Crab King Feedback

[chaosmonkey]

Hello,

I've been playing the beta in my megabase world and have killed CK 10+ there and probably another 10+ elsewhere. Overall I'm excited about the direction Crab King is going. The fight is a lot more interesting than before the rework. With some tuning, I think the fight will be in a great place.

Things that are working well

• The cannon towers, at least the nearest one, must be confronted if you wish to maintain your boat. This pulls you away from simple press-F combat.
• Having adds during ice shelf phase pulls you away from fighting Crab King. Again, this helps making the fight not a press-F-fest.
• The different components of the fight are all pretty interesting.

Things that could be better

• After the ice shelf breaks, it takes a long time until you can get your boat close enough to actually attack crab king again. This means that after the initial boat phase, the only DPS phase is really on the ice shelf.
  • I think this could be improved by making the shelf fall apart faster (all at once?) and/or by making the ice flow degrade faster.
  • Alternatively, maybe it can all be destroyed all at once with Crab King doing some sort of large AoE attack that you need to retreat to your boat to avoid.
• There's some exploits with stationary ocean items that prevent the ice shelf phase. I think structures like Ocean Trawler should not be stationary, and the waves should push them back as well.
  • OR, the boat forcibly being knocked into them should break the boat
• The healing phase is a bit.. boring? The adds kinda help, but CK just sits there getting beat up trying to heal after you defeat the adds. I feel like CK should be doing something else during this phase too (like maybe tossing more adds?)
• Feels bad that there's no way to interrupt the healing and get CK to do something else.
• The claws are pretty much ignorable now. They spawn far from the boat and despawn quickly. Just need to kill the 1-2 in your way at start of boat phases and then press F.
  • I think some of these should latch onto your boat and try to damage it rather than attack you.

Things that feel BAD

• Something is wrong with how the ice breaks. Unless you are fully off the breaking tile, you will fall in.
  • I think there's a missing is_overhang calculation from the adjacent tiles, and you end up dropping if you're anywhere in the 4x4 tile that breaks (even if visually you're still on ice)
  • The first ice that breaks doesn't have room to spawn a floating ice disk which means you're guaranteed to fall in.
• Attack commands while on a boat are automatically jumping onto the floating ice disks to get closer to the target.
  • Attack should *never* jump you off the boat onto ice. I would never do that intentionally. The effect here is that the safe way to fight is to just sit around waiting for the ice flow to go away, which is lame.
• Cannon towers can get attached to your boat, and then they cannot be attacked, but they will keep putting holes in your boat. This is a death sentence for the boat.
• Due to how ice shelf takes forever to break, there's not really a second DPS phase on the water because it takes so long for all the ice junk to despawn.

[Sir Noel]

There's this weird pattern with bosses where Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons of adds at once and also the boss at the same time without using things like panflute, aoe, or brute forcing through dps. It's worse with CK where he will heal, basically encouraging you to ignore them. This phase needs a rework for sure, or to tweak the numbers.

[grm9]

17 minutes ago, Sir Noel said:

There's this weird pattern with bosses where Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons of adds at once and also the boss at the same time without using things like panflute, aoe, or brute forcing through dps

they probably don't, requiring more than a weapon is fine, it sucks when there's no solution except pan flute and tanking though, since AoE doesn't work on crabs unless you're using catapults or something and even then you'll need to tank a bit

[Wormboi]

36 minutes ago, Sir Noel said:

There's this weird pattern with bosses where Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons of adds at once and also the boss at the same time without using things like panflute, aoe, or brute forcing through dps. It's worse with CK where he will heal, basically encouraging you to ignore them. This phase needs a rework for sure, or to tweak the numbers.

Klei thinks every character is wendy...

[arubaro]

43 minutes ago, Sir Noel said:

There's this weird pattern with bosses where Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons of adds at once and also the boss at the same time without using things like panflute, aoe, or brute forcing through dps. It's worse with CK where he will heal, basically encouraging you to ignore them. This phase needs a rework for sure, or to tweak the numbers.

I like when we have to think about what items bring to the fight but in this case feels contradictory to have minions in a moment where the boss is healing non stop.

Also pan flute effect last very long on them 

[Sir Noel]

1 minute ago, arubaro said:

I like when we have to think about what items bring to the fight but in this case feels contradictory to have minions in a moment where the boss is healing non stop.

