Since his tentacles hold enemies still now, wouldn’t he be better than Khora? I suggest this because his pilfering tentacles augment has higher stats than Khora’s pilfering swarm.
I would still take Khora just because of how convenient she is, with Hydroid’s tentacles you gotta go to where the actual enemies get grabbed and kill them. Khora just spams her 1 on her dome and everything in it dies. Hydroid would be better if you have a dedicated murderframe teammate, but good luck getting one of those with Public matchmaking.
I think it depends on the mission type, if it’s a defense where most of the stuff will get killed before getting close enough to the pod hydroid wins. His damage is also pretty decent but I’ve been playing him mostly out of steel path with my noobier friends recently to help them get resources.
Defense missions can already be slow enough as they are, I would never subject anyone to a CC frame during one unless I was certain I would have someone else with me to quickly kill enemies. Khora’s 4 might technically be CC but in reality is a giant death ball that extends her 1’s range.
I haven’t really had time to make a new Hydroid build since his rework, but I think he’s less effective against Eximus/Overguard than Khora. Khora is able to do most of what Hydroid does, but is able to do it better in my opinion.
Khora’s abilities work together to damage trapped enemies, and Ensnare can be used to increase the damage the enemies that are CC’d. It’s probably best to think of Khora’s Strangle Dome as an AOE ability that scales off of your melee weapon instead of a CC ability.
Khora is also a little more versatile for other missions like Disruption where you want to be able to slow down a priority target.Hydroid on the other hand, feels like he has too much range (for his tentacle swarm) and traps enemies out of sight, sometimes in adjacent rooms. This tends to lead to missions taking longer because you need to clean up enemies individually between waves if it’s a Defense mission. It starts to feel a little like playing with a max range Limbo/Vauban/Wisp Motes trapping enemies far away from the objective.
*I still need to play around with reducing range to see if there’s a good balance where his 1/3 are usable while not making the tentacle range obnoxiously large.They have 1 ability that overlaps but their other abilities function very differently. If you’re only concerned with that 1 ability then maybe but you aren’t usually playing 1 ability, you play a warframe with 4 abilities, a passive, a pet, weapons, mods, etc.