As for this thread feedback, maybe make fire retal a thing? Stuff in the game (items, devos) suggest it should be a thing, while it’s either just a side stat or food for conversion.
Not a bad theme for some demonic new set, isn’t it? It would convert phys to fire as set completion bonus (as Hellborne does, which afaik makes it the only semiviable rata item with fire dmg output).
@banana_peel this is not necessarily such a bad idea. Crucible shifting from farming to strictly testing grounds could be interesting.
But of course it would have to be accompanied by stuff you mentioned above, and I wrote about in this old thread: [Wish List] Improvements to Crucible
In short I proposed an alt more in crucible with no (or selectable) mutators and no loot as well as stuff like integrated timer, remembering the banners and blessings for a one-click setup, etc.
This would be awesome. But would interfere with the crucible-as-testing-grounds postulate. I’d make a celestial fight an optional third round after 150-160 and 161-170 but only accessible after traditionally beating 170 from 150.
Um… and what was the hard part to learn about it? Sure it lacks tutorial but same is for the whole game. And forums have good Crucible guides with the list of tribute earnings and buff/banner properties.
I also don’t like the concept of buffs and banners, but the whole gamemode is already balanced around them. Removing them would require a huge Crucible balance overhaul because rn only a handful of builds can be marked as “naked proof”.
Maybe i phrased it wrong. Of course, I meant ~5 mins in the hands of a good pilot with good PC as a benchmark. Because it usually means that a regular player with average PC will manage ~6mins to be able to squezze in 4 runs within the buff timer or at least 3 with bad spawns and mutators.
7-8 mins indicates either of three things: 1) severe system performance problems 2) the build is not suitable for the gamemode (single-target or retal tank) 3) complete lack of understanding the gamemode. I started playing GD when i had omegapotato laptop and i know from experience the time difference for the same build on different systems. It’s not higher than 40 secs under any circumstances.
Now you are heating up for no reason. Who said anything about the norm? There are some tanky builds that would enjoy a harder challenge of naked Crucible. Why not reward them with a drop booster for tributes for their efforts? More diversity for the gamemode is good. Rn naked is just a useless torture.
Ngl it’s very surprising to me how many people think that an official DLC with a price tag and a steam entry which has no story content, no levels, no new monsters and no unique items and only consists of several arenas should have loot at the very least. But i don’t think it’s a place for such discussion.
My heated reaction was a direct response to this quote:
I know other Crucible players like @Dmt prefer to play naked Crucible as well and wanted SR to be exactly like naked Crucible where all 4 Bosses rush you at once with no buffs to compensate. My response? Not as long as awful mechanics like this from Reaper Nemesis:
9% Chance to be Used
4 Second Skill Recharge
10% Weapon Damage
510 Physical Damage
486 Vitality Damage
15% Reduction to Enemy’s Health
670 Bleeding Damage over 2 Seconds
425 Reduced target’s Defensive Ability for 3 Seconds
40 Reduced target’s Resistances for 5 Seconds
continues to still be in the game.
As for Crucible clear times; I care much more for consistency than clearing, even if it means I have to kite more to make sure I’m not eating a billion MQ spikes or wasting time at Wave 169 to delete Korvaak before the 170 Wave starts. With melee, I’m assuming that clear times and consistency are one and the same, as hitting things to kill them = leeching Health so that you can facetank many more enemies.
Though it’s hard to gain sympathy when Crucible video descriptions are about how bad something like Lightning Forcewave is, and then you watch the video and it’s because you beat Grava in 10 seconds instead of 3. I know, relative differences and all, but that pushes discussions to “anything that isn’t a double RR class isn’t even worth bothering with” when that’s not the case in the slightest.
Crucible became much more punishing for kiting builds and you can’t rely only on positioning because sometimes you can get a combo of 3 hard hitter that won’t leave you along even for a split second. So if your build can only survive by kiting for a long time then 1) it’s not reliable 2) not suitable for the gamemode. Luckily the customization is so rich at this point, there is almost always a way to increase your passive defences for more consistency.
So you missed the part when i said it was the only one of the many Grava encounters i managed to survive? And the performance was still poor compared to other builds with Soldier?
What pushes? What are you talking about? A lot of strong builds are single RR. My four strongest melee builds are single RR. Ok, i’m stopping now, this is going nowhere.
It’s interestingly how this topic turned in Crucible discussion and performance.
But I see the issues people have and their point of view. Crucible was pretty exotic even before SR after FG perhaps even more. Still for veteran theoryctafters it’s excellent test ground for builds capabilities, cause it gives you taste of all type of enemies and finding the needed balance between offense/defense, brute damage /RR, single target vs AoE. Crucible can show easily overpowered and overpeformed items/skills and can underline weakness, underperforming classes/builds etc.
I like the Crucible for test ground purposes but if that’s the nature of it, you can see why it’s less popular with majority of players. Even if it came in your bundle…
Speaking of Crucible times and PC capabilities. Definitely weaker systems affect your times and for me it’s harder to reach community standards, no matter what they are. But if you develop your skills and with some experience, you can achieve pretty decent times, fighting against your hardware limitations. Then subtract few seconds because of lag and you will have clearer picture. I guess it’s less fun to play with everything on low and still lagging but crafting builds is the most enjoyable part anyway.
Hopefully this thread(and others) can improve even more build diversity. And may Grim Tools guide you!
If it were that easy, then every build would find a way to access these methods and obtain better consistency. The fact that there are types that do struggle - like Lightning Melee, Ranged Savagery and so forth - means that it isn’t nearly as clear cut as you want it to be.
