Swarm Strike is iffy and completely falls apart as content gets harder. Lets discuss why.
- Locust Swarm needs locusts.
Locusts are made of wet toiler paper and die instantly unless you invest in their hp. Which is awkward, because you now have to build minion hp even when you have no intention to using minions.
Locusts have duration and their duration cannot be refreshed and new locusts cannot be spawned. So you eventually you run into a window when you have no locusts and no quick way to replenish them.
Swam Strike AOE is mediocre and Locust AI is horrible and they are all over the place. The skill is balanced around eating the maximum amount of locusts to be effective, but good luck eating all of them if there is more than 1 enemy on the screen.
As corruption increases and enemy damage skyrockets these issues compound with each other and the skill becomes very painful to use. In fact the said reality is that over half of the nodes in the tree are designed not to be powerful, or fun, or build enabling… but to fight the crippling downsides of the locust mechanics.
Possible solutions:
Using Swarm Strike should automatically recall and eat all locusts regardless of where they are on the screen.
Hitting a hive with Swarm Strike should destroy it and eat all locusts inside.
- Locusts as minions are terrible
They got some crit chance… and that’s it. Their damage output is non-existent because of that. Worse yet - they despawn suddenly and leave you naked. There is not quick way to respawn locsusts and once they start despawning its typically in a rapid succession.
Solution:
Add scaling. Add ways to spawn locusts at once or refresh their duration.