Lets Rebalance Crab King.

[SSneaky]

this is a thread meant to compile people's ideas, these should specify what the change is meant to be

I'll start.

Addition/Small Rework (buff): A basic 10-35 damage double hit AOE melee attack that crab king can perform, area size scales with Green Gems, damage scales with Red Gems.

Nerf: Imposing Claw Base Hp 500 ->250

Nerf: Imposing claw Max Hp 750 -> 500

Nerf: Max possible Hp 95,000 -> 55,000

Buff: defense 0% ->10%

Buff: planar defense when Pearl is socketed 0 -> 5

 

 

[Arcwell]

10 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

Addition/Small Rework (buff): A basic 10-35 damage double hit AOE melee attack that crab king can perform, area size scales with Green Gems, damage scales with Red Gems.
Nerf: Imposing Claw Base Hp 500 ->250
Nerf: Imposing claw Max Hp 750 -> 500
Nerf: Max possible Hp 95,000 -> 55,000
Buff: defense 0% ->10%
Buff: planar defense when Pearl is socketed 0 -> 5

1. No thank you, I like my bees.
2. Ok
3. Ok
4. Hard to tell what this means because you didn't include a minimum possible HP. 1-pearl CK currently is 23k HP to give you an idea.
5. Depends on what the HP of 1-Pearl CK would be but I don't see much of a reason for this personally.
6. What does this accomplish? Planar defense only subtracts from planar damage which would only occur if you're using specific character abilities (i.e. willow's affinity spells) or shadow rift gear.

[Frashaw27]

I think adding a Melee attack to crab king is a really poor idea. I think one of the most unique aspects of the fight is how you don't need any armor to fight it, allowing that part of the fight to both be more diverse but also simpler with how you don't need to stack thulecite suits. Yes, it would help with freeze stun locking, but I would rather that just lower the freeze duration them take away one of the good things about the fight imo. Also don't add unnecessary defense, it maybe cool and quirky but it doesn't make the fight more interesting or notable, just drags it out. Other bosses with defense mechanics, like ancient fuelweaver and toadstool, have method to remove said protection so it doesn't feel like adding tedium to the fight. Toadstool's trees make the boss unique as you can and have to plan around it and do things differently from a normal boss, compared to just adding flat defense buff. Also adding planar damage is a bit of a jerk move as you also can't counter it at that point unless you do the entire shadow quest line, which not only heavily dampens choice but also just makes the player feel slighted for wanting to focus on crabking first.

 

In my opinion, Crabking is decently balanced in most of its aspects, te only stickler is the healing. Most other things like the claws can certainly be added to and addressed, but the healing is the only thing that rally makes the fight into a stress inuced nightmare. There ways to counter the freeze attack, there is many more ways to counter the geyser attack, you get almost no counters for the healing attack. Besides summoning a crapton of bees to spam attack it, you have to use a lot of of effort and rare tools like weatherpains just to counteract it. The amount healed, the rate at which is healed, and how much it takes to stop him from healing all combine it into a miserable experience. All that is needed to make crab king so much painful, in my opinion, is to make the rate of healing about half of what it is now, and the amount of hits to stop him is much more reasonable then less of what a optimizing player can output. That would make the fight a lot more approachable imo since your no longer needing to counter his regen as well as everything else. Again, all other aspects of the fight can be changed, but I think that healing is the one problem that spirals the rest out of control due to how devastating it is to miss even one chunk heal.

[SSneaky]

14 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

1. No thank you, I like my bees.
2. Ok
3. Ok
4. Hard to tell what this means because you didn't include a minimum possible HP. 1-pearl CK currently is 23k HP to give you an idea.
5. Depends on what the HP of 1-Pearl CK would be but I don't see much of a reason for this personally.
6. What does this accomplish? Planar defense only subtracts from planar damage which would only occur if you're using specific character abilities (i.e. willow's affinity spells) or shadow rift gear.

1: CK could use his melee rarely, and it just means you cannot literarily just use a single beenade to kill CK.

2-3: :>

4: current base HP is fine, just the red gem health scaling is absurd. but the health scaling could become 3500 per gem, using basic math.

5-6: wanted to transfer some of the bulk 

[Arcwell]

17 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

1: CK could use his melee rarely, and it just means you cannot literarily just use a single beenade to kill CK.

4: current base HP is fine, just the red gem health scaling is absurd. but the health scaling could become 3500 per gem, using basic math.

1. Implying you could do that currently, which you cannot. You need several bees to be able to counter CK's healing, a single beenade does not suffice:

4. I'm assuming you'd be tweaking this, because +3,500 hp per red gem would mean 30,500 hp for a single pearl, which in conjunction with 10% armor would be 33,889 effective health, a 47% increase from the current 23,000.

[SSneaky]

1 hour ago, Arcwell said:

1. Implying you could do that currently, which you cannot. You need several bees to be able to counter CK's healing, a single beenade does not suffice:

 

4. I'm assuming you'd be tweaking this, because +3,500 hp per red gem would mean 30,500 hp for a single pearl, which in conjunction with 10% armor would be 33,889 effective health, a 47% increase from the current 23,000.

1. Didnt know that heal prevented the use of just a single beenade. Though aslong as the bees (or any other flying/waterborne mob) stays aggoed onto KC theres nothing he can do, especially with his his ai works. My point in favor of adding a melee attack is that it would prevent CK from being a boss where you do the one thing you have to do, and then have npc's do all the heavy lifting.

4. Mm that's an issue, perhaps not a simple 3500 per red gem. Idk someone else can come up with a gems to health table (Troll)

[Theukon-dos]

3 hours ago, SSneaky said:

Buff: planar defense when Pearl is socketed 0 -> 5

I'm not going to comment on most of these, they're improvements but I don't think they solve the core issues with the Crab King fight. I just want to add that it's essentially impossible for this to ever have an effect without enabling rifts early.

 

There are only 2 sources of Planar Damage that can be acquired before beating Crab King in any given world. Both of which belonging to Willow; either her alignment spells or alignment Bernie!. Woodie's moose mastery only deals planar damage to mobs with entity planar protection, not planar defense. Wigfrid needs to open rifts to get her charged Erdling spear, which can't be done until after fighting CK with Pearl's Pearl. And Wormwood was able to deal planar damage with his bramble husk briefly. But that effect was moved to the Brambleshade husk. I'm certain we'll get more character abilities to deal with them as the world progresses. But for now, litterally only Willow is effected by this.

 

And if that wasn't enough, you need to fight CK with Pearl's Pearl to unlock the other planar options. But you can only get one Pearl per world. Meaning once you do get Planar weapons, you can't fight CK with planar protection anyways.

[finn from human]

4 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

There are only 2 sources of Planar Damage that can be acquired before beating Crab King in any given world. Both of which belonging to Willow;

what about the shadow reaper?

[Theukon-dos]

3 minutes ago, finn from human said:

what about the shadow reaper?

Oh yeah, I guess you could open shadow rifts. My bad.

 

I mean, not sure why you'd open those ones first. But I guess you could.