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No, it's fine for them to have the AC bonuses of the individual. For one, each individual in the swarm can dodge individually and in different directions to avoid the attack. They dodge like Jim Carrey in The Mask (but moreso), not like a normal medium/large/etc creature. For two, attack rolls are assumed to target a single creature in the swarm, which is why they don't work at all against diminutive or fine swarms (hitting one individual is a completely negligible effect).
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I agree that this seems a fundamental error in the design of swarms.
And part of what makes them suck so badly for low level players.
The fact you are not allowed to target an individual creature sort of implies that the individual creature size bonus shouldn't apply.
Actually, the problem is that you *are* allowed to target the individual creature. In fact, you always do, even if you try to attack them as a group. That's why direct target effects have partial/no effect; attacking one creature (or, if lucky, a handful) has no measurable effect on the whole due to their sheer numbers.
I will agree that they make a poor enemy, but the fluff->crunch mapping seems just fine IMO. You could write a small chapter just on how to integrate swarms into your game in a fun way, but since that chapter doesn't exist it's a mostly dissatisfying experience, so in that sense you could say that the design is flawed.
Perhaps swarms just need alternate means of dispersal, like "these bugs fear fire, so they don't join a square containing a source of fire".
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The problem is that swarms are an area-effect only threat. Being immune to weapon damage invalidates the traditional damage dealers. Casters have ways to deal with them if they built for blasting, but most druids and wizards who have access to those tools don't build for blasting, so they aren't able to deal with them either. They are designed to be the paper for players who always pick rock.
This is going to be amplified in core only games where you don't have half of the classes that are able to deal with them.
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This is why I was saying that their main flaw is that they don't have guidance on how to use them. You don't put a swarm just anywhere you feel like, you have to put them somewhere that there is an alternative means to deal with them. Perhaps there is an deep chasm between chunks of safe land and the bugs aren't smart enough to climb down then back up the other side, but the jump is trivial (DC5). Or maybe there's water in the middle and they can't swim. Or maybe they don't like torches so the torchbearer of the group isn't affected (and perhaps Light confuses them and is treated as a torch).
Now flying swarms, on the other hand, there's not much you can do there aside from go underwater or rush through a doorway and close it (and hope the swarm is not small enough to go through the cracks).
If anything, I feel that dealing damage directly to them should have been considered the fallback method of handling them, not the main one. They should be more of a non-combat encounter than a combat one, so I suppose the *real* mistake was giving them a stat-block.
The few times you see swarms in media, one of two things happen: people run and live, or people stay and die. Eventually someone either grabs a flamethrower or some chemical weapon. PF seems to be meeting the theme there, but no-one seems to add the terrain complications necessary to make "run and live" viable.
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Dealing with swarms would be fine, if their touch AC's were actually mimicing the size of what you're trying to hit.
The mere fact a level 1 character, could spend all of their starting wealth on alchemical items, and still fail to kill a CR 1 swarm, due to not being able to hit the touch ac, is a problem.
If the same swarm had a touch AC modifier for a large creature (as it rightly should) this problem would go away and the low level PC's would have a chance to fight something they supposedly prepared for.
AFAIK splash weapons still count as direct attacks, so the touch AC isn't too relevant for a dimunitive or fine swarm. The non-splash portion deals 0 damage, so the swarm takes exactly 1 point per flask with effectively no roll. Even a tiny swarm takes half damage, so an average of 1.5 damage for the direct hit, 1 for the splash.
As I said, swarms need to be thought of by DMs as environmental hazards that happen to have a statblock, not creatures. You don't send a lava flow at a party and say "I hope you prepared resist energy today or you're dead!"
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 8
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Dealing with swarms would be fine, if their touch AC's were actually mimicing the size of what you're trying to hit.
The mere fact a level 1 character, could spend all of their starting wealth on alchemical items, and still fail to kill a CR 1 swarm, due to not being able to hit the touch ac, is a problem.
If the same swarm had a touch AC modifier for a large creature (as it rightly should) this problem would go away and the low level PC's would have a chance to fight something they supposedly prepared for.
AFAIK splash weapons still count as direct attacks, so the touch AC isn't too relevant for a dimunitive or fine swarm. The non-splash portion deals 0 damage, so the swarm takes exactly 1 point per flask with effectively no roll. Even a tiny swarm takes half damage, so an average of 1.5 damage for the direct hit, 1 for the splash.
As I said, swarms need to be thought of by DMs as environmental hazards that happen to have a statblock, not creatures. You don't send a lava flow at a party and say "I hope you prepared resist energy today or you're dead!"
That's a common interpretation on the boards, but not one I've seen endorsed anywhere by actual Paizo folks (though it's been a while since I looked) and one I highly doubt is the actual intent of the rules. I know in my games, and every game I've played in, splash weapons deal direct hit damage to swarms without issue (and indeed deal 1.5 damage).