Crab King Suggestion thread number 18

[GreenBowers]

There have been a lot of disagreements over the new iteration of crabking on the forums. Some people don't like the new direction and think the old fight was better, some believe the new changes are a step in the right direction but need some more tweaking. I'm making this thread to catalog some of my own ideas, and ideas that I've seen other people make.

The Main Issue with the New Crab King
I think most people can agree that the new Crab King isn't as interesting as he could be, because a majority of the fight boils down to Hold F while standing right next to Crab King, while ignoring all the other mechanics of the fight, both because its far more effective to dps, and interacting with the different parts of the fight is a waste of time and resources.

If you position your boat right against Crabking during his claw phase, none of the claws will hit you, and your ownly worry is the innaccurate cannon towers, which you can just ignore. Its not interactive. During this phase you ignore pretty much anything the boss can do to you besides occassionally repairing your boat, because youre able to.

Suggestions to fix this phase
I have a few ideas to fix this. I'm not saying any of them are the end-all-be-all solution, but I'm at least putting out my thoughts on how to make it better.

• Return the Geyser attack.
  Crab King doesn't really do much to defend himself during the Claw Phase. He just sits there and gets hit, so having him perform a geyser attack under the players boat would be a direction action from the boss that requires a reaction from the player, thus making it a little bit more interactive. Its important to note that with this suggestion, he will only ever do his Geyser attack during the claw phase, probably after taking a certain number of hits.
  
  The Geyser attack would be slow, and very telegraphed, and it would require the player to row their boat around the arena. Because they would need to row, they would interact more with the claws that only attack the player when they're close to the edge of their boat (Where they need to be to move), and the stationary cannon towers (Which the player may need to row into the range of new ones while avoiding the geyser.)
  
  The fight would become DPS the boss until he performs his spell, then dodge out of the way before continuing to DPS. At least then the fight would be more interactive.
   
• New Mechanic, showing off one of Crab King's Drops as apart of the fight.
  For killing Crab King, the player is rewarded with the Crab King bumper, its pretty neat. I like how it looks.
  
  Why not involve the idea of the bumper into the fight? Crab King is basically a castle themed boss, so why not give him a 'shield' in the form of this bumper. It would be a different way to incentivize moving around him, to attack him, thus interacting with the cannon towers and claws more due to the need of moving your boat around the arena. 
  
   
• Make the Claws grab the boat again.
  I don't super agree with this one, as I think having the boat move around the arena would be more interactive than stepping back to fight the claws, but I've seen a lot of people mention it, so I wanted to add it as a discussion point.
  
  I don't remember exactly who suggested this part, but I thought it was cool. The crab claws would occassionally grab the boat, and if ignored, would crunch into it after some time, dealing a large amount of damage, but if the boat had bumpers on it, they would grab and damage the bumpers before attacking the boat proper, which incentivizes people upgrading their raft a bit before taking on the crab king fight. The bumpers would act as a sort of buffer before actual damage is done to the raft.
   

The Cannon Towers could use their own tweaks to improve them, in my opinion. Right now, the player can almost entirely ignore them to just dps the boss. There are a few ideas I have to make them feel more interactive.

• Give some kind of indicator where the cannonball will land, lower the rate of fire, while also making the cannon towers more accurate. Moving to dodge the cannon fire can again be interactive, but without any indicator, or time to actually move the boat out of the way, there's no real reason to try. I'm hesitant on suggesting straight buffs to the cannon towers because that won't make them more interactive, it will just make them more frustrating, though if they are more annoying and dangerous, I could see players going out of their way to kill them rather than ignore them.
   
• Make them drop a bunch of cannon balls in general after either crabking's defeat or killing them
  Cannon balls are expensive and aren't the most useful, so making them drop ammo might make killing them more interesting/make fighting crabking more replayable. This doesn't really improve the phase, but I do like the idea.

 

The Healing Phase
The second phase of the Crab King fight also suffers as not being very interactive, though in concept I think they knocked it out of the park. It definitely has a major problem holding it back.

• There is zero reason to at all interact with the Crab Guards or Crab Knights.
  Since the Crab King is constantly healing during this phase, wasting time fighting any of the summons is a very poor decision. Any time you do spend on killing them is time not spent on stopping the heal, which is a massive set back on the fight. They're also just going to die and drown at the end of the phase anyways. Killing the summons has zero impact, and its better to mass sleep them, or just tank them as you dps the boss.

My idea to fix this phase
I think it would be a good idea to take some inspiration from another boss that has a healing phase, but also a number of summons. The Ancient Fuel Weaver's self heal. The difference in this phase is, the players have to do something other than hold F on the boss in order to make sure they stop healing, which shakes up the boss fight. 

• Make the tiny Crab Guards carry rubble and stone from the cannon towers toward the crab king, slowly skittering along on the ice. 
  If they are able to make it to the crab king, he'll perform his heal animation, but if the player runs over and manages to kill them, they deny the heal while also interacting with the mobs. The Crab Knights can behave as normal, being focused on fighting the player while the little ones do the manual labor. You could also make the little Crab guards not all come out at the same time, so properly timing the Panflute to catch a lot of them becomes more skillful, but also, you won't be able to completely catch every summoned enemy with a use of the flute.
• Completely different idea: Make the little Crab Guards build up the ice that Crab King surrounds himself with.
  Crab King will not be healing himself during this part of the fight, and will only start once the ice wall is complete. The little crabs would work on the wall, and the longer they are left to build uncontested, the more hp the wall will have once Crab King begins to heal. The player would have to run around and kill the little crabs in order to prevent the wall from being too strong.

