To me biggest problem is the burst damage. @mad_lee in first video from Belgo you char die before I can blink. It’s kind of situation where piloting skills doesn’t matter, the game don’t give you fair shot to react. And naturally melee builds are more prone, since you have to take all the hits with your face.
So I join appeal to do something! 
Mindreaper has always been cancer anywhere he appears. The illusion ability that also serve as mini bosses are absurd.
Except if he would have prioritized and killed theodin twice he might not have taken an unsustainable amount of burst on 170. But that exposes you to a bit more risk at 169 and might add a few seconds onto your run (:gasp heresy) 
I will say valdarans /kaisans lightning strike/doombolt might be a little too strong. Especially since they both basically cast them from off screen as soon as they come into range of your character in crucible
And about the two venom blade videos post above… literally nothing was changed for the monsters on 169. Also perhaps not standing on benjahr mines and in multiple grava fumble pools? That nice mobility rune was off cooldown.
The old bosses needed to be a threat. You now have take into account that the vanilla bosses can actually hurt you. Before they were laughably weak in crucible, and all of their abilities could be safely ignored outside of the stuns from IM and valdarans.
Or better yet take even more defense oriented devotions routes or gearing options? You won’t be able to pull under 7 min clears any more, but you won’t be dead.
If you really go down the route of nerfing everything to make it safe for melee every melee build, then kiting casters/ dot builds will be immortal. Then their damage will have to be substantially nerfed to compensate. 150-170 should be the challenge section of crucible, 130-150 for farming items efficiently. If nearly every class has multiple builds can make clearing 170 x3 or nearly x4 in a set of buffs with even 70% clear rate… Then it is not hard enough.
I get it, but aren’t Vanilla Nemesis present in 130-150? That’s efficient yes, but Nemesis, Mad Queen and Anasteria isn’t exactly free pass.
About hard challenge, I think the point is to have chance to react, some mechanics don’t give you that. I am not saying 170 should be walk in the park.
I think there is much exaggeration here. I just did 3 runs on this nonsense: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/a2Ebr1nV (holes everywhere, not even updated since warlords were nerfed - just changed the belt from Memebreaker) died the first time due to readjusting and then it’s all good. Times went to shit because you actually gotta kite now unless warlord. Can’t properly speedrun things now like hoarding nemeses to one place to max AoE. Gotta one-on-one stuff and blink out to reset debuffs more. Crucible got a little more “Shattered Realmy” now. And consistency went, too. Gotta give up on more stuff, polish defense more, I guess.
But that nerf to Bloodied Crystal: dick move. All I can say. Helped nothing. Decimated of every 10th build that actually had problems with bleed res.
I agree that skill should be a factor. The main cause I’ve found of instantaneous death is brought by valdarans/kaisan combos coming from the north or west when already fighting a boss like reaper, grava, or kuba on the bottom left corner. I don’t think their bolt skills should hit as hard since they give literally no chance for counter play.
I can’t believe you are defending current balance. First of all, you as a builder know fully well that for dual-wielders it’s impossible to go too defensive in devotions because their survivability depends on their damage output, sustain and faster killing times. No amount of defensive devotions (also, what even are those for Belgothian? Turttle? lol) will save you if you are not killing dangerous debuffers/nemeses fast enough. Secondly, I am not saying 150-170 should be a breeze and safe farming route for melee builds, but so far I have tackled it with a couple builds that used to be very safe and consistent and both have huge problems now. @Dmt 's Dervish which as you can see is always built a bit more defensively (unlike @ya1 's Dervish for example) can’t do Crucible consistently with Acid Devotion route and has to use upper left corner of the sky (Dying God, Aeon).
Honestly, it felt like Crucible was in a good balance 1 or 2 patches ago, it was still very hard but it was fair. Now I am feeling that it became much more punishing for no reason. Even with PRM Mage Hunter, char that was always invincible there I felt like there is a risk of dying now. And you know that of all the builders I always build my toons on a safer side: i.e. with sufficient overcaps, good cc-res and and good DA.
I’m defending the fact that vanilla nems needed to be buffed. Basically nothing besides some trash mobs health values were changed besides them. I am saying that certain boss abilities probably need to be looked over and not just the buffed vanilla nems… as said above. Fabius DA shred is probably too high now as well and a middle ground needs to be reached for crucible and SR. I’m fine with campaign versions of nems being even stronger
As ya eluded to, more defensive play is required as well.
