Hey guys and today we’re going to take a look at the Hydroid Pilfering Swarm Build.
So, for the Hydroid Pilfering Swarm Build, I’m using Energy Siphon aura but it’s not too necessary. It’s just to make sure that I always have the energy to cast Tentacle Swarm so you can swap it for whatever you want. Then I have Primed Continuity, Augur Message, and Narrow Minded for a ton of duration so Tentacle Swarm lasts a decent amount of time which is followed up by Stretch and Cunning Drift to balance out and Narrow Minded. And this is so that the tentacles don’t spawn too close together and actually cover a decent area.
After that, I’m using Vitality for a little bit of extra beefiness, Thief’s Wit which gives me a ton of loot radar which is really useful on a farming build like this. Next up is Pilfering Swarm which is what makes this a farming build because it augments Tentacle Swarm and it makes it so that when an enemy gets grabbed by one of the tentacles they have a 100% chance to drop more loot. It doesn’t guarantee extra loot because the way it works is whenever you kill an enemy in the game it will roll a dice to see if the enemy dropped something or not. And this just makes it roll twice which means that you can still get no loot if both the rolls come out negative. You can get standard loot if one of them goes positive. And you can get double loot if both of them are all positive. Overall, it just gives you more loot.
And finally, I’m using Streamline to make the abilities a little bit cheaper. Though it is very much not necessary so we can run Natural Talent for faster casting, Flow for more energy, and stuff like that.
Now, the arcanes here are very much up to you. It’s mostly about what you want to do with this Hydroid Build and what kind of stuff you want to farm with it. So, my build for an example uses Arcane Strike which gives me a 10% chance on hit to increase melee attack speed by 40% for 12 seconds because I tend to run this with a melee weapon. And I’m running Arcane Resistance which gives me an 80% chance to resist any toxin status effect because I mostly use this versus the Infested.
I used to run a lot more range to kind of spread the tentacles around but as time went on I gravitated more towards a less range sort of around the 100% mark. And I found that it’s kind of like the sweet spot for infested defense which is what I mostly do with this Hydroid build. Because it will happily cover the entire cryopod and they have a decent amount of range even though they look like they’re very packed and they’re not covering an awful lot. They do actually have a decent amount of range. And it kind of prevents the tentacles from spawning on walls and ceilings and stuff like that. So, it spawns them exactly where you want them to be. And as I’ve said already I’m mostly using a melee weapon to kill the enemies because that the tentacles don’t have to kill them for the extra loot they just have to grab them so you can kill them with a melee weapon or something like the Arca Plasmor once they’ve been grabbed by the tentacle as well.
Now, if you’re not a big fan of defense missions and you would rather farm in survival missions you can very much do that with this Hydroid build as well. Just find yourself a nice choke point and pop the tentacles there.
The thing I like about this build is that first of all it’s a zero forma build and it’s also very flexible. You don’t need a ton of different stats to make this build work. You basically just need a little bit of duration and Pilfering Swarm. That’s pretty much it. So, I would encourage you even more than usual to customize the build for yourself. Rip out mods replace them with other stuff so if for example you want your tentacles to do a little bit more extra damage the energy conversion mod you can get from Cephalon Simaris is a fantastic choice here because it’s a farming build so enemies are going to be dropping energy orbs all over the place.
And that’s pretty much it for the Hydroid Pilfering Swarm Build. Now, of course, this build will work on Hydroid Prime as well as the standard version. It may just require a little bit of forma on the regular Hydroid. And I thank you very much for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed the article and it was helpful and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.
