Cannon Towers

[Arcwell]

That's these lil guys:

Cannon towers in the Crab King fight are a really cool concept! Though, in their current iteration, I think they do too many things that collectively make the fight a bad experience. That said, I think with some changes they could help tie into Crab King's kit and improve the fight overall.

Here's a list of issues I have with cannon towers currently:

• It's hard to tell if you're dodging away from or towards the projectile it fires
• They have a deceptively large AoE
• It's often impossible to prevent cannon shots from hitting your boat given their maximum speed, acceleration, and cannon's spread. It's essentially RNG if it will hit or not.
• They respawn every time claw phase starts (which is a lot)
• Knocking even one down while Crab King is below 90% HP triggers wave phase, losing out on 2k+ damage you could've been dealing during claw phase.
• Gems that augment cannon towers are prohibitively difficult. Adding even 1 red gem after adding pearl makes cannons cause boat breaches, which, given how unrealistic it is to dodge them with a boat, is a recipe for disaster. Adding any amount of yellow gems amplifies the number of shots you need to dodge or tank, which again, given how hard it is to see where they're falling, is often just more hits the player takes and more repairs the player needs to make.

In summary: I cannot consistently dodge cannon towers and attacking them directly actively harms my progress in the fight. As a result, I've come to the belief that the best way to deal with them is to just ignore them and heal/repair the damage they deal if necessary. I do not think this is a very engaging design.

Here are some ways I think cannon towers could be improved:

• Add an indicator for where they will fire (something like earthquake shadows)
• Give enough time after each indicator appears to make consistent dodges possible. This would provide interaction with CK's claws since in order to row away from the shots, you'd need to move to the edge of your boat and be susceptible to claw attacks.
• Either make it so that destroying a cannon tower does not trigger phase change OR make it only trigger once all cannon towers have been destroyed OR rework the wave phase trigger entirely (as one example, you could make it trigger at 75%, 50%, and 25% of CK's total health)
• Either make red gems not cause boat breaches OR limit it to a higher number of red gems (something like 5+pearl instead of 1+pearl)

But what do you all think? Are cannon towers good as is or should they be tweaked? I'd love to hear any suggestions you have as well as any feedback you have on the suggestions I've listed.

[Jakepeng99]

Make them have a warning when they are going to respawn, like little bubbles that look the same as the old geyser attack.

[Helenar]

I agree! Having an attack with no counterplay besides just repairing your boat feel pretty bad. With ck's gem mechanic, it would be really unfortunate if 2 types of gems are out of the question because of the nature of an attack. Ideally, ck wouldn't have 1 meta combination of gems. More realistically, there would be some really good gems, but also less devastatingly bad ones so you can mix and match based on what you have. If 1 red gem will ruin the fight, the pool of possible gems to use gets smaller.

[Jakepeng99]

4 minutes ago, Helenar said:

I agree! Having an attack with no counterplay besides just repairing your boat feel pretty bad. With ck's gem mechanic, it would be really unfortunate if 2 types of gems are out of the question because of the nature of an attack. Ideally, ck wouldn't have 1 meta combination of gems. More realistically, there would be some really good gems, but also less devastatingly bad ones so you can mix and match based on what you have. If 1 red gem will ruin the fight, the pool of possible gems to use gets smaller.

I wish it was more like the shadow pieces.

 

You go for the rook normally, but go for the knight if you want followers. If the gems were implemented to be a better version of that, it would be cool.

Each purple gem could give the minions some extra sleep resistance.