Reading through the forum, where debates about sub5min-Crucible runs are standard, one could conclude that finishing crucible at all is easy peasy. Only now and then some statements pop up about people not playing crucible at all.
Me, I kill celestials and master SR75 regularly with nearly all my plenty characters.
But when it comes to crucible, I fail with all of them.
Playing the game for years now, having completed (!) Crucible around 5 times so far.
Wanna say: Is it really just me who fails to navigate in a sheer clusterf*ck of enemies, being pumped up to the teeth, dropping dead the next instant with no chance of ever knowing what killed me to begin with?
I think it’s most probably designed to kill before getting killed unlike in SR and celestials where fights last much longer thanks to their health and a few more mutators.
Crucible for me feels a different kind of monster for me.
Most people who talk about sub 5 min runs and “crucible players”, i suspect, do not play the gamemode at all and don’t really understand hard hard it is to finish it reliably.
It’s very difficult to get into because your mistakes get punished really hard and you have very little feedback on what killed you. Only when you learn the spawns, boss combos and enemy behavior patterns would you be able to finish Crucible with smth that is not a tank by design.
And yeah, the vast majority of sub5 builds do “kill faster than get killed”. The most important property is when you are able to burst down a single hardest nemesis of the wave before you run out of fail safes.
Crucible is the crowning achievement for my characters. Always the hardest and left for last. With my one character - like you said - everything else went rather smoothly but not Crucible. And I still keep trying to finally finish it with that char.
One thing I must make clear though: I’m glad it’s difficult.
Exactly opposite imo We (“people who talk about sub 5 min runs”) do understand very well how hard is to finish it reliably and that is why we don’t think that <5mins should be a building standard by all means.
I remember having some toons having no problems in Cruci but troubles in SR75, for example with Reaper but I was very inexperienced. I think to some degree it’s what you’re good at + what modes you tailor a build to.
I think it’s mostly due to Superboss and SR fight is determined mostly by the defensive stats check, and people can choose which target to strike first and then kiting when defence skill on cd.
Crucible on the other hand can trade the defensive portion to be more offensive as there is buff and banner to mitigate it by a bit. I believe what kills in the crucible is due to tons of debuff from the mob, so it makes sense here for the trade. Then there is wave 160/169/170 where the 3+ Nemesis spawn which can activate all defensive layers at once with their burst damage skill. Pushing the 5m run mostly due to experience to know what composition that spawn and how to pilot the build, like for example baiting all melee mob to the ranged mob position then throw BWC for all to burn, than throw 2 BWC at the ranged mob and at the melee mob.
Debuffs are extremely dangerous in Crucible, some are stackable, like 169 and the insane amount of RR by fatsos and Anasteria. The more time you spend on wave showering in debuffs, the bigger the chance of dying. But since enemies have limited amounts of health and you have offensive perks in buffs and banners, you focus on killing main threats before they can do their specialties. Classical targeting is nasty Nemesis resistant to your damage or with lots of health or dangerous attacks and let AoE take care of rest.
Then there are many factors of why build can do 5 minutes Crucible. You need well tailored build for this mode, sometimes one piece of equipment changed can lead to 15 seconds difference for instance. You need also decent system, since you have plenty of enemies on screen. And most importantly you need player skill and knowledge. Before aggro was fixed, you have to manually aggro enemies and chased them down to their holes, so it required more skill to herd them around you. Now it’s easier in a sense but more dangerous, since you’re closed down even quicker. And that further alienate Crucible play style from the rest of content. And that explains why experienced players might struggle to even complete 150-170 Gladiator, while certain players can speedrun it with closed eyes.
QFT. I have no issues in Campaign/SR, but I get decimated in Crucible. It doesn’t help that I don’t like the mode much, which means I don’t focus on Crucible specific builds or work on Strats. Both are needed in Cruc, very different then Campaign.
Just surviving in crucible is different from speedrunning it. However, what’s always applicable is that you need the knowledge on what spawns and where if you wanna do it consistently. SR requires you to adapt to whatever the room gives you and dodge unfavorable matchups if you can. In crucible that’s not possible since there’s only a limited amount of possible spawns. You need to have a consistent plan for every wave until the last. The good thing with crucible is that once you find your strategy, it basically works for every build of that acrhetype 90% of the time. So if you’re playing say TSS druid when you figured it out, that strategy will work for like BWC sorc or most casters. If you figure out your melee strategy, it works for most melee. This doesn’t apply to the same extent on SR due to the wider randomness. Most of the time, this strategy is about isolating the fast nemeses from the slower ones so you can get a 1v1 or 1v2 instead of 1v4.
As for difficulty, I dare say buffed cruci 150-170 is harder than SR80, and that’s coming from an exclusive crucible player. I only started thoroughly testing my builds on SR and I found out that SR80 is too easy for my builds while SR85 is where my lack of SR knowledge shows (I use edited chars so I skip anything in between). That’s just most of the time tho. SR can have bullshit spawns that’s almost impossible to deal with.
I guess that means that if you’re only limiting your build to crawling SR75-76 then you won’t necessarily be able to survive CR170 buffed. You want something that clears SR80 with ease if you want to also easily survive CR170 on buffed. Naked EX runs (i.e. no buffs with extra spawns) are more comparable to SR90.
On speedrunning, the strategy changes from isolation of dangerous enemies to clumping them all up. This is mainly where the kill them before they kill you philosophy comes in. There’s just no way you expect to tank 2 reapers, fabius, moose and korvaak 2nd phase indefinitely.
Most of the videos you can watch on cruci builds use this speedrun strat, so if you’re just learning how to survive it’s harder to learn from those vids.
We (“people who talk about sub 5 min runs”) do understand very well how hard is to finish it reliably and that is why we don’t think that <5mins should be a building standard by all means.