Many classes don’t have access to either a 3-second “delete everything on the screen that you can” button like Arcanist or a very strong Physical damage source where you’re dealing with -50% less resistance than every other damage type in the game like Soldier. In a game mode like Crucible where the enemy’s Health is 3 times less than what they are in high SR, it can easily come down to either deleting the boss before it uses its debuffs (which then becomes an “I win” button) or you face a situation where you’re dealing 1/5th of the damage you were before because you didn’t reach the magic DPS number. Games like to avoid that rapid-jerk randomness, but when you’re talking 5-6 minutes of combat, you have to do something the provide a challenge that rewards well-crafted builds without making it a snooze fest.
For the record, I agree with you that Grava’s pools are worse than any other Nemesis ability in the game. I also provided another concrete thing that could be changed to remove that randomness, because there are very few builds which would survive a Boss which randomly takes 40 Physical resistance for 5 seconds while also spawning Wraiths which have Stackable -% Physical RR as well.
All in all, there’s way too many factors that go into a game mode balancing discussion that it’s near impossible to talk about one thing without it being intrinsically linked to another thing.
I used to play a fair amount of Crucible. Now, I hardly ever touch it. The main reason I played it was to get good loot and xp, but the main campaign offers better opportunities for both. I find the Crucible kinda mind-numbing, and if I am playing it I always have a beer and listen to music.
Idk. I opened a thread once about SR aggro abuse and getting done with it, and iirc DMT was most stalwart in defense of it.
As for the original post and the idea making naked cru the meta, it would need too much work but after some thought, I’ll risk saying, why not? Would go back to the olden days post AoM when 150 was hard, and 170 was almost like reserved for specialized builds. But making such drastic changes makes little sense at this point.
What could in reality improve about Crucible is little things like loot adjustments, balance, maybe some fun features like that built-in timer I was talking about, maybe a dummy.
It’s a minor detail but I gotta disagree here. Before SR, Crucible was imo the only realistic loot source. It was many times more time efficient than anything in main game. SR kinda replaced it as such.
I think he was just trying to illustrate the tendency among some of the top Crucible achievers to nitpick at the little differences in performance (which is true, they do that) and only focus on toptier builds while refusing to acknowledge all the others (which is not true afaik).
@ya1 aren’t SoT and BoC better and quicker to farm than the Crucible? In Ultimate legendaries drop like flies, especially with monster totems. I bet you could run around the map hitting various rifts and farming monster totems and you’d end up with way more loot than the equivalent in Crucible.
The build went through many nerfs during the last several patches, such as canister radius nerf, barrelsmith canister damage nerf in 1.1.7.0, barrelsmith canister flat cdr nerf in 1.1.9.0, and most recent Ulzuin’s rework.
Since 1.1.7.2 the build went from 4:35 to current ~5 min, which is on the lower end with recent high end standards in mind. As usual, when a build tuned up for crucible gets hit not only it’s timer suffers, but survivability as well. And this is a min-maxed setup.
A way to buff it without spoiling anything else would be to further tweak the pistols. E.g. bump cdr on set bonus to compensate for Ulzuin’s head change, as well as give both pistols ~2.5 energy regen because the build still runs out of energy – and it’s a Sorc of all things with -33% global cost reduction on top of set’s skillmods! If Purifiers or Elementalists had to use these sets they would be forced into Harp / Scales setup, which would yet again be very bad because caster pistols mean you’re missing on %damage.
Pistols could really use some casting speed too, it’s necessary for rotation of Canister, Grenado, Mines, Flashbang/BWC. The Sorc in example has 150%, which is very uncomfortable for this kind of gameplay. Purifiers and Elementalists will have even less and feel even more clunky.
AA design just doesn’t work – no flat lightning, no AA skill support, no piercethrough, very weak granted WPS.
Here is a nice 2H fire eor build… it is playable with legit farmed affixes as well. https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4VxRAyaN There also is an 2H acid version somewhere on the forums that uses dreegalnore. But I wont turn down more 2H eor support. Its one of my favorite skills.
I guess Warlord might be in a slightly better spot than Shieldbreaker on the fire front as well, since the claymore can at least grant full fire conversion… Still, I’d wager the character would once again be even better off with double Alladrah’s Spellblades.
That’s kinda the issue for me. Anything I try on my Shieldbreaker on the two handed front winds up being both harder to find (triple rares etc.) and inferior to just two prerolled lvl 84s. Tried Cindertouch for the lightning route, but weapon itemisation for lightning is awful for EoR, tried various fire-based legendaries like Blazerush, or greens like the Barthollem hammers people suggested to me in the past and, predictably, none of it compares to dual-wielding Spellblades. Spellblades simply do too much for any “generic” MI without direct EoR support to compare. It’s hard to rival direct Fire EoR support, +skills and full fire and lightning conversion on one item. Every time I try to find a two-handed alternative, the build winds up losing at least 33 % of its damage for no noticeable gain elsewhere.
The character, as it is right now (double Spellblades), does not struggle by any means. It has the highest DPS of any character I have. It’s just not at all the character I planned her to be. Out of the 38 characters I have, she is the only one where I had to compromise my vision for the build due to a lack of support.
I generally don’t put components and augments in my GrimTools, since those wind up changing based on what gear I have/don’t have and what the rolls are on greens etc. In-game she’s of course decked out head to toe.
Considering the -69% fire resistance the build already has, the extra -23% off Eldritch Fire didn’t seem worth the deviation at the cost of survivability and energy sustain. Without Tree of Life proc the build runs out of energy by the time it DPSs down a training dummy. The OA/DA shred + CC on Korvaak, absorb on Ishtak and sustain on Tree of Life all seemed more needed than the diminishing return on Eldritch Fire, especially considering it would take 9 devotion points to get there.
Its one of my favorite skills.