Crab King is the worst designer boss

[Walrusst]

If cannon towers knocked a few times before they broke through the floor of your boat I'd be fine with the fight, its just the number of invisible ways to lose it all are a bit high. Like really its just a bit more controllability in key phases would make it so it'd be fine, and the cannon towers only respawn when more than one or two are killed (That way people who  don't try to wipe out all cannons can reasonably expect to not have to dodge the towers re-emerging.)

Such as when he is preparing for the ice platform, if you had a little time to steer out of the way/mine the cannon towers instead of a eject at near max speed then that part could be engaging.

[WilsonHiggs]

9 minutes ago, Walrusst said:

If cannon towers knocked a few times before they broke through the floor of your boat I'd be fine with the fight

Nice idea. I agree that that is way to punishing 

[JaxckLl]

5 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

I swear, you'd argue in favor of characters randomly exploding if I said it seemed bad.

Yeah kinda the impression I've gotten from that guy (and a couple others in this thread). The game is good, but it's not perfect and it's okay for different people to have fun or not to have fun with different mechanics.

4 hours ago, Walrusst said:

If cannon towers knocked a few times before they broke through the floor of your boat I'd be fine with the fight, its just the number of invisible ways to lose it all are a bit high. Like really its just a bit more controllability in key phases would make it so it'd be fine, and the cannon towers only respawn when more than one or two are killed (That way people who  don't try to wipe out all cannons can reasonably expect to not have to dodge the towers re-emerging.)

Such as when he is preparing for the ice platform, if you had a little time to steer out of the way/mine the cannon towers instead of a eject at near max speed then that part could be engaging.

I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. I've been complaining about the healing, but now having done the fight a dozen times with only a couple times actually getting the opportunity to finish I do wonder whether the combination of waves, boat destroying effects, and ice platforms collapsing may be in fact more frustrating than the healing itself. The healing adds a lot of stress to the fight, but it's the platform disappearing from underneath your feet that is damning and just outright ends the fight.

23 hours ago, Dingle said:

More of my crab king gem notes. All with the pearl.

If I'm Winona doing a catapult boat or a strong aoe character, I can go up to 4 purple gems. I've even done 6 or 7 purple as Winona, 8 really sucks though.

1 yellow max, 2 doubles tower health.

I've done 2 or 3 blue ok before. It really doesn't mess things up too much, in practice. You end up doing one more rotation, off top of head.

1 orange max if solo.

Multiple red is fine if going for grass rafts.

General ideal setup is like someone said above: 1 of each gem except 3 greens, then the pearl. If you can kill the crabs easy, then my favorite is 4 purple, 1 red, 1 blue, 1 orange, 1 green, skipping yellow entirely. Grass rafts open up doing more reds.

I've found max purple + pearl with any kind of substantial minions to be the most effective (I used Wicker's Grumbles, but Wurt's Merms would also likely work. Dunno about Webber's Sea Striders I feel like they'd just die to the claws. I saw a no-damage run where the guy was using the Golden Belt Pigs with Wilson, which is fantastic). I wouldn't say "easiest" as the fight is a pain in the neck and you can still lose randomly to drowning, but having something to soak up most of the attacks from the Crabs while also doing some work into King himself is extremely worthwhile.