these changes look really good, the crab king is to this day the only reason I haven’t tried to go for celestial champion and stuck with fuel weaver, the amount of preparation always seemed way too much and it usually discouraged me to even try (even the bee cheese looks like a pain to do)

I do wish there was a more noticeable way of telling when the ice was going to break, i know the characters say the arena is breaking, but I wish the tiles themselves changed so show it instead of instantly popping out if existence. I'm 100% not salty because I fell into the ocean cause the ice closest to ck broke.

One thing I like is that that made the fight unique, which is a hallmark of all the best bosses in dst. Ancient guardian has the stun locking, celestial champion has its drastic changes in fighting style, and now crab king switches between a position and resource management ocean fight to a minion based “land” fight

minion spam is always a finnicky design choice for a game that is primarily single target attacks with limited range, but the fact that crab minions are just not an issue with panflute rlly makes the ice phase feel like beequeen but a lot easier and for the claws, i feel like they have a bit too much range and can clump up in 1 line bbut overall, i'd say ck is shaping up to be a banger. hopefully your suggestions go thru cuz you had great ideas also i want NO OCEAN MOBS to spawn (and for them to be revamped/hp lowered cuz god they are awfulllllll)

Every time they've done a fight based around a big enemy that spawns protectors (queen bee, Queen womant, ancient herald, and now this), you have ALWAYS been discouraged from interacting with the minions and are disproportionately rewarded for finding a way to bypass or ignore them. I don't like this personally, but trying to make a fight where you need to churn through a ton of respawning hp in minions will always have a problem of dragging on if you are forced to kill them. The biggest difference between all of the previous one though and this one is that the rework is stunning in unique mechanics and cool setpieces, and there is a lot more total to the fight than just ignoring minions (see: queen bee). So having the land minion phase be bypassed is not the worst thing, as theres still a good bit of gameplay past it, and the scene of crashing through the icewall is cool enough on its own.

crab king is gonna be much more bearable in this update. this is a pretty nice change.

What if the ice was able to be pickaxed instead of damaged? Also I just had this thought.. what if they incorporated the cannon that’s able to be placed on boat as sort of a cheat code? Maybe breaks lots of ice immediately or something. Just to get you to use little items that you otherwise wouldn’t normally.

Great feedback, perfectly explained! I hope Klei watches this.

I think they should add a hockey stick, which you can use to whack the crab guards back into the water. It'd be fun way to quickly deal with the crab guards! Especially as an alternative to just using the pan flute. Then you could have fun with the interactions that'd have in the boss fight. For example, you could quickly dispatch the guards by knocking them into the ocean, or knock them into the ice wall to break em down faster. Although, maybe that loses the original spirit of an ocean based boss fight.

It got to be difficult for the devs to design all of these bosses to be manageable in both group fights for online play and solo play.

Important to note should also be that it seems blue gems ALSO increase freeze resistance, just like before Reason I mention this is because for the ice platform phase you can actually stall out his heal if you freeze him whilst getting pushed away. Since the platform is triggered through your boat's distance to crabking, he'll be stuck frozen in the middle of the ice platform being summoned, giving you time to prepare for panflute uses, fighting the crab guards, or do boat repairs. No idea if this would "solve" your issue regarding the crab guards, but I personally really like using ice staves this way, especially when compared to how you'd use them pre rework.

Personally, the best way to get people to deal with minions is giving a reward to the player for going the extra mile. This could be achieved many ways, but the most fun I can think off is: after killing a minion the self healing done in the last 5 second by Crab King nullifies. Maybe the King could have a 10% damage resistance while the minions are alive, so you don't just cheese the minions and put them to sleep. This way you would deal with minions first and not worry about the heals done while not dealing damage to the king.

