Well after completing it on Aspirant here’s what I think:
Given that this was what I imagine to be the “Normal” version of the run (at least given by my extremely overcapped resists) I didn’t expect it to be that hard. Ramps up at waves 130+ though so I’m a bit hesitant to try out the next difficulty just yet.
With regards to towers I personally never saw much use in them. The problem is that I’m melee and want to engage the enemies as quickly as possible to maximize my score multiplier.
Sitting on a tower would be fine but Grim Dawn has no concept of line of sight. Blocking an enemies path with a tree or boulder means nothing because they see through the object, they just can’t shoot or move through it. This makes the offensive/defensive towers much more situational.
With this in mind my strategy going forward would be to rely more on the passive buffs you get and keep towers as a final “oh shit” button, at best using the fire/lightning towers since they don’t require me being in them. I haven’t tried a ranged class yet but imagine you would get more mileage since you can stand in a tower’s bubble and shoot people.
Another thing that affects towers is map equality. Some maps are larger than others and have less obstacles making them far easier to maneuver around in. As an example, Crucible of the Groves is much larger than the Crucible of the Dead, not necessarily in flat area space, but because the Grove has more obstacles you need to move around and two dimensions of elevation.
Overall I think it’s fun diversion from the normal gameplay but very, very long for what you ultimately get out of it. On Aspirant at least I didn’t find the rewards particularly worth it but I’m hoping that improves on the harder difficulties.
The first 50 waves are a complete joke, the difficulty is more in not falling asleep there.
Afterwards it got more challenging and infinitely more fun, but after like wave 110 it gets really tough, i died 3 times between 110 and 140. But I tried beating it on my Pyromancer without any buff or tower.
On my Coop Warlock (together with a BM) we cleared Aspirant easily and wiped in the Challenger Crucible on wave 149 (lost concentration, got swarmed and died almost immediately). Coop is just too forgiving, you die, your mate kills the rest and you are alive again. you can just build a massive dps char and a support that can generate enough aggro and its not even difficult sind the support just respawns if he dies.
But it’s really fun and challenging, props to Crate
The difficulty really needs some work IMO. They need to flatten the difficulty curve, because the first half is super easy, but lvl 130+ gets stupid hard. There are so many enemies, I can’t even tell what I’m doing and it brings my computer to a crawl, and nemesis bosses start spawning like crazy. I had Fabius spawn three times between lvl 100 and 130. Given, they aren’t nearly as tough as in the campaign, but they still hit hard and you can’t kite because there are so damn many enemies on screen. I can’t even beat the first map with my dual weild pyro. I get to lvl 139 every time, IM spawns, I get mobbed, she wails on me, I die. Even with towers and a blessing, it’s futile. Oh, and it would be nice if we had a few seconds between rounds to see what the heck the mutators are. Sure, I see the icons, but I have no idea what they mean. Makes it a bit difficult to adjust your strategy when you don’t know what you’re up against. I’d much rather them shorten it from 150 levels to like 50-60, with a much more linear difficulty increase. It’s faster to just run one of the campaign farming routes over and over than it is to slog through 150 levels of crucible if you’re farming. It’s a fun concept, I loved TD in the van helsing games, but it needs some reworking here IMO.
I have had really good luck getting MI’s, many of which I’ve never seen in my 120+ hours in the campaign, I’ll concede that. Still, it’s too much work IMO.
In completing the first 2 difficulties I got 3 Legendaries I didn’t already have and a couple of good MIs. That was ok. No time to do the third difficulty yet.
I tried the first difficulty with characters that are on ultimate - not OP characters, they didn’t even finish it - believing it would be a walk in the park. In campaign mode, it would be if I went back in normal or elite difficulty.
The beginning was easy. The end… not so much.
Reaching and beating wave 100 is not difficult. But the following waves?
If I can’t do the 150 waves in the first difficulty, I fear what I would be able to manage in the next difficulty.
Or is it that in the second difficulty level, the first 100 waves are easier than the last 50 waves of the first difficulty? That would be strange.
And the defense towers…
I tried only the lightning one and it wasn’t great.
I believe it should:
cost less (first levels of the tower doesn’t do enough damage for the cost);
be possible to destroy them and get part of the cost back (lose the bits cost or the bits and one tribute point);
have a more explicit description of the effect;
have a more explicit depiction of the range (or at least it should be written in the description).
well i’m kinda stuck. I’m on level 43, Regen mutator for the mobs (all ranged) and a black legion combat medic - I can’t kill them as a retaliate / reflect warder, they regen before I can do enough damage
stalemate in the crucible. are waves random or do they roughly come in the same order?
The highest I made it was gladiator 80. And I have no interest in ever playing crucible again. I think its insanely unfair that nemesis mobs are thrown in the mix. They’re never alone and are typically swarmed in with boss mobs or hero mobs. Only a small handful of builds in this game have any chance against odds like that. The first time nemesis mobs or anasteria shows up on gladiator, I’m done. I’m overcap on fire and aether resist, and anasteria’s devastation attack still hit for 6k+ and she spams it. Combine that with a mobs that can immobilize me and I’m done. Which is exactly what happened.
I find that my build is personally stupidly busted in the mode, mostly because it gives it the one thing the build desires more than any other stat, as a near free buff that has massive uptime. The CDR buff, on my CDR-Breaker spellbreaker, lets it reach 100% CDR on Shadow Strike at all times, and perfectly optimalized with the mutator, I can get as low as a 3.6 second CD on Mirror too.
i wish you could spend tribute to go to a checkpoint on your next play session. annoying that you have to have time for the entire thing in one session. otherwise back to level 1
Another problem is severe lag with all the enemies floating around. Grim Dawn already had some pretty shit optimization from my experience but the Crucible enhances this to the extreme.
I went and did Challenger mode on my poxy Witch Hunter build. Not completely geared yet, only level 78 (79 now - managed to actually level in the Crucible but it’s not efficient for that) and got to rank 95 before a Nemesis boss killed me (biggest weakness for that build is reflect so the Iron Maiden sucks balls – apparently the Blitz update affects her too, lol).
If you min-max and are geared I don’t think it’s too bad, but you gotta be real careful and have max resists. Especially stun, that shit’s the biggest problem I had most of the time.
I completed the Crucible with my lvl 85 Soldier (Markovian-Set, not "min-max"ed) now on Aspirant and Challenger difficulty. I won´t complain about the difficulties (maybe after I tried on Gladiator), because it was makeable, but also challenging sometimes and not too easy.
I think it´s fun to play, but there some points I want to talk about:
As already said by others, there should be some time to take a look at the mutators to find out what they doing.
Maybe I´m wrong, but do you get damage, if you stay in the mobspawns ?
In this case I would recommend, that enemies like the “Aetherial Obeliscs” don´t spawn in there.
For me it was no Problem, but maybe some melee players with lower gear can´t kill them.
The “Regen”-Mutator needs some adjustment IMO. It´s too strong, I think.
But all in all I like the Crucible DLC. Good work Crate!
You do take damage in the spawn pad areas (I found that out pretty late on in, I had so much healing I didn’t notice it until I was between waves and walked back there to look at the area and saw that I was taking damage).
And yes, I do think the Aether obolisk should be restricted to spawning in the middle only. It really sucks that they can spawn in there, because they are so slow that a build that can’t get in there (Mine can do so fine, jump in, Mirror, kill everything, move out before mirror ends) has to wait like 20-30 seconds for them to move into the safer ground, but god would I feel sorry for a melee build without the tools to nuke em down fast.