 

End of this post. I just want to emphasize that these are just my ideas. I don't think complaining about the content of the beta without at least trying to offer how to make improvements is very constructive, so I wanted to put a post together with some of my own, and some that ive seen in a few of these threads. I want to discuss them with the rest of the community, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered making a thread in the first place.

[GreenBowers]

Additional Change to Ancient Trees

Let us speed up the growth using Tree Jam so its both more Accessible to the player base as a whole, while also interacting with ocean content and giving another use to tree jam.

[dst_lover]

cool i like your idea its very smart way to make some of the things on the fight like the crabs have purpose 

[the bafoolo]

if klei add this it will be so great 

[Malfario]

2 hours ago, GreenBowers said:

Make the Claws grab the boat again.
I don't super agree with this one, as I think having the boat move around the arena would be more interactive than stepping back to fight the claws, but I've seen a lot of people mention it, so I wanted to add it as a discussion point.

I don't remember exactly who suggested this part, but I thought it was cool. The crab claws would occassionally grab the boat, and if ignored, would crunch into it after some time, dealing a large amount of damage, but if the boat had bumpers on it, they would grab and damage the bumpers before attacking the boat proper, which incentivizes people upgrading their raft a bit before taking on the crab king fight. The bumpers would act as a sort of buffer before actual damage is done to the raft.

Please no, one of the biggest flaw of original crab king was precisly that the boat wasnt able to be moved around to doge his attacks, i am all for making the fight more interesting but restricting the movility of the boat gets us back to the original problem.

 

The rest is very well thought and would make for great aditions

[GreenBowers]

Just now, Malfario said:

Please no, one of the biggest flaw of original crab king was precisly that the boat wasnt able to be moved around to doge his attacks, i am all for making the fight more interesting but restricting the movility of the boat gets us back to the original problem.

Thats mostly why i stated I didnt really like the idea, but I saw quite a few people talking on it and felt like i should at least include it. I agree with your opinion.

[Malfario]

I think the most important thing for crab king rework now is a proper way to space out the attacks, so its challenging but not frustatring to keep track of them, as well as having enough time to react to all of them properly.

[GreenBowers]

I think the geyser as a revenge state should be a good way to go about doing that. He wont use it until he takes a number of hits in his claw phase, so players could play around it a bit.

[Pet Rock]

All of these are great ideas! Adding these would already make Crab King fun. However, I do have some things to add.

For the cannon towers, they could shoot a large grenade type object that casts a shadow before landing. In exchange for their lower fire and travel speed, they would once again blow holes in boats and damage them more (it wouldn't damage structures though). Also, if they miss, they will create a circle of geysers shortly after sinking, replacing the old crab king geyser attack. I feel like this would be better than the peas that they currently shoot.

I'm not sure if you got it from me, but I suggested the claws attacking bumpers thing in one of my threads . However, to add to this idea, I think instead of slowly munching on bumpers, claws could be repelled by them, as they can't find a hold. This would still damage bumpers though. This mechanic would make the claws more manageable to allow for other changes to the fight.

Another thing that would be cool would be melee attacks. An occasional melee attack would stop players from holding f. A slow lunge attack could even reposition crab king in the arena which would add more to the fight. Maybe players could lure him to cannon towers to destroy them faster. Melee attacks would probably have to be an alternative to the shield, since I can't see those going together, but both would enhance the fight.

One last thing is that a special attack when Pearl's pearl is inserted would be cool. I suggested a laser where players would have to hide behind structures in my other thread 

that's all

[GreenBowers]

10 minutes ago, Pet Rock said:

Snip

Oh i did get the idea from you! I recognize the pfp. Hello xD

I think the crab claw bumper idea is really fun and cool. Its a struggle because I really want my geyser idea, and the crab claws would go against it. I'm not sure what Klei will do it with it at the end of the day.

[Antynomity]

I do think claws should grab onto the boat again, but instead of stopping it completely in place, they would slow it down, with decreasing effectiveness of each claw the more grab onto it (also them grabbing onto the boat should be something they do only when they can't reach the player for an extended period of time.)

 

As an example, one claw grabs on, the boat moves 25% slower, then if a second one grabs on, it moves a total of 37.5% slower, with three it'd move 44.25%... so on and so forth.

The boat being unable to move was the only huge issue with the old fight outside of CK being able to perma freeze you while sinking your boat, so having that readded in the exact same way would be counter productive.

[GreenBowers]

Some interaction with the claws would be very nice. At the moment you can ignore them like 90% of the fight by just standing directly next to crab king, so whatever solution they come up with, i hope its interesting.

[GreenBowers]

Shameless self bump because it got bumped off the page-

[GreenBowers]

Seedshells should be usable as Cannonballs

I think this change wouldnt be too difficult to impliment, and would make this less than popular item a little bit more interesting with a new use case. The force of the cannon could cause the explosive seed's aoe to be even larger, so the cannon would have focused, high damage mostly single target, while the seedshell would have medium damage, but would hit in a large area, so its great against a lot of mobs.

It would also allow sailors to get more ammo while out on the high seas, using resources only found on the sea, thus encouraging people to interact more with ocean content.

[GreenBowers]

Going to bump this, since I feel like CK is the last thing the beta needs to fix before its alright.