[Wish List] Improvements to Crucible

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

I’ll keep it short and plain as rain. Crucible fell behind SR in terms of farmability. It’s more difficult and less rewarding. It’s became mostly a tool to measure performance of builds for the minmaxing part of the community. So I’d like to propose a few ideas to make Crucible a better such place.

1) Mutators.

Mutators are one of the things that contribute most to minmaxer’s inability to answer the question “how good my setup really is.” For speedrunners, it’s like a pop-up window “Do you want to play? Yes/No” and having to click “No” and watch the loading screen 50 times before you get to play.

So, 2 solutions:

a) No mutators no loot. Simple and true.
b) Pay for your mutators. Pay tributes, gold, whatever, to either remove certain mutators from the pool, or add, or both, or reroll, or countless cool possibilities. No loot.
c) Or at least make mutators not change between rounds so that the first ten waves of 150-170 are not wasted when Shattered, Resistant and Aetherwarped pop up at 161.

2) Blessings, banners and QoL

I’m proposing that the game remember the choice of your blessing and banners, and simply activate it one-click at Lokarr’s. “Same as always?” asks Lokarr. Minmaxer replies, “Yes, please, gimme quick!”

3) Dummy

Dummy in crucible. Anywhere. Even in the middle. Disappears when you talk to Lokarr.

4) Stopwatch

A clear stopwatch (not timer) that starts when you go at Lokarr’s and resets as you die or cash out. Once for for all answers the question how to count Crucible times. Also, does away with the Grim Internals frauds (I mean speeding up the game a few percent so it’s almost imperceptible but can increase the times a lot).

5) Aggro

This is probably a problem of the engine, and there’s no easy solution. But if there is, fix it pls. Aggro in Crucible is super inconsistent, and also dependent on hardware for some reason.

That’s it. Thx for reading and other ideas welcome.

Also, a shoutout to the noble modders. These are pretty good ideas to mod around, I think. Thx.

8 Likes
2

Do you actually farm in crucible? I thought you just GD-stashed everything :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Mutators are just another way of randomizing the difficulty from run to run, similar to how you can get a very easy nemesis combination on 160/170 or how you can get either Theodin or Korvaak on 169, albeit these probably affect your times in a less dramatic manner. If mutators were to go won’t you complain about your cold runs getting ruined by Kuba or Moosilauke?

Randomizing buffs and banners it is then. :smiling_imp:

Are my arenas a joke to u :rage:

This one isn’t half bad :+1:

This one as well, but it is never that easy.

1 Like
4

Lol, is that a thing? Who does that shit?

I will add something too. Crucible has become a super hardcore sandbox for the min-maxing part of the community. And it stopped being fun. If I was to farm legitimately I would choose SR 65-66 or SR 75-76 every time over it. And it’s a shame. Because Crucible owners payed money for this mod and I can’t see any benefits that come from playing it.

The intensity of cc-debuffs is at all times high, capped cc-res just don’t seem to work and it’s very frustrating. It’s especially frustrating when playing melee builds which is already a step up in difficulty compared to playing casters.

Loot is also worse, and you can lose it and lose tributes if you die. Unlike in Shattered Realm.

Zantai’s balancing based aroud Crucible overperformers made this mod extremely unpleasant for average builds and average pilots.

Aggro bugs are everpresent and are especially frustrating for players with low end computers.

So overall while mod’s super hardcore nature made min-maxer’s builds even more min-maxed it probably repelled most of the casual playerbase because basically you are paying 10 bucks for Grim Dawn: Dark Souls with the soul component taken out of it.

9 Likes
5

I agree with most of that. I noticed my constant drop of clear rate of builds up until the point of defenses do very little to improve it, which forces me to make my builds glass cannons and hope I can kill fast enough, before am killed myself. But the original point of nerfing builds is to decrease the times. In reality building community continues to make fast clearing builds but with bad success rate/badly optimized for defense.

CC out of nowhere, buggy interactions and general nature of Crucible makes it very ineffective now for farming. When I started farming Crucible, it was lot easier and SR didn’t exist. And Crucible is extra mode, at least that bundle have it together with rest of the game.

So CC, monster stuck at spawns, etc are good proposals.

I would suggest one more thing, change the tribute system. Make the death less of a punishment. This way players can farm Cricible for gear/iron.

3 Likes
6

That’s why these suggestions are only viable as optional and contingent on removing loot. Would not hurt anyone. Crucible farmers will still get the fully randomized experience.

There’s lot of work getting done for the more superficial players - like visuals for vitality RoH and stuff. I don’t see a reason why the more hardcore minmaxing players - the ones who stayed with the game for years and beat the shit out of it - should not be thrown a bone as well. Especially when most of those improvements would not require a lot of work.

I’m not saying remove all randomness. A good build should be able to deal with random stuff. This is why Crucible is a better measuring stick than dummy or main game nemeses/celestials.

I’m just saying - mutators. Some of them are equivalent to turning off your exclusive skill. Which is fine for the full random farming experience. For minmaxers it’s just a waste of time. You just don’t speedrun with Shattered. Exit menu.

