Reducing oneshots in Crucible181-200 would be nice

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
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New waves currently have certain scenarios where your character gets oneshot (or effectively oneshot, when it happens within 2 frames) through over 30k HP with other defences intact. When it’s a big telegraph ability that’s meant for you to avoid it, that’s fine. But more often than not it’s a combination of random or just over the top factors that are hard or impossible to avoid.

One scenario is Anasteria’s cast on death. I think in such a packed environment it should do way less dmg.

In the video you can see how i try to kill her from way afar standing in the seal, but the cast on death still reaches me and coincides with her projectiles hit, and another wave hit. I do have Amplicorum up, but i also have over 3k armor, 14% phys res, 32k HP, 11% DR applied to her, I’m standing inside the Seal. I’m not sure what am I supposed to do here to not die. And I assume, this ragdoll means I received overkill dmg?

Overall, way too much danger in the current game revolves around effective oneshots, and it happens with every char I have, even with good HP and no Amplicorum. Crucible is just the mode it happens the most in.

Another instances with common oneshots:

  • Prodromus’s AA hit that connects with any other decent chunk of dmg you receive. These huge hominh projectiles deal absurd dmg
  • Underking’s rock shotgun off the wall
  • Shriek’s AA hit with another attack
  • Ixall’s hard to avoid null into any other boss attack
  • Unfortunate sky shotgun from heroes or champions that hits right when Ben traps you, so even 80% trap res doesn’t save you
  • Walking over dark color puddles that you didn’t see under all the enemy textures and effects
  • About 1001 things that can go wrong at wave 200

The most frustrating thing, you learn almost nothing from deaths, even when going over the recording frame by frame, which cannot be expected from a player. For how punishing Crucible deaths are, you expect to be able to have stable runs with full set of buffs and an expensively kitted out character, compared to campaign or SR where deaths are more forgiving. Instead, it’s the opposite: you constantly die to random things in Crucible and can’t help but think you are better off farming anywhere else.

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The answer is to not stand in the meteor rain

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  1. The time between first projectiles hit me and unavoidable wave that leads to death is 1.3 sec
  2. If you start running away from any of her projectiles hit, you’ll just get spammed by more and more of it. You never die from 1 or 2 of those hits, you die when she walks just in range of cast on death at the last split second that coincides with projectiles hit

This is unfortunately a far too common situation where you either kill the enemy before they do smth or be doomed to run away forever. So yes, you can be extra careful in every situation and finish up your runs in 9 minutes. But then why play this mode in the first place?

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The other answer of course is don’t use Amplicorum in fucking Crucible unless you’re running something with both damage absorb, a shield and enough tankiness to tank stuff if you get nullified.

Or you will die rather easily.

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And now youtube finally fucking loaded that vid (I’m guessing they vibe coded and screwed up something, again) I can now see why you died.

It was Outcast’s death sunder wave combined with her burning aether ground effect AoE. Which you should have dodged or gtfo, but tried to tank unwisely. I learnt the hard way in SR34-35 with the release of FoA to never do that because she now hits like a superboss and unless you have Mirror etc you are going to die. DR and absorb also wont save you, because that on death sunder hits harder than her usual sunder spell.

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Anasteria spawn is deterministic and can be played around, that’s a definition of skill issue.

Ixall and Sriek sadly aren’t.

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Can’t speak to the PTR but from my experience on live crucible…IMO Anasteria is plenty disruptive already (especially in SR where she’s outright lethal) that I’m not really sure why this middle finger of a skill is even there. If it was a CT sized explosion to punish the tankier melees and make them try to time their dodge as the pop happens (or let her die to DoT at a distance), I could be ok with it but the blast hits like screen-distance and sometimes even though a wall. Considering our mission is to kill stuff I don’t think getting punished for killing stuff, especially this severely, is a good inclusion. We already have Spiteful Wraiths to deal with for melees.

And Amplicorum certainly hurts, but it’s not solely its inclusion that leads to this sort of stuff. I’ve had baseline 25k health characters with respectable armor and 16% DR and absorb, with an Empyrion blessing on top, get ripped by completely random stuff. Groble meteors, for one. Ancient Shambler sunders (why do they have them?). Purple Tempest Spawn’s dispell rock that comes with no warning every 8 seconds. Vinn with his seemingly zero CD blitz sunder + all the other shit on the map. You can circle kite all you want but he’s getting you. Tracking Sunders from Nyarlathon and Ixall phase 2…not really sure what the point of tracking sunders is, they basically press the pause button on your ability to fight at all. Instead of skill expression in dodging at the right time, it’s just “and now you run for 8 seconds, sucker”. Then you add to that Nyarlathon ground curse or crystals blocking your path, or those Ch’thonian Omen tracking projectiles that look almost identical to Grava’s dispell projectile so you can’t even tell if you’re safe. Or Scorv’s dispell totems and sunder wraiths that don’t disapper when Scorv dies. It’s a circle kiting mess especially at waves 199-200 and at any point where you feel like you can stop and DPS, something blows you up and you have no idea what. And let’s not forget the phase transition nonsense where enemies pushed to phase 2 don’t stop wave progress so if you happen to be an AoE build you carry most of the end bosses into wave 200.

Overall it feels like Crucible 200 is there for the challenge, if you actually want to farm up, go to SR and your return on time invested will be immeasurably higher. As long as you don’t go too high, cause then one-shots come say hi in there too.

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While,as mentioned in this thread, I do not want curcible to fall into the same trap as it slowly did since FoA, where incremental nerfs make way for vapid against the clock runs and the very idea of challenge becomes irrelevant, I agree with some one shot instances here.

