[Feedback] Crate of entertainment boss encounter

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

TL;DR:

  • leave the portal to this boss open, after you kill the gate maggot once. Similar to the blueflame guy in Lokarr’s quest
  • tweak down HP and/or resists of the boss
  • hard summon limit of 8 for crate pets, before any player induced splitting process

Hello dear crate, after 2 weeks attempting this boss, i’d like to give some feedback regarding the whole encounter.

I primarily play on hardcore mode, my sole softcore character never made out of veteran difficulty. What i want to say is, i’m not shy of a challenge, however i’m under the impression the quest is designed to kill off hardcore characters.

The way through bonebleach basin is annoying, but manageable. the issue start with those one-shotting maggots. It is impossible to safly pull the gate maggot out from all the other ones. So i brute force it by killing them all. Depending where it spawns it generally take me 15 to 25 minutes to open the portal.

My setup for getting through the maggots: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/RZRoBvjN

Additionally the light radius is really strange on this map. After sometime it turns completly dark from a few meters away.

Compare those screenshots: https://i.imgur.com/aeoHdzz.jpg and https://i.imgur.com/26WaQ37.jpg to https://i.imgur.com/gdNr4H9.jpg

I had very close encounters with maggots who shoots out from darkness and almost killed me. Furthermore sometimes they seem to ignore the slow on hit mechanic. I had few occasions where 1 maggot simply ignored Forcewave stun and charged relentlessly at me. Dunno if it’s a bug or something wrong on my end. Anyway, suggestion would be leave the portal open, after you killed the gate maggot once.

On to the boss itself. Originally went in with this setup: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/dVblbgYN

After my experience so far, i think direct melee characters are impossible to kill this boss. Main problem is to apply damage, and from what i gathered, pet and DoT builds are able to deal with it. So changed to this setup: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrP6152

My best attempt was 15% HP left on the boss, much better than my full Octavius melee try. It very much feels like a DPS race, if you can’t kill him after 6 minutes it’s basically over. I feel his HP and resists are too high for a DPS race, especially due to his movesets people will struggle to apply damage.

Also, he seems to summon pets infinitely, despite grimtools info of 4 limit and 60 seconds life, the overwhelming amount seem also to be a technical difficulty, as this guy in the video seems to have crashed at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH3qY_IYmN8

So, maybe a hard limit of 8 before splitting?

Thx for the great game and hope you can tweaking this rather unfair encounter a bit.

2

Found something new

heavy DoT focused builds seem to be very reliable at killing this boss. As it’s the most relible way to apply and maintain dmg.

I think to reduce the HP would at least give ranged direct dmg characters a fair go at him. The build which can already reliably kill him are doing so in around 3 minutes anyway.

3

What can I say.
I don’t know why there are so few boxes in templar vid. I tried Crate with EoR paladin, and after ~1 min(or less) of fight my 7600k+1066 showed something like 1-2 fps.
Also I saw a bug, when Crate didn’t heal after death. But could not kill Crate that time because of too many crates, and after 4th death Crate was fully healed.

bE9eb5V.png1163×655 872 KB

4

Out of curiosity, how well do you apply and maintain dps with EoR on crate? I imagine his disengaging strikes will interrupt you quite often like regular melee characters already suffer and then you’ll often have to wade through all those boxes to get to him.

Edit: Just saw your bomberman vid, simply wow. Great stuf, my dude!

5

Thank you!
Just lottery. Somitimes I managed to press the box against the wall and do some dmg, sometimes Crate moving very bad. With 22 inq seal and ascension it’s possible to facetank a lot of crates, but these suicidal crates…

6

I would like to see this boss never nerfed.

1 Like
7

I have just beaten this boss by utilizing pet, ranged and DoT: https://i.imgur.com/qN7gpom.jpg

I saw your warlord vid, what’s your take on the melee situation in this encounter? I really find it impossible, even if you do it super carefully by not killing his pets, after a certain time, it’s game over.

Regardless i think the maggot part definitely need some changes. In the past 2 weeks the good portion of time was wasted to safely digging through them in hardcore, which is quite frustrating.

8

Melee is pretty fucked but a very tanky sustain dual wielder can probably deal with him if they cut out their AoE. It’s rough.

But this boss is not supposed to be accessible across all archetypes in the first place.

The maggot part is fine. If you’re struggling with that part you need to realize that

  1. They don’t attack you unless you aggro them by using a spell/attack/proc/hit them first.
  2. Only one matters
  3. A single aether cluster + a teleport rune on your medal makes killing the right maggot and getting out alive very easy.
9

Recorded full run, everything took 4.5 minutes.
10

Nice run, gz on the drop! Dmg still strong on Ulzuin i see. That escape from the maggots is quite risky though.

@adoomgod a bit unfortunate that melee characters are kinda gated out, but so be it.

I’m familiar with the maggots mechanic, i’m primarily complaining about the rather risky and unneccessary nature of this portion. You can see it in John’s vid that 2 movment skills were used, realistically not every class get 2 rush/blink type moves, even with cluster you can maybe tank 3 hits? And you can’t single pull the gate maggot, even without aoe, you’ll always aggro a group.

It’s just extra tedium in hardcore to safely get through, emphasis being on safely. It’s like you’ll have to lure that blue zombie everytime you want to visit Lokarr, just with the risk of being oneshotted. But Anyway i’ll rest my case.

11

A bit of info on how I do my runs with pets:

C6gXDyF.jpg1800×1220 557 KB