Just went to check my offline lightning swarmblade and felt like ATLEAST 90% of my dmg was just gone. Was critting stuff for 1k with a 7k storm bolt tooltip. Feels like the character is just broken.
Am I imagining things? Haven’t seen any similar comments.
Did you spec into gathering storm to boost storm bolts? It was carried by tornados huge multipliers before iirc, so without that it’d definitely feel way worse.
Anyway, started it this cycle, and while it wasn’t horrible, it kinda struggled on dmg even in normal monos. Could be a gearing/player issue, but still far from what I’d expect from a supposedly one of the best druid/swarmbug builds. Defences still fine, carried by serpent strike reachin ~60-70% dodge from 0 even with stutter-stepping.
Died to mono Lagon, so I’m rolling bleed version now to hopefully transition into frostbite asap, as the locust management is annoying and clunky AF thanks to them having 0hp, and being kinda hard to hit a decent amount of locusts + bleed stacks to maximize swarm storm dmg. Clear’s way better on bleed version, single target slightly better for now as well, just squishier because you can’t take the flat evasion on serpent strike.
Yeah have specced gathering storm since and made gear changes to fully utilize that tree but still feels like just bad compared to before. I don’t know how much lower the dps is but I feel uneasy about normal mono bosses now as the fights take so long. On my offline character an emp mono boss took 5+ minutes, but high level monsters got buffed so take that with a grain of salt.
Feels like I’m minmaxing like crazy to have mediocre dmg so definitely feels like this build is either bugged or hit with the heaviest nerf hammer I’ve ever seen (dmg wise).
There is a new idol affix with significant +base dmg to storm bolt though, so it might scale with gear? I’m not ready to give up as the build is awesome in every other aspect.
The build was technically buffed actually. It just takes a lot more work to get there. You are now required to stack max mana (400-500), make sure you have 100% crit, and stack attunement. The only build that really benefits from the more damage based on max mana node in the GS tree is swarm blade, due to the fact you can offset the mana/rage cost of the bolts with rage on crit. Although going higher than 500 max mana will create possible situations where you can get rage starved.
Before you got a free 1.8x multi from swarm blade and 2.0x the tornado tree, so that damage ramp happened immediately. Now you can get 1.32x + ~1.65x (comes with gear) + 40% penetration from the gathering storm tree + a lot more base flat/slightly better flat scaling than before
I’ve also been curious about speccing into Gathering Storm as a lightning swarmblade. I’m having trouble understanding what nodes do and do not affect storm bolt. I can understand the ones that specifically mention storm bolt such as lightning strikes twice, jolting strikes, concentrated storm, and I guess excited bolts. The maxroll guide, and a lot of people on the ladder seem to spec into things I’m not so sure about.
Do we gain any benefit from Rending Vortex?
What about the damage increase and storm bolt cast frequency from concentrated storm?
Tempest weapon?
Valinov above mentioned Thunderous Strikes, but the tooltip mentions only gathering storm and not storm bolt.
Excited bolts: We don’t actually have mana in swarmblade form, so do we actually benefit? Unless it’s draining from our actual human form mana pool?
Edit-
I’m also under the assumption we almost never use gathering storm itself since we should be in swarmblade 100% or near 100% of the time. I’m still dropping swarmblade form somewhat often, but I also just now completed the campaign and don’t have 100% crit or 8 points in Rageborn yet.
So storm bolt is a sub skill of gathering storm, the generic multipliers to gathering storm also apply to the bolts. Nodes that specify melee or that reference storm stacks will not be of use to a swarm blade build, as you won’t be using the actual gathering storm melee attack. The one exception would be tempest weapon, but that’s because that node only applies to the storm bolts.
Rending vortex adds a significant amount of base crit for your bolts because maintaining 8-12 stacks of maelstrom is very easy on swarm blade. Which makes getting crit capped easier now.
Ok good to hear that it’s a gear issue. That is the best case scenario here. Guess it makes sense to move the build’s power towards the endgame as it just stomped everything immediately before.
@Einzbern You can test skill nodes in imperial era, champions gate. There are target dummies. You can also check the storm bolt tooltip from some of the skill nodes by holding alt on mouseover then change nodes, attack a few times to refresh and check the tooltip again to get a rough idea.
The gathering storm tree 40% penetration from thunderous strikes reads to me that it comes from casting gathering storm. If we’re in swarm blade form how does that work?