8), Tail Crush (2/8), Hellfire (1/8), Fire Spin (1/8), Antimatter (1/8), Grim Reaper (1/8).
Getting hurt for >16% HP in a single hit breaks this head's neck/spinal cord, boosting its Evade by 50%.
Strategy
Epic Battle Fantasy 2
Don't underestimate their revival ability: if one head is defeated, the other can revive it with full HP. Consequently, you must carefully manage the two heads' HP in order to bring them down in rapid succession, preferably in a single turn. This can be complicated by any automatic attack skills equipped by Matt and Natalie.
Defensively, the main concern is the Grim Reaper spell, which can instantly kill either of your characters if it hits, regardless of their health. On higher difficulties, its success rate becomes dangerously high — if both heads use it simultaneously, the fight can end before it really even begins. Thus, it is advised to keep Auto-Revive up as much as possible (via using Natalie's Revive on an alive player, and keeping her Magic Attack buffed up for more health restored upon revival); ideally, you should have a few turns of Auto-Revive left from the previous battle. Survivor and Angel skill bonuses may help, but they cannot be relied on much.
The boss has a significant and easily accessible weakness: both Grim Reaper and Revive, along with other magical abilities, can (and should) be blocked by simply Syphoning the heads (preferably via Rune Blade's Unleash, for guaranteed application), significantly simplifying the fight and allowing to ditch Barrier/Magic Defence buffs, though Auto-Revive is still welcome, and Protect/Defence buffs are now vital to endure Hydra's remaining attacks.
You may try to Blind the heads to reduce their hit rate, but it's generally simplier to focus on one head and kill it before it causes much trouble. Kyun (Natalie's Limit Break) can be used to create a breathing room for the players in a tight situation, though it might be better to save Limit Breaks for the final boss (as in EBF2 they take longer to charge each time one is used). When one head is down, the battle is basically won — as long as you keep the other head Syphoned, it will not cast Revive or use multi-target attacks, so it shouldn't pose any problems to defeat it and finish the battle.
As Zombie Hydra is affected by the Dispel handling bug, Dispelling a head on Epic difficulty will decrease its physical strength by ≈11.7% (not stackable) for the whole battle. It pairs well with the possibility to restrict the boss to use only physical attacks. (On this foe, the bug will not have any effect on lower difficulties.)
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
Preparation
Unfortunately, the boss can no longer be easily Syphoned, yet getting high resistance in both Dark and Fire elements will nullify most of Zombie Hydra's magical damage output, possibly enabling players to go without Magic Defence buffs. The rest of equipment should boost Defence and HP as much as possible (without increasing vulnerability to Fire and Dark), since the Hydra's physical damage output is staggeringly high. As one more upgrade from the EBF2 version of the boss, Hydra can now use three (four in the Battle Mountain fight) Instant Death abilities on the same turn — make sure to resist them too, especially since Dark and Death resistances often come in pair.
Offensively, you may want Fire and Holy-based weapons to exploit the Zombie Hydra's severe weaknesses. If you're worried about setting off their Evade boost, however, you may want to focus on weapons that raise your defences and relevant elemental resistances. As Hydra's revival ability can no longer be blocked, the only way to win is to bring the heads to low health and then slay them all in one or two turns before they revive — watch out for counterattacks to not kill an almost dead head too early. Nuke and Supernova, being quite strong on their own and even stronger when affected by the Fire weakness of the boss, work well for finishing the fight, especially when both are used in a single turn or/and are further boosted by equipping a Fire-elemental weapon.
Strategy
Even with high Defence and corresponding buffs, the Zombie Hydra's tail crush and triple bite still deal extreme damage. Your best bet is to buff own Evade (via Guardian, Reflex or/and Energy Drinks) and reduce their Accuracy (via Solar Flare, Flare and Coal Bat summon) to decrease their hit rate, as well as frequently apply Auto-Revive or/and Morale to guaranteedly survive the attack if it hits, hoping the other heads won't pick off a weakened player.
The Zombie Hydra's high weaknesses to Fire and Holy make it an easy target for spells like Judgement and Eruption. Hellfire, as the greatest non-limit single-target source of Fire damage in the game, may seem like an attractive spell, but it may inflict Berserk on the target — and empowered physical attacks from this juggernaut may prove more trouble than it's worth. Plus these spells will likely break off the head's spinal cords, increasing their Evade. The way to prevent that is to use multi-hit abilities instead, such as Legend with Heaven's Gate or Magma Hammer, as well as Bullet Hell. The Evade boost can also be circumvented with high accuracy abilities (such as Judgement), buffing own Accuracy, or/and lowering enemy Evade (via Bind and Tired).
If farming for experience, a good idea is to try to keep all the heads at low HP in case the party is starting to get overwhelmed by the Hydra to quickly finish off the fight with a Limit Break. Alternatively, you may switch to Easy difficulty — it wouldn't impact experience gain, while making the boss' damage output a non-issue.
Trivia
- The Zombie Hydra likely inspired the Zombie Dragon enemy in Epic Battle Fantasy 3; both creatures have the same sprite and almost all of the same attacks.
- One of the final enemy encounters in EBF3 is a pair of Zombie Dragons, replicating the Zombie Hydra battle, minus revival and easy Syphoning.
- The Zombie Hydra may also have inspired the Pyrohydra boss in EBF3.
- The Zombie Hydra's theme in EBF2 is "Twins of Duality".
- In EBF2, the Zombie Hydra's roars are taken from the eponymous character of the Godzilla film series.