Grava’Thul is the ultimate enemy of every melee build. Multiple homing pools with unprecedented fumble chance, on top of disrupt (2 secs of complete helplessness with all safe abilities blocked) and dmg reduction skills, make him by far the toughest enemy a melee build can encounter within a pack of bosses.
I’ve played 1H, 2H builds of every dmg type (as well as casters), and every time i see Grava i play around him and him alone, regardless of the dmg type. The last experience is with 2H aether Blade Arc. What’s the hardest boss for an aether build with single RR? Hard hitting Reaper? Aleks with his shards and meteors? No, it’s Grava’Thul (15% aether res). I can reliably facetank any pack of bosses with any mutators, except when Grava is there.
It happens with half of melee builds i played (not only mine). It doesn’t mean that the other half is somehow immune to Grava, it’s just that builds like Rah’zin Witch Hunter have enough dps to kill Grava before he summons enough of his pools.
Even though his full version has dispel, he is not as deadly in MC/SR because in there you have a chance to single him out. In Crucible you cannot.
What makes him so painful for melee builds, is fumble pools. They are many, they are fast, they will hunt you and halve your dmg output as well as make the most important tool of melee survival, leech, very inconsistent.
I don’t think it’s healthy when one single nemesis is the hardest encounter for 1/3(?) of all builds in the game.
One might argue that i have to turn my builds into immortal tanks if i want to beat the hardest content in the game. But this topic is not about the difficulty of the game. It’s about the balance between bosses. Sometimes Grava makes me wanna quit the game.
I suggest to rework Grava’s pools: either split it’s fumble chance between fumble and impaired aim, or change the pool properties towards more dmg and other utilities like slow.
What’s your experience with this boss? Does it seem to you like it’s too strong compared to the others? How is it to casters?