Crucible: Helpful Test for Build Variety or Menace?

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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From you previous posts I can only infer that you are playing a poison DoT Witch Hunter. Just for the record, WH is not the best class to farm the crucible solo. However, it can be done reliably as dw, caster and ranged. Post the grimtools link and I am sure a knowledgeable person will at least try to help you out.

You are right that some classes have inherent advantages in the crucible (i.e. arcanist, soldier), while others have profound weakness, but I believe any combination can do it with no banners and no potions in less than 40 min (100-150).

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Bleeding Trickster with no AoE besides Grasping Vines with Rend and no Physical Resistance (item set has none…). :wink:

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64034
Last post there is a slight build change which might help for Crucible (I used it for Lokarr).

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I’m not going to say I suck as much as you are claiming, but I have come to terms that I have a lot to learn about the Crucible, and part of it is the buffs and part of it is I have troubles when facing Fabius and Iron Maiden at the same time, which always starts to happen around wave 120.

I have noticed that I do improve with practice, so maybe there is hope. Ultimately, the only things I like about the Crucible are that it’s a decent test, and the loot. I do not find it that enjoyable being stuck in a single room with waves of enemy coming at me. I’d enjoy it more if far fewer mobs showed at once. It’s hard to see what’s going on the screen with so many waves, and it’s exhausting.

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other than checking some boxes to see if your char potentially works in crucible or not it all comes down to practice after a gear threshold.

Give a fully decked out tier one(whatever that means to the player) crucible clearer to someone who never ever played crucible and there is a very big chance that the player will die.

It will be frustrating at first, there is no way around that. You WILL die in the beginning. But then you get to know the waves and monster sequence etc. and gets easier

65

But they are extremely helpful! And tributes max at 100 :).

66

Double buff is best for no stress easy x10

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If the content of this thread is representative for the community, then what are we even discussing?
I haven’t read the ‘bashing threads’ but to me it seems hardly anyone is being elitist about gladiator crucible here
If it isn’t representative, bring out the ‘dicks’, that would make things interesting, it would also make this more of a discussion

More on topic:

  1. I am one of those people not playing crucible much, I think it gets tedious pretty fast
    Because of that I also don’t have the experience of getting better loot, I have a ton of gear and components all from drops/farming, crafting and acquired through trade
    I probably don’t have many great MI’s, which would require a lot of farming in both instances, which I don’t have time for

  2. I concur that it can be intimidating to post builds here, if I’m honest that doesn’t necessarily have to do with them being bashed
    Usually when I have posted something about a build, people have been very helpful
    Sometimes though, that is not what I’m hoping for, of course I want them to jump for joy over my great build! XD
    Joking aside, I do have the feeling that my builds need to be at their capacity before posting a guide
    Maybe I should just take the plunge

68

If there’s one thing about this whole kerfuffle that I just don’t get, it’s what I consider the misuse of the word “viability”. Far too often, I think, people substitute the word viable for the word optimal. They’re two dramatically different concepts that should never be used interchangeably.

Perhaps I’m simply using too loose a definition of the word, but it seems to me that viable is a really broad term here, and that the intended use of the build is what should be used to narrow down the context of the word. If someone is only interested in the campaign content then it doesn’t matter if the build can do crucible. What matters is whether or not it can complete main campaign. Crucible is a test only of whether or not a build is crucible viable. Granted, a build that can complete gladiator can most likely complete campaign, but are there not builds viable for campaign that fall down in crucible? A build doesn’t have to do both to be viable if it was never intended to do both. A build doesn’t have to have the fastest clear times (in campaign or crucible) to be viable, it just has to be able to complete the content.

69

This is essentially true, but like in any other game people invest a lot of time in, sooner or later new benchmarks have to be invented in order for the “small elite” group to feel better about itself. :rolleyes: It doesn’t matter that we talk about a game with no economy and no inherent competitive nature, it’s just how player psychology goes.

First it was Fabius when the game was “Fabius Farming Simulator” and, naturally, all classes with Nightblade in it became tier 1. Next it was Mad Queen and, again, all classes that had access to nullification or “proc machine” skills became tier 1. From 1.0.0.6. onward, that benchmark became the Crucible.

Now, there is a very important aspect here that nobody mentioned and I think it is extremely important to examine it on the long run. This important aspect I am talking about is the fact that local optimality DOES NOT imply global optimality .

To put things in perspective, think about this - how much time do you need to level a character from 1 to 100 with or without xp boost items and potions? Well, the answer to that question depends on your class combo, because classes are not created equal in terms of ability to clean trash and move fast between mob groups. As such, anything that incorporates BWC, DEE, OFF or Shadow Strike will go faster than anything else. Sure, every class has at least one ability to clear fast (e.g. Death Sentence, Bone Harvest, Primal Strike), but leveling with Blade Arc, for example, will be 2-3x slower than BWC or even less popular skills such as OFF and P-Blades.

