I’ve been studying how different stat values affect Locust Swarm’s damage on the dummy target over the past hour, both with and without the Soaring Scourge passive.
I was surprised to see that the Locust Swarm did less than a third of the damage when its based on minion damage (through Soaring Scourge) compared to when its based on my own damage.
I was trying to figure out how, since my gear/build favours minion damage over my own (though I haven’t made a full transition yet to minion damage, but still).
I belief Attunement/Strength is the culprit, I have over 100 combined Strength/Attunement from The Last Bear set and passives. They added 49 tick damage per point on the dummy without Soaring Scourge, but WITH Soaring Scourge it seemed to have no impact on its tick damage whatsoever.
I’ve tried going in and out of form and relogging to make sure it wasnt some snapshotting issue, but that made no difference.
Conclusion
I’m assuming by default Locust Swarm depends on Swarm Strike’s scaling tags (Physical, Melee, Strength, Attunement).
If specced into Soaring Scourge these scaling tags get replaced to any Minion Damage type modifiers MINUS Attunement/Strength?
Seems kinda strange if that is correct, since locust spawned from Summon Hive has the scaling tag for Attunement/Strength and should benefit from those stats no?
Soaring Scourge, assuming it’s working, means that Locust Swarm will scale with any if your minion stats (minion phys, minion melee) rather than the player stats. Since minions don’t have any attributes they may well be missing out on that element of the damage scaling though I don’t know if that is intended or not.
@EHG_Kain might be able to find out. There isn’t a bug report for this particular issue.
I’m fairly sure Llama is correct here, and that is intentional for the mentioned reasons. However I’m double checking with the team as an angle of feedback to see if maybe it should still scale with attributes.
It’s a bit odd though since when you have “proper” minion skills (summon skellies, etc), they do benefit from the player’s Int (because the skill gives the skillies increased hp, damage, etc based on the player’s hp) so it feels a bit odd that that node would not include any str/att bonus for the subskill if you take it.
I’ve done a lot of testing recently as well and noticed something was off with the scaling of Soaring Scourge and maybe Frost Bites in the Swarmblade Form passive tree. I also fell like some tags don’t get converted fully to minion with Soaring Scourge, same thing when you add Frost Bites, since it’s then converting the minion phy tags from Soaring Scourge to minion cold damage.
Thanks for all the replies. I’d tend to agree with Llama’s second reply. If a base minion summon scales with base stats, then Soaring Scourge should at least partially benefit from base stats.
Twiztedprince might be right about some minion scaling tags not being fully converted as well. Even without the scaling of 100+ combined Strength/Attunement, I’d expect more than a third of the damage without Soaring Scourge. But I’m not sure on the math of that.
All % increased damage stats are added up then applied, but if you’re taking the figures from the character screen then you need to be aware that any generic modifiers such as % increased minion damage will be double counted on the more specific lines (such as % increased minion melee damage which will include any relevant more generic modifiers). It’s much easier to upload your character to the build planner then look at the offense tab as that will be correct.