Here are some ideas I had mixed in with basically what you and the community at large suggested (bit of a read): + Crab King has 3 phases now. Phase 1 is the same while Phase 2 activates a little later on closer to halfway. Phase 3 activates when he has 2k-3k health left as a last ditch effort which increases the cannons attack speed and range, able to hit your boat from pretty far away, almost double their current range, and the minions he spawns while healing are faster and have a quicker attack cooldown, no buffed hp or damage. (that comes later.) - Crab King can no longer be immune while the ice wall is up and can be heal-canceled via ranged attacks. + While Crab King is healing, you can't do damage to him as you would instead be attacking the rocks that he uses to heal himself (effectively 100% armor until his healing phase is done. This puts emphasis on negating this phase to prevent him from regaining any health at all, only being able to deal damage once he's finished healing like a falsified 'back and forth' battle. Any healing that he gets through would then be 100 instead of 125 due to you not being able to undo the damage until after his healing round is over. Might sound like a pain in the ass, but it drags out the fight a little without increasing his health pool. You can still make the case that "he shouldn't be invincible while he's healing because that's just ice-wall and ranged damage all over again", but think about it, 12k for a raid boss's HP is pretty generous considering people can solo the likes of Misery Toadstool and the previous version of Crab King without a cheese strategy. Even with his immunity phase the fight hasn't changed much yet.) + Gems socketed that increase cannon effectiveness also increase range, allowing for, at max gem insertion, the cannons to hit you from anywhere on the field but at the cost of reduced overall damage to their shots. (Because getting pelted from across the map would be annoying if it was constantly dealing max damage and had a faster attack rate.) And now, the moment you've not been waiting for! Should you decide Crab King is too easy and needs more of a challenge you can now fight him after Celestial Champion is defeated and a Lunar Storm is active. I present to you... *ENLIGHTENED CRAB KING* (This version can also be forcefully spawned by socketing nothing but Iridescent Gems and/or Pearl's Pearl) + All incoming damage from his various sources have a flat Planar Damage modifier leaning towards Lunar and will do a pre-set damage being around 20% of the original attacks damage + its current damage value. (So if something did 100 damage before it'll now deal 120 with 20 of that piercing your armor.) + 1.5x Health (18,000) + Increased attack speed + +3 Base Claws + +3 Cannon Towers + Can spawn the ice arena in a larger radius and no longer waits for you to be out of range. + If you're in range of the ice arena when he summons it, you are temporarily frozen (bringing back old CK freeze mechanic but not as deadly) - Can no longer heal and instead will spawn Crab Minions that can swim towards your boat like Strider Spiders to attack you from anywhere. - No longer stays stationary and will now dive underwater and reappear in 1 of X locations within 6 tiles of his spawning location. (This means he's somewhat like Quacken and will dive under and reappear nearby to continue attacking you, forcing you to be on your feet or fight with multiple people. This would effectively turn him into a REAL Raid boss that would require either maximum skill to fight alone, or a player or two to assist you in the fight.) Once he's moved to a different location away from his central spawn area, he'll choose between going to a spot opposite where he is or returning to center at a 66-33% change for each respectively, meaning you can assume him to go to the opposite side of the field, only to be jumpscared when he resurfaces right next to your boat and pushes you away. (The spots he can go to are tiled away from the center in each direction, centering him on a tile himself, so 6 tiles N-E-S-W, and 3-4 tiles diagonally, set up in a somewhat circular pattern like the Archive Memory Puzzle.) +++ Upon defeating this version of Crab King you are awarded a Celestial Crown Shard. In addition to this update for Crab King, the Celestial Crown can now be crafted after killing Celestial Champion, via an updated altar drop like a refined orb or something (instead of the standard one you get form the moon rock and put into the machine to summon CC) or a rare Tumbleweed Blueprint. This recipe will still require the 5 shards to craft but as of now deconstructing the crown will only yield 3 shards instead of the original 5, making it a proper (roughly) halved recipe upon deconstruction. (You can't use decon/con cheese to farm shards as it would break into 3 and require 3 to craft even if you used both methods. Either way you'll still have to kill CC or ECK again to get more shards.)