Here is what I am getting with this: let’s examine things objectively:

  • In the blue corner we have a character capable of doing Gladiator Solo with no buffs in 25 minutes.
  • In the red corner we have a character capable of doing the same in 35 minutes.

The difference is only 10 minutes. Now, if the “red” corner character levels to Ultimate in 24 hours or less (and this is entirely possible, btw) he might have an advantage even after 100 crucible runs. Just compare leveling in Veteran with Blade Arc vs BWC and DEE and you will understand what I am saying. The 16 hours you lose in the 100 crucible runs difference you gain in the leveling process. (Obviously, I don’t believe a sane person would actually do 100 Crucible runs with a single character, but we are talking a hypothetical example here which only makes the argument stronger). Sure, you might say, but 100 crucible runs (i.e. 16 hours) means a lot of more legendary items. That is true, but it also means a lot less components (Ugdenblooms for example) and epic items you dismantle. The difference is not that big. It’s just that people usually forget that the Crucible does not represent an END, it is a mean through which you obtain items in order to test what really matters in this game, viz. finishing it with the worst supported classes, not with what you know ex ante is OP.

Grim Dawn is not Doom or Counter Strike. You do not get better at the game by improving your attention, hand-eye coordination or short-term memory. You get better as you gather gear because 90% of the encounters are gear-checks. This means that the challenge has to do with: a) patience; and b) intelligence. The patience part is obvious, I think, but the intelligence part has to do with the fact that the game is like a puzzle - you need to find the optimal path given an initial set of conditions. If the initial set - i.e. skills of the classes + devotions - are OP, the challenge is zero (think DK Krieg). The game really does what it is meant to do when you can actually complete the challenge with a bad “opening hand”, namely - classes that have poor synergy and poor item support. Therefore, there is nothing to brag about beating the game with a good hand. You just won a lot of chips with a Royal Flush…wow

70

Should damage dealt in crucible be shown as damage dealt in inv ? seems like…not fair…

71

I maybe late for this but here my two cents.
I think OP should add option to vote for “crucible is fine in terms of difficulty and ability to test builds limits but it’s boring”. I personally play it only for farm not for fun. By the way huge props to Zhuugus for his thread it was very useful for choosing build for me.
Don’t know what makes rogue dungeons and farm pathes in main campaign more entertaining for me. Sadly I don’t have suggestions for devs how to solve “problem of boring crucible” so this is probably another useless complaint. Maybe crucible isn’t just my piece of cake and never supposed to be.
Note that I don’t suggest to stop enjoying crucible - play whatever way you like. But it little bit upsetting that OP and other crucible lovers think that if player don’t like crucible than he couldn’t handle the difficulty.

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Poll Results as of the update 1.0.4.0:

First Option: 8
Second Option: 3
Third Option: 3
Fourth Option: 5
Fifth Option: 7
Sixth Option: 27

I kept the poll open until well after the New Year so people can come back to this and compare how they view the Crucible before and after the update. I don’t know how people can reset their answers, so if you’re vehemently set on changing your answer from one to another, give some indication of what you voted for and what you opt to switch your answer to, and I’ll make a notion of that in the poll results.

73

Based off my experiences at <150 Crucible and hearing the forum accounts of people who have done 170 Crucible, the old Gladiator would mercilessly crit any player that doesn’t have roughly 3300 DA. The new Gladiator seems to have a requirement of at least 3600 DA if Superfluff’s comment of having Kuba with a 12% crit chance at 3200 DA is roughly true.

Meanwhile, 2900 DA at Ultimate seems to be the number to reach to make absolutely sure no Nemesis has his/her way with you. These were the types of numbers I was hoping to obtain during the beginning of the discussion, so here’s a question for participants and devs alike:

  1. Outside of spamming Stalwart + Protection greens, how did you think people will reasonably obtain the new defenses necessary for Crucible?
  2. Between Arcanist’s Mirror, Necromancer’s MoT, Nightblade’s Blade Barrier, Soldier’s Menhir’s Will + Massive defensive bonuses, do you think there’s enough itemization / skill choices where players of all damage types and strategies (melee, ranged, pets) have a decent circuit breaker or other ways to mitigate extreme group damage that comes from dense mobs in Campaign + high waves in Crucible?
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  1. The only other method I can think of getting 3600 da is getting judicator seals ad have about 3400 DA before it procs. Warder and tactician would be able to do that easier. That said, stalwart and protection affixes are yellow so they’re not really that hard to get.

  2. For the current crucible, no. Casters and defensive shield builds surely have enough, but for the rest I don’t think there is.