Have you tried playing it with weaker classes lately? Because it’s night and day difference between playing it with Vindicator/Infiltrator/Warlord and Witchblade for example.
Played it with Pet Witchblade. Was easy… 
Actually, it’s all because of Anasteria. Her RR is absolutely insane, and not just Aether, but all elements, making enemies hit like trucks. The safest strategy for 169 wave for me - quickly focus her, or kill other enemies while not letting her get close to you (kiting).
Actually, it’s all because of Anasteria.
Exactly.
mad_lee, I already talked this to you in our Discord, but it’s not difficult for me to repeat this - RR from Anasteria is one of the most broken mechanics in whole game.
Why? Because she are COMPLETELY ignores all over-caped of your resistance, you got +1% or +500% in overcap - Anasteria are really don’t care, she shreds everything to 50%
Fortunately (indeed fortunately), if the resistances were raised above the cap - they will also be cut off by 50%. If it was 88% - it will be 44%
I recently played pierce Rf dervish. No problem at al 
I don’t see the reason why the majority of builds should be able to beat cruci fast. At least 1 build for eveey class is fine. And probably the only class that don’t have a sub 8 min build is warlock (and probably battlemage).
Man, RF Dervish (I assume Acid one, not Fire one) is up there with all the oupie class combinations. When I go into Crucible with my Vindicator or Bleeding Trickster or any Belgothian or Deathmarked I don’t have any problems at all either. You should try how weaker class combinations feel there. Like try Witch Hunter instead of Dervish and see the difference.
Did you even read pierce?
Huh? What do you mean?
I said I had no problems with PIERCE RF DERVISH and you replied ACID RF DERVISH is one of the strongest builds out there. I don’t even know what to make out of that.
ah, my bad, not sober enough to read carefully )
But, I am assuming you had Belgothian pieces in your build? Or something? Because whole concept sounds a bit sketchy, like it would not do enough damage and die a lot. Personally, I have tried Acid and Fire Dervishes, and first one is a great spec, but not on the same level of greatness as Belgothian or Deathmarked. I mean, it might even be faster then Belgothian or Deathmarked in some cases, but the piano nature and a funny rhythm of how the build plays (with ABB spam) turned me off. Fire Dervish is just straight up bad.
So really curious how you made pierce dervish work.
It was inspired by all the pierce blademasters which made me think nightblade+1 should be ok by itself as long as there’s a good autoattack. Can’t link grimtools cause I’m on mobile, will probably do a suggestion thread later.
No belgo. Did belgo and on paper it looks so squishy and not enough hp so didn’t play it. I did 2x derp slicers + realm set, then max aqc, wd, execute, the usual pierce nightblade stuff then rf, consecration, oathkeeper passives and mandate. Still in polishing but I got a 6:20ish run once. The slicers were godlike tho 
Well, sounds like a cool build, but my point stands, you were playing a god-tier build. Shattered set + autoattacking + Nighblade wps + Oathkeeper’s Ascension: there are quite a few strong build in the current build meta that are like this (like my sabo or my trickster or jabrixone’s acid auto-attacking dervish or safarael’s tactician which doesn’t have nightblade or oathkeeper but does have soldier and inquisitor).
I have recently been going thru my old builds - updating them for FG, and damn, builds like Stormreaver/Totem Conjurer or Trozan Breaker have really hard times in Crucible nowadays.
Pierce Dervish,hmm I play pierce Trickster 
Also on topic actually what’s the chance of Korvaak spawning?I feel he’s in 80% of my runs.
Stormreaver conjurer isn’t cutting it? Damn that’s sad. Still if it’s just about classes then conjurer has plenty of pet variants. Dunno about vit but it should also be good given all the sustain. Trozan isn’t exactly made for breaker too, or at least the sets aren’t for breaker. Druid is good (no matter how much Dmt wants to buff it ) and harra breaker is good.
@Nery recently it’s been close to 50% for me
No, Conjurer is cutting it, I made it work. But it’s not as dominating as it was before. Before it used to be able to pull out 6 minute timers consistently in good hands. Now I think it lost about 20-30 seconds of its completion timer, and I had to switch from Rhowan’s Crown to Revenant to ensure its consistency. Trozan Druid might be even slightly weaker then my Spellbreaker, and it’s a very hard build to pilot it successfuly in nowadays Crucible. I don’t think Harra’s Breaker is going to have easy times either: recent Harra nerfs that forced all Harra’s builds use that damn pistol have really hurt that build
I mean, it’s just my experience, your might differ, but if you take a gander at my youtube chanell where upload all the stuff I test you would see that I test quite a few builds and concepts (and I don’t even post all of them). And from my experience, Crucible Gladiator 150-170 is almost as hard as it’s ever been except maybe first days of when 150-170 with AoM nemesis was added.
A small reminder: Crucible without blessings is still very challenging for the overwhelming majority of builds, including those who can otherwise clear it with ease. It hasn’t been reduced to an all-comers speedrun contest; it’s merely played like one because it’s far more accessible that way.
We are going off-topic a bit, but: Trozan Druid is fine. I tested a straightforward setup that clears Crucible in 6:30 with 3/4b + vb as part of a TSS feedback round-up which I hope to post later this week. As you say, however, it’s not easy to play, and remains more brittle than a similarly powerful Skybreach Vindicator.
Sub 8 mins are the farming builds. It’s just your standard that’s too high where you want a lot more builds getting below 7 mins while being incredibly consistent. That’s my personal criteria too but if we lower the standards a little bit and consider sub 8 min timers then the list of good builds suddenly expand by much.
We just have to accept that some classes are innately better than others, OR we go the other way and rebalance them with nerfs and buffs. Cruci is okay, imo. If there are changes I prefer for it to be harder.
Problem with 7-8 minute builds is that because of how slow they get to kill monsters they become very incosistent and fragile. Like most of them are already “brittle” in the first place, but without much firepower Crucible becomes exponentially harder.
Again, I don’t have a personal stake in this, I have made dozens of different builds and I perfectly understand that each build doesn’t have to be a 6-7 minute monster. I am just talking about some balancing issues that seem off to me. And I don’t mind high dificulty, but I want it to make a bit more balanced, that’s all.
ah, the famous John Smith’s windy Vindicator that came out before FG. Partly inspired me to make my Cyclone Vindicator.
I am not a fan of universal RR shred honestly, seems like a cheap way to make the game “harder” and all the issues I have with the game basically come from excessive RR shred and fumble (moving fumble pools or giant fumble pools with low CD recast).
I know Crate doesn’t have the budget to give every boss proper telegraphed attacks and animations but “lol insta debuff xD” abilities on the player really stick out like sore thumbs.
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