Another patch, and another set of numeric Swarmblade changes. Buff it until it becomes overpowered and people actually play it, and then nerf it because it’s overpowered so people stop. This is not a good cycle, and it’s just going to continue until they either fix the underlying problems or give up on it.
The TLDR because I don’t really do ‘short’ when it comes to talking about game design: I don’t think numerical changes will fix Swarmblade because the problems are rooted in its mechanics. In needs a more fundamental change, not just numbers tweaks. On with the long version!
The problem with Swarmblade isn’t the numbers, it’s the mechanical interactions between its abilities. Or should I say the lack of mechanical interactions, because there’s a significant and distinct lack of synergy that is really the root cause of everything that has gone wrong. And the core of it all is Swarmstrike.
I can see what they were trying to do with Swarmstrike. Swarmblade has 2 distinct identities, summoning a swarm of locusts and using direct attacks. While LE does have better support than most other games when it comes to hybrid pet/self builds, trying to get both from a single skill tree will never work (Forge Strike has the same problem, which is why any build that wants to scale the swords just takes the pet nodes from Forge Strike and uses points on a different tree to summon them). So you have summons that will never be used by builds that attack directly, and direct attacks that will never be used by builds that are using the summons. Since the transform skills also lock out the rest of the Primalist skills this means that every Swarmblade build would be forced into being a 1-2 button build, which goes against their design philosophies.
They came up with a rather interesting solution to this problem - add a direct attack skill that consumes the pets as fuel to give direct attacking builds a reason to still use those summons, and add Soaring Scourge and Locust Master to the skill’s tree to give pet builds a reason to use things other than Hive. This isn’t a bad concept, but it falls apart in the actual implementation.
First, the locusts are hard to control and Swarmstrike only consumes them in a small AoE. This means that in actual combat the skill often just doesn’t work as well as you want, as some locusts will chase enemies out of the area reducing the Locust Swarm’s power. This pushes the optimal use of Swarmstrike to be an out-of-combat sequence where the locusts are summoned and consumed before rushing over to the enemies, which really isn’t fun.
Second, they made the Locust Swarm a DoT while making Armblade Slash one of the best crit scaling abilities in the game, since it can get +16% base crit from Swarmblade and Viper Strike. Crit scaling and DoT scaling have no synergy, so even if using Swarmstrike was easy it still wouldn’t be worthwhile if the player has invested in crit to scale their melee damage. If the entire goal was to give melee Swarmblades a reason to summon locusts, then why give melee good crit scaling while making the connecting skill unable to crit?
Third, of the 4 Swarmblade skills only Dive has any support utility. In LE it’s mostly fine to scale several damage skills at once because they each have their own skill tree, so they each pull from a different pool to get their maximum power. Transforms are different, because all 4 skills are supported by a single mastery tree. This strongly encourages players to focus on 1-2 skills for their damage, and other damage skills will fall behind in power until they’re no longer useful. Spriggan and Werebear forms each have 2 support skills (Healing Totem, Thorn Shield, Rampage, and Roar) that are still useful when the player has fully invested in other parts of their tree. Swarmblade just has Dive. As a result, basically every Swarmblade build will end up giving up on 1-2 of its skills just because they’re not worth the time it would take to cast them. Why summon hives to activate a Locust Swarm when it does less damage than just continuing to Armblade Slash?
I think there are really only 2 ways to fix Swarmblade. One would be to split it into 2 different transforms. Right now it has to many different damage sources. Pets, hit/crit, spell DoT, Melee DoT, and Poison/Bleed/Frostbite… it’s just too much for one skill to support when it’s a transformation that needs to carry the whole build. They could make a second transform to absorb some of this load, letting each focus more on a subset of these damage types to improve the focus. Make one a summoner transform that focuses on summoning/buffing/consuming a hoard of angry locusts, and make the other the Scyther style close range melee fighter.
The other option would be to redesign 1-2 of its skills to have more baseline support utility so they don’t need Swarmstrike to act as a linking skill, and then get rid of it altogether and replace it with something that synergizes better with what the Swarmblade is doing. This is probably the easier option because it doesn’t require the creation of an entire new transform skill, so I’ll offer some suggestions on that one.
If I were going to go down that route, the first thing I would do is change Hive. Remove the ‘summon over time’ aspect because it really isn’t fun to play with, and just have it summon all its locusts immediately. In its place, have the hives provide a stacking buff to all nearby allies at about a 1 screen radius. This would be strongest with a locust build because it’s buffing many individuals at once, but it would also be worth casting for builds that attack directly just to get the buff even if they haven’t spent points on hive/locust nodes. Since attack speed is relevant for the spell proc builds, hit based builds, and pets I’d want to include as part of the buff but it could also give other benefits. We rework all the existing hive nodes to improve the strength of the buff, reduce the cooldown, increase the duration, and add an node that causes it to release additional locusts over time to allow players to get that playstyle back if they wanted to.
With hive acting as a functional support skill without investment we don’t need Swarmstrike to act as a linking skill anymore, and since it isn’t particularly fun to use and synergizes so poorly with the rest of Swarmblade we just cut it entirely. We can also get rid of the locust cap that was just a band-aid fix to its scaling. In its place we want something that interacts well with both the pet and direct attacking aspects, so definitely not a DoT. That said, the idea of consuming the locusts for some benefit is a good one.
I’d make the new skill Consume, an active skill that kills all locusts in about a half-screen range to restore HP and Rage per locust eaten. Mastery options would include increasing the heal, sharing the effects of Consume with your allies, and adding additional effects per locust consumed. One of those effects would be a node that refreshes Hive charges based on locusts consumed, so it could be used in a Hive → Locust → Consume → Hive gameplay loop that is very different from the game’s other pet builds. The combination of supporting effects from Hive and Consume could allow Swarmblade to function as a support role in MP, support for build focusing on a companion skill, or as a way to sustain/buff themselves for direct combat. We also need to change Swarm’s Fury, so I would instead tie it to Consume and have it provide a melee buff based on the number of Locusts consumed with a 20 second duration. This gives us a gameplay loop where we use Swarmblade to summon and eat a bunch of locusts, then fight as a Werebear with those buffs for 20 seconds before switching back and repeating. I think that would be much more interesting than just using the transform to extend the duration of a Swarmblade skill that has no real interaction with anything the Werebear form does.
Those are my thoughts. I feel like the Swarmblade idea has a lot of potential, but until they resolve the underlying mechanical problems it will always be held back.