Anasteria 180 - kills almost as many builds as 200. Generally I use Damage reduction right before killing her otherwise it’s gg and even use evade right bafore she dies.

If you have a dot build she’s easier to deal with - this is the best way if available

Prodromus - I am torn on this. Like Anasteria he needs Damage reduction cast on him asap. You have to avoid using SS or movement skills into him as his projectile will home in back at you as your movement animation end and can kill you. However his projectile, unlike anasteria, is highly “Evadable”. So you can DR>Evade> into killing him 99% of the time. It’s what i do anyway.

I’m not convinced this one shot shouldn’t exist under the above circumstances.

Ixall - I hate this guy with a passion and having him at 180 so much is super annoying for the simple fact that he has 2 forms that you want off the map immediately.

What i most dislike about him is that the Null animation in his first form is barely distinguishable and he casts it soon after engaging you too. Very often I was swarmed by bosses and mobs,doing fine, and suddenly shit goes south because i just don’t see his null coming.

His 2nd form is more noticeable and takes way longer to wind up and is far easier to avoid than his 1st form.

Wave 200 should not have 2x Ixall…

Shriek - while it happens rarely she can shotgun you in melee with 0 chance to react

Underking - Haven’t had issues with his boulder lately. If anything his Geyser seems to delete you randomly.

For 200 going wrong - aside from bs like 2x Ixall I think it comes down to Nyarlathon, Herald of Annihilation shrewdly spawning with delay mid map, thus making it very hard to engage him in the snowball of nasty nemesis hitboxes coming on top of you. If not for that, Beornath freak-out DB storm and AoE preassure made by Dread could be more easly mitigated.

Dark Pools of pure hatred …right back at them.

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Did anasteria change? - because her devas are(used to be) fixed and thus both controllable and avoidable (imo what made them kinda… not that useful for her)
So personally i don’t think “if when” standing in her devas is ever helping and just detracts from it.

I’ve always agreed with her death’splosion, that thing is just crazy hard to “react” to so in many cases your only option is to somehow soak it(which is hard) or you disengage and try to kill her will “range” as melee with lingering dots or procs. :neutral_face:

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If Crucible to remain this dangerous rewards should be adequate. Otherwise nobody will play it. Right now I am hearing that rewards on it are not really worth the hassle.

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Not every deterministic enemy can be played around 100% of the time. This cast on death skill with huge dmg and huge sunder clips even a character that fights for 1.3 sec at the highest available range.

And if you start stutter-stepping away and away from her on death range, you lose leech and will be ganged by other enemies and her projectiles that have huge range as well. It’s jsut not enjoyable enemy to fight in Crucible with these values.

Crucible has its own set of enemies in the database, if i understand correctly. So reducing her explosion for Crucible specifically seems feasible and justified for me. 182 should not be one of the hardest waves of 181-200.

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I don’t think this part’s accurate though. My usual approach to dealing with her is to stand outside the archway to her spawn. When she spawns, she immediately casts Devastation on your location. At that point you can close in with her (even on shooters or pets), where you’re outside of the Deva area and burst her down before the rest of the wave catches up. Her explosion alone has not killed me in that situation in the around 50-60 runs that I’ve done in FoA (I’m honestly kinda confused what exactly it was that killed you in that clip cause the wave doesn’t hit this hard and the deva wasn’t all landing on top of your head, so wtf). The bullshit part IMO is the fact that after that you’re dealing with the rest of the wave with a close to unavoidable sunder on you as a reward for doing your job right. Well, technically if you do your job right you round the corner before she dies to DoT or you time the Evade so that your iframes make you dodge the sunder altogether, but that’s not consistent.

In a way she’s like a baby version of wave 200 where you should just bumrush the top right spawn and kill Valdaran ASAP or you’re in the shit. Except with her you’re in the shit after you kill her, not as much before. That part I don’t think is very fair.

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Deva has 100% uptime and occupies a very large area, with projectiles randomly falling from the sky. You can avoid all almost of them standing still, or you can get unlucky 2+2 hits to your face, this is the nature of random projectile attacks. They are not dangerous until they kill you instantly.

You can bait the deva at one spot, move to another spot altogether. If you have cutting edge single target dmg you can kill her right then and there, before Alkamos with Shadow Strike arrives, so you can dodge away and regain your HP after the big on death + other stuff hit you.

But if your build is not in the category of “kill everything before they do anything”, this becomes a grueling experience of running away from area denial abilities.

Her Deva is not the problem and maybe should be even stronger in some way, it’s the screen size cast on death that makes the encounter bitter.

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ye that’s why i was confused about bringing up the projectiles at all
As said her death nova i always agreed is bad, even in SR 1v1 it kinda sucks for non casters/ranged to react to

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Unless she’s been buffed in health on the PTR, even AoE focused builds kill her within her first devastation.

That’s on an all AoE build with no blessings and with me completely blanking on applying my Bonechilling Cry RR or triggering Abominable Might cause I haven’t played the build in 3 weeks.

Again, not saying I don’t find her on-death explosion problematic from a design perspective, but I wouldn’t put her among the top culprits when it comes to surprise one-shots in Crucible. She’s dispatched at her spawn quickly enough, but leaves you with a stiff middle finger after the fact.

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Like I said, it’s very random. Most of the time you do this and you get away with barely any scratch.

You can see that even after baiting the initial deva and closing in you are still getting hit by these projectiles. And then for some unknown reason Alkamos arriving just in time for a nuke didn’t hit you.

I can find 9 clips similar to yours in my recent videos. But on the 10th you die and scratch your head thinking what did you do differently.

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Well, I would be but Sir Archway of House Brick is heroically tanking for me XD

But yes, Crucible gets very random.

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