Every patch in which balance was broken and weird shit started happening I have heard the same thing: “But we have barely touched it, just chaned x or y, that’s all, we swear” 
Look, man, I don’t have a personal stake in this, I am just reporting my experience. So far I have run Crucible with 6 or 7 different builds (all of them top-tier) and felt the imbalance with every one of them.
And as I am eluding to, there is no “defensive” play with melee builds. Maybe Dervishes can kite a bit and let Poison do the job, but Belgothians or Warborns can’t for example, if I start kiting I am dead, I need to kill dangerous foes one by one and fast or their collective debuffs with blow my Belgothian up like Chinese fireworks.
Maybe it’s time to rediscover the art of stutterstepping?
More defense?
You might have missed smth, there weren’t any Ben’s crystals near by. I died from melee attacks with 3k+ armor, 3100 DA, 26% phys res and all active Ascension, Ghoul, Prismatic Diamond, 32% dodge, million of fumble and 50% chaos overcup (also 10% dmg reduction from augment)
Just one week ago it was one of strongest and safest spec in the whole game
might need to get your eyes checked because you can clearly see it get summoned to the right of the banner then explode shortly after. Although the DA shred didnt particularly matter since reaper already had applied his larger one and the flat 40 rr… then you had -24 ele res on top of that… then you were hit by grava melee swing, ben wave attack, and the elemental wave from the last boss all at once… Which they all would have had a chance to crit you due to the DA shred and the Brutal mutator.
And compared to a week ago very little has changed in the videos you posted. Ben gained some HP and a bit more damage. Other than that the monsters involved have the exact same stats.
He summoned crystals on top of the banner. I wasn’t in range and died in melee with ALL safe abilities up.
I have been playing this build since FG release. I made SR90, naked Cruci, one of the fastest Ravager’s kill. And all this isn’t enough now to withstand 160 wave of Cruci?
Edit: yeah, now I see one crystal exploded near me, but the damage was negligible
The set and oathkeeper have taken some relatively serious hits in terms of damaging ability (when accounting for the fact killing fast means staying alive). This extra couple of seconds per kill of exposure often can lead to death if there is not re-positioning. I mean in the video you can pretty much chalk that up to badluck rng roll on getting crit multiple times with da dumped + brutal mutator. (as that almost was certainly what happened since defensive buffs were up besides resilience)
As to the crystal yeah it was negligible due the the fact a stronger da shred was applied (fairly sure I’m remembering the ravager shred icon right) Maybe something weird going on and it is acting as a -x shred?
I think identifying monster abilities which regularly create situations that offer no counter play needs to be done… then perhaps something can be done to tone individual monster skills down to prevent un-preventable deaths
I think that altogether Venomblade, OK and NB nerfs were too much at the same patch 
i just tested my meme dw retal dervish that i hadnt played in some time… its still pretty much immortal even though the kill speed it garbage. took about 9 min for clears… 3 run success. only time i came close to dieing was on 170 when i tried to facetank reaper, ben, val, and kaisan. (two nems I pointed out have a problematic skill.) Even then I just used vires to move away, popped a heal, and i was good.
reference https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4VxLDPeV
side note it appears vires devo got a new fx… that or i just never remembered a fist coming out of the ground.
I definitely felt that on my Vitality PB Dervish that suffered not only Oathkeeper nerfs but personal kind of nerfs.
Nemeses’ wps are extremely powerful. But they always have been. They only got 9% chance so more often than not you’re safe but when they hit… Reaper’s wps with Fabius’ VoS is 700 da shred. Add one Reaper’s ghost and Zantarin’s CoF and you got over -100 vitality res, -60/70 phys res, -80 acid res. Other combos produce other but equally colorful effects. So even the slightest change to monster hp, banner crit dmg, gear dmg output, you name it, raises the risk of these things happening more often.
The Mad_Lee’s vid is weird, though. I don’t know how he died. Alex’s debuffs were gone when he was one-shot by Kuba. And Kuba with Steward don’t really have anything very dangerous except the regular all res reduction and health reduction.
Also, I think, the good old times of letting pierce, bleed and chaos res fall behind are gone.
Well yeah, but it’s not like it’s easy to overcap everything by 30%+. It’s impossible on most specs.