Guild Wars 2

30 sec cooldown for a 10 sec swiftness that puts your into combat if you get too close to something….

the damage is too low and the aoe radius is too small for it to be an effective damage dealing ability and it just puts you in combat at the worst times.

I think the ability needs to changed so it has a clear purpose. right now it is a damage/speed hybrid that fails at doing both.

It’s a Swiftness and a Cripple. Great for when you need to catch someone up and stay in range of them, and forget the damage – just use it for the snare when you hit something with it. Combining the warhorn in the offhand with a dagger makes for some easy melee hits for one example.

I love my Locust Swarm.

As Karther mentioned, its more of a utility skill. Great for both chasing and running away. If they catch you, they’ll be crippled and you’ll still have swiftness (hopefully.)

The attack speed on it is rather quick too useful to proc on hit/ on crit attributes

The only problem is that the necro has several better options for cripple, and swiftness that are miles better such as spectral walk and the 2 spell on scepter, 3 on axe.

And compared to using a dagger, or focus for the offhand it just isn’t as good.

What are people using in WvW to maintain their speed? I won’t use Locas because it’s AOE just nabs mobs to easily. Signit is ok but it still seems like I’m 2-3 seconds behind the main group.

the cripple is pointless since it only lasts one second. people can still chase you easily while dealing damage because the cripple is not long enough to let you get much distance from your pursuer. add to the fact that almost everyone has a ranged wep switch in GW2 makes the cripple it fairly pointless. i use warhorn for WvW because i need a move speed boost ability for chasing and running away and locust swarm is just really annoying.

I love locust! Great for the swiftness/cripple and ticks for 250 a sec with my powerbuild. I just love to pop this run into an enemy>immobilize>wells>deathshroud>dagger2 or axe 2 combined with the flesh golem rush. It does a total of 20k+ dmg within 8 seconds. The additional locust is another 2k dmg in total w/o any effort > as long as I stay close which is np since I mostly use daggers anyway.

all i want is a decent escape mechanism for WvW : (

I feel your pain… but I’ve grown to live with it and focus on the benefits. Using it to run through opponents with Life Transfer up can be pretty useful in WvW. I also use a sigil of superior speed, so for pve I’m usually perma-swiftness. You do have to be a little careful not to put yourself in combat when running through neutral mobs, though because I use minions I’m usually back out of combat in a couple of seconds.

I don’t always get away in WvW if I have 2 or 3 people following, though I get a fair distance by laying down marks between locust recharge and the dagger root skill. Usually it’s enough to get to a safe location/to allies.

Use Specrtal Walk, if you trait it, you can have Swiftness up almost 24/7. It does not port you back when it ends if you dont click on skill again.

Don’t know what build this necro was running but Locust was hitting me for 400+ a tick. For a power build it is very nice. You get an aoe damage, speed buff, and it slows. in other words everything you need in one.

Personally I’d rather they drop the cripple and make it a vampiric attack again, we already have plenty of better options for snaring.

I use D/W and this is my most valued ability. The 1 second cripple is reapplied every second of Swiftness. Brilliant! You only need to buff Boon duration through traits to get 13 seconds of Swiftness AND cripple. Condition duration bonuses should stack beyond 13 seconds. I haven’t tried that. Great ability! Priceless, if you use a dagger. Also, the damage is burst applied each second, so it scales with Power, ideal when gearing for Dagger. Leave this one alone, please.

It hasn’t been mentioned yet that locust swarm is also a very effective life force generator in close quarters combat. It generates LF per tic per enemy hit, so if there are several enemies clustered, you can fill a very large chunk of life force bar.

Also, as others have said, it’s a good general utility, either for harassing targets (keeping them crippled when you follow them) and for transportation out of combat.

Warhorn is a great offhand.

It gives 1% life force per hit.

It’s not bad for necro’s that like to stick to people in melee range. Pop it before going into Death Shroud to tank multiple things.

Wow, so many tears over what is, in my opinion, such a great ability. The cripple is not for running away, it’s for preventing others from running away by hugging them – great with the dagger. The Swiftness is also our only Swiftness aside from Spectral Walk which takes up a utility slot.

I have a video of some WvW and PvP I put up recently mainly for my guildies (until I sort my PC out to record in better quality), but I think many people will benefit from it for this thread – there’s a few good warhorn/Locust Swarm uses in there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOlUI4Wx2fU

Spectral Walk and Locust Swarm (War Horn #5), combined with traits give you perma-swift. I’ve been using it to 100% complete my PvE map. In PvE, I just run through mobs, because they can’t catch me anyway.

It can be used Well, I haven’t used it properly in a while and my Main PVP build doesn’t use Warhorn so

if it is meant to be damage+slow+lf_gain ability i reckon they should give it a slight range buff.

Personally, I wouldn’t want it to have greater range. It hits things in melee range which works fine for me, but already grabs some unwanted aggro, too. The bigger the range, the more of an issue that would be.

I know we’re supposed to be black-hearted deathmongers, but I can’t help but feel bad at all the hapless wildlife I’ve slaughtered, as it is.

u just think it is fairly underwhelming like most of necros OH abilities

Vzur.7123

I know we’re supposed to be black-hearted deathmongers, but I can’t help but feel bad at all the hapless wildlife I’ve slaughtered, as it is.

If small things were meant to live, they’d have bigger teeth or faster feet.

Ahahaha I love slaughtering everything I come across, if I could get my warhorse to work the swiftness would be nice, I don’t know how main hand dagger necros can give up the multiple target blind from offhand dagger though.

fun fact, the trait which reduces horn cool down and boosts duration also boosts the cripple duration. That is, the locust effect last longer (13 seconds?), but the amount that each cripple tick last for also increases, even if the tooltip doesn’t show it.. Testing on golems showed that there was a full 13 seconds of cripple left when the locusts vanished, and that’s without condition duration boosts.

Locust swarm is very, very good for dagger/warhorn, as well as any situation where you need to keep on top of someone, and I often use the warhorn trait over ground targeted wells purely because it can keep them slowed for so long.