Yeah seems the difficulty overall has been adjusted as well. Can’t even clear Challenger now. Thanks Crate.
Yes its sad no achiviments for beat it with rifle man 
I was wondering if there was a global change in monster damage, or lowered defense on my tank. I used to be able to straight tank most every nemesis on wave 150. Now, even after adjusting my shield recovery to 100%, I can’t. I also noticed even on elite, with a dual wield blademaster, with 2100 DA and 10K, was constantly taking shots to half health, even though the tooltip showed the mobs had no chance to crit me. I haven’t played a lot of melee until recently, but that seems awfully punishing. Being in melee range seems rougher than I remember.
AoM enemies are pretty much responsible for the big difficulty spike. Crate just stuffed them with so many different abilities (in some cases they are complete bullshit). I feel they were made this way on purpose because of the complaining some people were doing about the base game being too easy.
The AoM enemies being in separate groups in vanilla helps a lot with managing them but put them all together in the same place, and the difficulty just skyrockets.
I also think there should MUCH higher rewards for 151-170 waves, if you manage to beat them.
I’m never against a good challenge, but to justify it, there should be damn LOOTXPLOSION everywhere when i beat that!
Yup this is part of the problem but they have dialed the difficulty up in other ways as well. Just had 4 nemesis bosses I believe in wave 150 Challenger, one of them was Iron Maiden. One of the major problems being you can’t see what is going on as to who all is there. (and I have already dialed back my gfx). On a previous run I died fighting what I thought was Anasteria, turns out Valaxteria was tucked in behind her so twice as much shit dropping on my head.
Throwing this random opinion here diluted in 11 pages of comments:
I think the Crucible would have been more appealing to more players if there was no bosses/nemesis in it and way less loot, with huge waves of trash mobs coming to you, in bigger maps. Some kind of tower defense I guess? Traps are free (I hate spending tributes) and mobs come by thousands. Imagine defending places like Fort Ikon… 
I think there is even more to it than just the AoM mobs. I used to easily face tank Iron Maiden 1 on 1 with my tank on round 150 Gladiator. Now I have to watch it, as he will do more damage than I heal back now. The spike damage is just plain higher. The same for Moose, and Ben is spawning his mines around my character a lot more. Usually only a couple would show up in front of him, now it seems 4 are spawning, though those aren’t too difficult to move away from before they spawn.
Another good idea on how to rework the mess that is Crucible, nice.
I like fighting the new bosses in crucible though. Probably could use a little adjusting for certain styles of play, like melee.
I don’t think wave 170 should be so easy that almost any build can do it. But I also think it reduces variety if only a few builds can do it.
Is it me or is the loot about the same as wave 150?
This is basically the tagline for the expansion. It’s really annoying; I have a bunch of characters that I liked to play that I just can’t because the xpac shit is designed with the assumption that you are a fucking fortress made out of borg cubes. It’s not even interesting or tactically minded, it’s just “ha ha you aren’t taking all of the defensive everything, get murdered”.
Care to give some examples of builds that aren’t surviving campaign? From my experience it takes a bit of doing to make something that falls flat on its face even just doing the story.
Squishy ranged builds trying to do the undergrowth boss, sylvaria, are pretty pooched. Also squishy DW melee once they get that stacking haste debuff (-90% attack speed is synonymous w death when you’re ADCTH)
So overall I’d agree with his sentiment in terms of the game wants you find a high dps build (preferably melee or guns) that is EXTREMELY tanky, and I feel like most of the bosses in GD especially AoM will presuppose that is the case.
That being said you CAN win with aether sorc, summoner, totem elementalist etc, it’s just a ton harder.
Unless you made an error when you put in how much DA you have, that is your problem right there. If you aren’t 2500+ DA you are going to get shat all over in campaign and in crucible. Nemesis will have at minimum 300 more OA than your DA at 2100 and those crits which are already on super powerful abilities will destroy you every time. Also don’t forget all the health reduction abilities and resist reduction abilities and Lokarr knows what else is thrown in the mix now oh and slow resistance is an absolute must for melee builds.
This was Elite I was talking about. Not Ultimate. And it was pre AoM. It was plenty of DA to survive, and at that level, you can’t really have a lot more. The character I was talking about in the crucible had over 3100 DA.
If one build has high DPS and is TANKY, while another has low DPS and is squishy, dont you think that second build is simply an underpowered crap? That’s what game tries to tell you.
It was added in as an endgame challenge. Do you try Reaper with “most reasonable builds”, or do you customize something (that you’d never use anywhere else) with 7k armor and 4k da? I think that it’s too easy if there are already multiple builds clearing lvl 170 gladiator.
problem is, a toon that is 25% as durable as a tanky dps or ADCTH dps is not doing 400% damage of those tanky dps or ADCTH lol… so you have to go for that everything build- you gotta shoot for like 3k OA (with procs), 2500 DA, 15k HP, 2500 armor with 90%+ absorb. that’s decent numbers for all-content viability (unless world boss or new broken grava etc).
oh and you should still be able to get 100k dps with procs like that. but if you’re a caster, good luck hitting those minimums and the extra dps you get isn’t worth the drop in defense (especially with none of the CC in this game having any effect whatsoever on bosses)
in a game like D3 characters who explode up close ANNIHILATE from range, because they have to in order to remain viable. Now i see squishy ppl in crucible all the time, and they do TONS of dmg, but i bring heavy tanky DPS because SOMEBODY has to anchor the game for when the others die (and they always do).
The loot from 150-170 isn’t that great, as mentioned earlier if you have the gear to clear it then you don’t need the loot, anyway. It’s all about the challenge. I’m guessing that you don’t like challenges though, which is ok, too, just stay away from waves 150+.
You never played baldurs gate 2 then I take it…some of those battles I would have to use every single buff possible before the battle, then recast during battle, then pause after every single action that any character made…it was still great though.