7

It isn’t always about loot, you know. Some people just enjoy the gauntlet feel of it. There’s also the thing that 150-170 is easier and two times faster than 75-76, so it won’t be fair if they were on par in terms of loot per run.

As for crucible only being for hardcore playerbase now you seem to forget what kind of hell Gladiator 170 was on it’s release. Or the clear times you had before FG. Won’t that make the current crucible the pussified version for filthy casuls?

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I think that for good, you generally need to remove the mutators from the Crucible and Shattered Realm so that the players do not abuse the selection of mutators. Without them, the build quality assessment will be more adequate. Instead, I propose to add Shattered bosses on 150-170 waves to set fire to the fart for all interested players.

9

That’s not true. It can easiliy be deducted from the quality of the builds that can complete SR 75-76 and the fact that you can die in SR 75-76 and you can cheese the most difficult parts of it. And don’t forget that resetting mutators or runs in SR 75-76 is quite cheap (price of one waystone) while in Crucible it’s impossible.

True and not true at the same time. Yes, it was super unbalance but at the same time builds back then were much more casual and much less min-maxed and Crucible meta wasn’t really figured out.

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  1. I quite like the no mutators no loot mod. We can’t just change mutator mechanics now that they now also exist in SR and campaign, so this is a nice route, imo. But will surely result in (a bit of) lower build quality if you’re not aiming to make farmers.

  2. Don’t really care but okay.

  3. Same as 2

  4. FUCK YES PLEASE

  5. Also this. But yeah we understand that it’s not easy.

On the loot issue, as someone who never really cared about cruci loot since I’m an avid GDstasher, I’m still of the opinion that 100-150 should be the farming mode similar to SR75-76 and make 151-170 loot basically shit. This would make 170 be just a for fun mode. Like 80+ SR levels. How do you do that? Just buff the hell out of 150 loot and reduce 170 loot. Then 170 will be reserved for the hardcore minmaxers but people will still play cruci for the farm cause 150 exists.

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Pretty sure no minmaxing would have displaced the DA meta that time.

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Agree, can’t compete with something that broken. Although it would be interesting to see how min-maxed specs of today would fare against DA stackers of the past in that early Crucible.

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A lot more builds can complete Gladiator 150-170 deathless compared to SR 75-76 deathless. If you’re throwing coprses at SR then you’re spending extra time on that, reducing loot per time ratio.

Just for the info Crucible 150-170 yields 8.8 legendaries per run, SR 75-76 yields 15 legendaries per run. Source is MikeFic’s datamining spreadsheets. I would had used your own videos as a proof, but all speedrunners cut the loot part out. And both of us know that you weren’t burdensome on my coffers as of late, heheheh. :smirk_cat:

So the resource used to legally re-roll stats on set items is cheap to you? :joy_cat:

14

Where are you getting this? Based on the deathless runs posted by Crucible speedrunners? That’s just not true at all.

Yeah, but consistently farming Crucible 150-170 deathless is much harder than farming SR 65-66 or 75-76 with few occasional deaths here and there.

It’s cheaper than losing 88 tribute stack in Crucible, I am certain of that.

1 Like
15

For what it’s worth, i’ve made some videos of specific mob issues in crucible and Z took a look at them.

Whether he managed to spot a a bigger problem and solve it or it was just those areas that needed fixing, that we’ll have to see when patch hits testing

1 Like
16

Agree for the most part and i even wanted to make a similar thread, glad other people feel this way too.

All aRPGs, in the end, revolve around loot. Crucible right now is useless in terms of farming. SR75-76 run gives about 3x times more loot than 151-170, takes way less time than 3 runs, less piloting skills and has almost no risk. And Crucible is a DLC with its own price. Does anyone still buy it? Constant nerfs to performance without any loot compensation.

To be more specific. I suggest to rebalance mutators a little bit. Some of them have no impact and others straight up ruin your build.

Attack and cast speed debuffs, shattered debuff and monster resist buffs should be cut in half. Other monster buffs except brutal and the crit one should be increased.

To echo what Nery said about glass cannons. I have a build that survives better with Fevered Rage. Because i can kill bosses faster than they are able to obliterate me with their nukes and debuffs. And it’s not retal.

3 Likes
17

Good stuff. For what it’s worth, I always got trouble in bottom-right. Especially the FG raptor trash mobs fall asleep, the ghost armors and the griffins. All kinds of caster heroes are also very prone to hiccups.

Maybe (though it’s arguable) but death is mostly irrelevant in SR. You die in SR and lose 15s of your time. You die in Crucible 153 with your blessing and banners on and you lose an hour to get the tributes back. Farming-wise, SR is simply better. Especially for people who do need that loot to improve builds that need improving.

But this thread is not really about loot. It’s about enhancing experience of long-time players who just wanna see how fast they can go. I’m not saying that GD should revolve around that notion. I know Z would strongly disagree. But even he can’t deny that this is a big part of the game.

1 Like
18

That’s what I start with in the videos :grinning: By far the main offender

19

This was an across the board fix to aggro behavior in the Crucible.

3 Likes
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Is it included in the 1.1.7.0? Or can we get it as a hotfix earlier?