Fuck the Iron Maiden. That is all.
Challenger, wave 120 with a friend : 2 Fabius. Playing in softcore but still, that was something.
You can copy your character. Then use GDStash to rename it and convert it to softcore. Then play the Crucible.
Odds are, unless you have an absolutely perfect top tier build, optimized to be able to handle 100% of game content successfully with the gear you have on you 24/7, not just swap out gear as needed, you will die in the high gladiator waves. My build tops out so far at 140 Gladiator, but is busted beyond belief by the new crucible buffs, so that isn’t exactly an accurate way to assess it. Only reason it went down was Fabius got a 75% crit mutilplier on a mutilator, and managed to land a .1% crit or so on me. It hit me for like 20k damage, more than the nearly 18k hp I had from all the insane buffs the mode has.
I feel sorry for Hardcore characters.
HC is about playing smarter, not harder. The point is to avoid the monsters that are too difficulty until you can do them, but in the case of the Crucible that basically means just not doing it because it’s too unpredictable. Unpredictability, being surprised, is what usually kills hardcore heroes.
Wave 140 to 150 isn’t necessarily difficult unless you just so happen to get the one Nemesis boss your build simply cannot kill, meaning the Crucible is mostly going to be for min-maxers who either cannot die or one-shot everything so it doesn’t matter.
I’m not fond of that in Softcore or Hardcore largely because it ruins build diversity.
I feel the Crucible is simply another example of where ARPG’s often fail and that is actual challenge. ARPG’s are a statistical challenge most of the time: Either you have the resists and health and live or you don’t and die, mechanical difficulty is often limited to moving out of a ground effects but ultimately you build your character so they don’t one-shot you anyway.
It’s not that big of a deal but it makes build diversity suffer since you really can’t do anything you like and win, despite all the claims devs often make about how you can. At some point your build means nothing and it’s the gear that matters.
That is actually one of the most beautiful things about my build. It is actually heavily (player) skill based, as it has lowish innate durability, but from smart use of it’s mobility, buffs, and CC, enable it to 100% clear ultimate content.
I won’t go into what it does on Gladiator Crucible, because they busted it 100% on there due to giving it 100% uptime 100% CDR on it’s main damage ability, Shadow Strike. I go from 22k sheet DPS in ultimate, to having potential for over 300k Sheet DPS on Gladiator difficulty, without even having optimized my items yet, and as such I still have the ability to at least quadruple that 300k easily.
IMO HC chars should not be lost if died there. Crucible should be treated as an extremely challenging loot pinata with no death penalty. A gear/build check side area and that’s it.
HC doesn’t correspond at all with all of the crucible mechanics. Both in terms of monster/mutators balance/power, and the strategic gameplay/reward distribution.
Hell, SC chars who die are not lost and still get rewards if they do. What’s the point to play crucible on HC? To lose everything for nothing? To challenge your build? To see how far you can push it, before…you die…once per character?
Ok, ok. You play it once per difficulty, build too good, build challenged. Then what? Repeatedly doing it for the lootz? Sure not, loot comes in safer ways.
I’m impatiently waiting for an updated trainer, simply because I got no SC chars. Otherwise would play it strictly on SC.
Get the latest GDStash. Copy your character. Rename it and convert it to softcore.
Sadly, first got to revive the char I want to play the crucible with. Died at wave 150, holy mother of crucibles.
Today i got my first frustrating problem, thank god it wasnt my hardcore toon but on wave 90 something there was this 3 mutators and 1 of them was regenerating and the other some kind of aetheral resistant and the other was i dont remember what but this super tanky dudes were getting hit by 30ks over and over with my 2h riffle and me kitting around but they would just regenerate it back in 1 second so after a lot of minutes of trying i had just to stop and give up, they couldnt kill me and i couldnt do the 150k per second needed to get them down , without kitting…
I think when 2 nasty mutators, one that mess up ur damage and other that regenerates them is too strong, i even tried to change weapons during the fight as needed, did better but was way too difficult… was thinking maybe we could have more sets of equipement? to change to another one with 1 click as needed? idk…
There’s a lot of ways you can get one shotted in this game even with tanky builds, and not only in crucible.
I find the spike damage is actually the same or even higher than POE, a game known to be unforgiving. The problem IMO is the complete lack of somewhat reliable anti death mechanics (immortal call, or diablo 3’s passives)
They could come at a heavy cost, like an amulet with no stats except a proc on death that will leave you at x%hp with x% damage reduction for x-seconds destroying the amulet afterwards.
Or why not make “constitution” actually matter, draining very quickly when your HP reaches 0, giving you an extra second or two to use a potion…
“but people will press escape and quit game”
some people will, some people won’t. I realize the game is balanced around softcore, but god damn in grim dawn, there’s just so many ways you can get instakilled at any moment, on any build, not because of a player mistake.
It didn’t use to be this way, but turned into it over time. Certain mobs ( or combined with certain damage types) manage to ruin the good impressions of the overall balance.
Time ago Medierra promised to look into it, yet to come.
If you find certain encounters to be particularly unfair to Hardcore builds, please do report them.
We are already looking into adjusting the Iron Maiden and Fabius’ weapons, but if there are others, or a particular Mutator that is excessively powerful, we appreciate feedback.
anything on zantarin? like he one-shot my character on the first difficulty, a character in full BIS-gear that clears ultimate no problem
I’ve been trying to repro your problem with Zantarin on Gladiator and have been unsuccessful. I’m deliberately getting hit with every attack he uses and he’s never once even been close to oneshotting me. The only things I can think of is maybe it had something to do with his % health reduction attacks or maybe you had been hit by a nasty resistance debuff prior to getting hit by Zantarin.
I think it happens when he uses his shotgun vitality attack and you take all 20 projectiles at once.
I’m not about the uber enemies. They are hard and should remain this way, ofc some balancing and monitoring of these is always welcome. Anyway they are rare encounters and players are, and must be, prepared by default.
Enemies like devourers, some beastkin heroes, harbingers, scourges. The overall phys damage balance. The duration of curses, the power of curses, the multiple overstacking curses. The wide spread stun mechanic, the stunlocks. The shotgunning. The slow (combined with raped MS). The too common skill disruption through multiple sources/enemies.
That’s at a first glance, there’s more but got to take notes to get into details.
I also almost got one shotted against him in the first difficulty of the dlc with 84 resist with a bit over 12k health. I used from far way shadow strike and he used at the same time that nasty barrage vitality attack. It took me a second time against him to stop charging him as I see him because even though the second time it wasn’t as bad it still took about maybe 70-80% of my health 
here’s what one-shotted my cadence warder the other day, who was somewhat specced to counter reflect damage.
i was not sure what killed me at the time because Kilrian, the Tainted Soul is NEVER a problem, until a few minutes ago when Nomos Dred nearly one shotted my savagery warder because he spawned with this fucker:
that should not be in the game, at all. it’s one thing to die on a mob with the huge reflect effect active, but this… it can happen at any moment, to anyone farming oligarchs.
I’ve been trying to repro your problem with Zantarin on Gladiator and have been unsuccessful. I’m deliberately getting hit with every attack he uses and he’s never once even been close to oneshotting me. The only things I can think of is maybe it had something to do with his % health reduction attacks or maybe you had been hit by a nasty resistance debuff prior to getting hit by Zantarin.
My warder can tank the mad queen in ultimate, and just got one shot twice by Zantarin in Aspirant difficulty.
The first time he cast it after I was already well in melee range hitting him, the second time he cast it as I cast Blitz.
14k HP with 70% vitality resist.
Not gonna lie, that was pretty fucking bullshit.