The new Crab King is quite frankly awful

[Catuna_]

I acknowledge that this is not a finished fight and that doesn't take away from the criticism I want to give in any capacity, these are my initial opinions and I do not care about the old CK and how that fight plays. I think this new Crab King rework is pretty bad and that's what I will exclusively talk about.

What's bad about the fight?
There's a lot about this new fight I do not like, I will state each of them seperately:

Crab king's freezing and geyser attacks were removed. Hooray! Right? Everyone hated those.. Well not really, with how your boat is never bound to one specific spot I fail to see why these were removed, the new Crab king doesn't have many attacks and will just stare at you after you break the cannons and the claws, there is no reason for it to be unreasonable for the player to just row away a couple times or step back to avoid these attacks, and they would fill in that gap of CK generally feeling underwhelmingly simple and him doing nothing once his "defenses" are down. Yet they are not present.

The new crab minions are cute, but I fail to understand their addition. You are forced into the ice platform to be able to attack CK while he is healing yet you are also expected to fight these 360* hp minions (*with Pearl's pearl) which directly contributes to him healing, when Crab king is low enough he will spawn an upgraded one with more health. Why? Am I supposed to tank them? They attack infrequently, but a mob that forces you to take damage and slow down your damage does not feel interesting to me. Are you supposed to sleep them? If so, whats the point? The new boss design is supposedly about more complex boss designs but the solutions to these crabs are to hold f which seems self-contradictory.

The new cannons have no indicators for where they will sprout up from or when, causing a leak in your boat. At least as far as I'm aware they do not, feel free to correct me otherwise. Otherwise they are a complete non-threat as they miss most of the time and do not cause leaks in your boat. I expect this to be remedied in the next hotfixes but it's still a valid point on what needs to be improved.

The claws have 200 hp with Pearl's pearl... Wow, the new claws are the definition of clunky as they barely get out of your range a lot of the time but rowing towards them gets you hit, they also are blocked by Crab king meaning that you can position yourself in certain ways to completely avoid them ever trying to hit you. This is most notable when you just spawn Crab King in as you can just hold f off of spawn for his first 2K+ health but you can set it up at any time if done properly. They feel like pushovers to deal with with all these factors combined, and are not worth ever fighting with a lot of their respective gem because they scale up to 600hp which makes them undesirable to fight as 1x damage.

Crab king's freeze platform phase operates on a timer as far as I'm aware, meaning the player can completely ignore the claws all together as they do not stray far enough to target the player. Crab king's freeze platform attack makes you question why you're on a boat at all, the fight might aswell all be on ice and have the claws pierce through it (exaggeration). You tend to... kinda stand still... during that phase, since you're encouraged to tank the minions or sleep them because of reasons stated above... You don't get to experiecne the ice mechanics, what is the point? The minions come to you anyway. Crab king is untargettable by the player when his ice shield is up, adding a level of linearity to the boss that I felt was very artificial, it might be because of wanda but it was very disappointing that Howlitzer/Slingshot didn't work.

The new gem system isn't much better, you are still going to use the optimal gem setup (cheaper + most comfortable) and that just happens to be 8 purples + pearl's pearl as far as I'm aware... Since you can just panflute the minions and hold f as you please. However, I actually don't really see this much of an issue with either the old or new Crab king because you practicically can't stop this from happening.

Well isn't it better than the old crab king?
No? Not really? If all you wanted was an easier fight then I mean yeah, but the bar shouldn't be set so low. I personally want a SOLID boss design if this is going to replace CK which a boss I was very looking forward to having tweaked. The concept is not very good and feels a lot less coherent and less well put together so far compared to what we already have. The issue with the old CK is that the fight in practice is difficult because of numbers that are overtuned like gem scaling and healing intervals etc, which begs the question of why not just adjust these things rather than fully reworking the boss? It's sad to see CK's interesting concept just be entirely scrapped in favor of what feels like a ctrl f fest.
I feel like talking about how the live branch CK is right now isn't relevant, but rather it should be the concept and what can be done with it, because we're dicussing a hypothetical of him receiving changes anyway but keeping said concept. Arguing that the new CK is better to fight because it's easier doesn't accomplish much... It doesn't mean the new one isn't heavily flawed.
Obviously I can't just ask klei to scrap this much work, and this is what we're getting and what we're going to have thus it is a lot more productive to go about how to make this fight better.

What are suggestions to improving this boss?

I think in general this fight just needs to have more to it, more difficulty, something to make the fight feel a lot more tense. The old fight excelled at making you feel like you were walking on thin ice a lot more than the fight where you literally do walk on thin ice. I will go through these quickly in bullet points, they are separate suggestions and if you think they don't work together then do keep that in mind.

• Add back his geyser attack, performed on a timer after at least one tower/one claw have been defeated and increasing mildly in frequency depending on how many are left.
• Add back his freezing attack, performed when the player starts attacking CK forcing them to move back or be frozen and possibly have their boat damaged.
• The player can target Crab King through the ice "shield" using ranged attacks, expand the ice to make it untargettable for Wanda as a compromise.
• Claws will no longer stray away from the boat and will instead have a timer that causes them to hold the boat by clamping it similar to old CK, but only if no valid target (player/npc) is nearby for too long. They have 200 hp with Pearl' pearl, this would be fine.
• The baby crabs will not target the player immediately, instead they will be the ones to build Crab king's ice shield, the player can kill as many as they can before the shield is eventually fully built, which then CK will start healing as normal and any remaining crabs will target the player as normal, and the player is required to break the ice shield.. Alternatively just make them take knockback on hit and you can shove them away as anyone. Or both!
• Crab king's healing timer will now only start after a certain amount of towers/claws have been downed, or it can be activated manually for each 2000 damage Crab King takes. This way you can't ignore the claws by just... existing far away.

These are just a few ideas that would make the fight feel a lot smoother in my opinion. I hope that Klei will improve this fight to make it feel more coherent. Please be civil when replying, would be very sweet.

[GreenBowers]

To give my feedback on how to improve things, I agree with some of your suggestions.

Personally my idea is this.
 - I don't think cannon towers should respawn, but I do think they should be buffed to compensate. They should be a valid, actual threat that can't and shouldn't just be ignored, but killing them has to be worthwhile, and if they just easily respawn, then killing them would hardly be worthwhile. Killing them should drop a good amount of cannonballs too, to further incentivize it. 
- I like the idea that the little crabs build up the ice shield. It makes me think of Ancient Fuel Weaver summoning those little shadow wisps that run toward him to get eaten and healed. Having the little dudes build up the ice shield would incentivize running around and killing them, which makes the fight more interactive. The big crabs should just aggro the player like normal.
- Geyser attack should definitely come back. It should NOT be able to be used during the healing phase. It should be entirely limited to the normal fight phase, to encourage players to dodge a very choreographed attack by rowing around the arena, which would also make them interact with cannon towers that are normally out of range of the crab king.

The end goal should be to make the fight more interactive. If the fight fully ammounts to just standing infront of him and holding F, then its a failure. The way to play out the fight should involve moving around the boss arena, and killing the optional enemies to make things easier on the player.