Also pan flute effect last very long on them 

28 minutes ago, grm9 said:

they probably don't, requiring more than a weapon is fine, it sucks when there's no solution except pan flute and tanking though, since AoE doesn't work on crabs unless you're using catapults or something and even then you'll need to tank a bit

Agreed on both fronts, if there was another way to deal with the minions it would be fine (or just letting us get them while the boss chills), but CK healing on top of that is a bit much. Panflute is always the easiest solution sadly...

[Radicaljoe]

I think a good solution to the boat not being pushed back is to have crabking also cast the old geysers around himself to make you need to back up. Have wind up time so people can get away, then anyone still in the radius gets a constant geyser attack. Id say a small radius, maybe 1.5-2 tiles worth

[loopuleasa]

20 hours ago, Sir Noel said:

Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons of adds at once

I truly believe devs at klei do not clear the content by themselves, as they are pressed for time

Good devs should both love and be skilled at the game they make

Just implementing it and testing it with c_godmode on for bugs only is not enough

[Jakepeng99]

2 hours ago, loopuleasa said:

I truly believe devs at klei do not clear the content by themselves, as they are pressed for time

Good devs should both love and be skilled at the game they make

Just implementing it and testing it with c_godmode on for bugs only is not enough

There is no evidence though that they dont test bosses. That would be silly.

[loopuleasa]

1 hour ago, Jakepeng99 said:

There is no evidence though that they dont test bosses. That would be silly.

You'd be surprised how many devs implement bosses and never test run it in a real wipe with real conditions up to the point where the boss is dead

[chaosmonkey]

Folks, whether or not the devs thoroughly test the bosses is beside the point. Clearly they do some testing because the fight actually works end-end without major bugs.

This thread is for feedback about the fight, not speculation or critiquing how the dev team tests. Please stay on topic.

[Electroely]

On 6/16/2024 at 12:03 PM, chaosmonkey said:

There's some exploits with stationary ocean items that prevent the ice shelf phase. I think structures like Ocean Trawler should not be stationary, and the waves should push them back as well.

I would hate it if the Ocean Trawlers could move. It would mess with trawler farms a lot. Just have them take damage & break if they really are the problem.

The bigger problem in any case is the fact that Crab King doesn't stop trying to push the player away. You don't need stationary structures to cheese him, you just need an anchor and a Malbatross bill with other players or followers dealing damage. I think the push needs to be stronger and Crab King needs to stop trying to push the player away after some time to spawn Claws to hurt the player.

[gamehun20]

2 minutes ago, Electroely said:

I think the push needs to be stronger and Crab King needs to stop trying to push the player away after some time to spawn Claws to hurt the player.

I think the geyser attack could work here if the player stays in the same position for too long crab king blasts the player or something idk

[chaosmonkey]

3 minutes ago, gamehun20 said:

I think the geyser attack could work here if the player stays in the same position for too long crab king blasts the player or something idk

that's a neat idea. A few seconds after waves start for him to do a ring or two of geysers around him for as long as there's a boat in range. 

 

8 minutes ago, Electroely said:

I would hate it if the Ocean Trawlers could move. It would mess with trawler farms a lot. Just have them take damage & break if they really are the problem.

Fair. Seems like there's plenty of options to address this that don't break existing ocean trawler mechanics.

[Well-met]

On 6/16/2024 at 12:19 PM, Sir Noel said:

There's this weird pattern with bosses where Klei thinks a character by themselves can deal with tons

wow its almost like the multiplayer game devs design for multiple players

[Sir Noel]

13 minutes ago, Well-met said:

wow its almost like the multiplayer game devs design for multiple players

Of course they designed it for multiple people, that doesn't mean solo players should struggle or not be kept in mind though. If the point is to engage with the crab king minions then they missed it by a huge mark, even in multiplayer its easier to just put them to sleep. Panflute has been our best friend for a long time now and it always will xD

[Well-met]

19 minutes ago, Sir Noel said:

Of course they designed it for multiple people, that doesn't mean solo players should struggle

...yes it does

[arubaro]

1 hour ago, Well-met said:

wow its almost like the multiplayer game devs design for multiple players

Wow its almost like this game is balanced, gives the option and is played by solo players

Useful comments as always