I noticed something. If Crab King spawns near the lunar islands, stepping on the ice platform will count as a lunar island. I'm not a veteran player and I just beat him recently where I encountered the problem. It also took 3 pan flute to make the crabs sleep. IDK if it was intentional or a bug.

I feel they need to incentivize interacting with more of the mechanics by sailing around the arena. Thats my only complaint with it. I absolutely love the direction they took the fight but i think it needs a little more.

Personally i think the wave idea at the start of the fight should be 100% implemented and possibly give that phase 3k more hp. The phase needs to last more than 30 seconds imo. Making the first phase 5k hp and the second 10k is fitting. It'd give more time for actual ocean combat with boat measurability. The crab guards need to be more menacing somehow. Currently they're a complete non threat with just a simple panflute. I agree that sleep immunity is not the right choice. Im thinking maybe the crab guards dont spawn all at once. Instead they spawn in short intervals somewhere within aggro range of the player so they cant be ignored. This'd make the sleep strat inefficient since it'd require too many uses to fully negate the crab guards. This'll force the player to actually engage with the crab guards or potentially run around the ice wall to avoid them. In the process this'd make the ice wall actually effective since you'd have to frequently break a new one or go all the way around again back to the ones you were focusing in hopes of avoiding the crab guard. If they go down this route though they'd have to nerf the crab guard HP a bit. If its too high the 1 by 1 spawns would make it impossible to even injure the crab king. I agree with the idea of giving the player something to do in between ice sheet spawns. Having to break a certain amount of towers is a smart idea.

No way Jazzy Starves video? Long time no see

I'm dying to know how sea weeds do in this fight. All those sea stacks surrounding Crab King before the fight starts, it seems like an invitation to plant sea weed starters. In the old fight, the freeze attack would aggro all the sea weeds. In the new fight... Would the destruction of the sea stacks at the start of the fight also kill the sea weeds? Or aggro them? Or neither? Would they be effective at all against the ice walls?

I've never fought Crab King before, but it's not because I never reached the point where I could, it's because I was already getting bored of the world when I got to him, and fighting him sounded so awful that I couldn't bring myself to do it and eventually I just stopped playing that world. This new fight looks so much better, I hope one day they rework a majority of the raid bosses to make it so you don't have to spam pan flutes and weather pains in order to beat them

This version of the fight is definitely superior to the original gameplay-wise, but dang, the original customization mechanic (The HP increasing one specifically) of Crab King was _SO_ cool! You could basically create your own hyper-challenging superboss and with the game that has so many super-difficult bosses already, he fit right in on that regard, however flawed he was. Now, the whole gem stacking aspect of the boss feels even less impactful than it did before, the green gems are the new purple gems it seems. Also, one neat fact about the original Crab King: If you spawned yourself nine pearls with an external cheat tool or an item editor, you could create a crab king that had 500000+ HP and basically immortal, with this rework, this super cool easter egg no longer exists. The fact that they removed the HP aspect really sucks, the base HP nerf is justified but at least the _pearl_ should buff his HP for pete's sake. Oh by the way, do Iridescent gems still increase every single stat at the same time?

I really like that the fight was made so much easier, even if that feels weird to say! Like. I feel it makes way more sense for an ocean-based boss to have this level of difficulty, especially considering Pearl’s quest line comes before it! It just really didn’t need to be an end game fight, considering how much setup is involved. But then again, I say all this as a part of the percentage of players who find CK wayyy more difficult than the Celestial Champion! That said, there are a FEW things that definitely need tweaking before it’s a proper rework, mostly that the claws may as well not exist and there needs to be a better balance of the minions being very irritating if you deal with them normally, but entirely useless if you use a Pan Flute.

Already looks way better then the old Crab King fight i think one change that would be interesting is when after the ice platform breaks they turn into many ice Rafts wich you have to use to hop around and destroy the towers or some towers before you can hit Crab king again what also could be a funny idea is if you could use the Towers splash Damage to help destroy the minions during the ice Platform stage so you could do a mix of gems wich boosts Towers & Minions

Sounds better on paper, wasn't a fan of the original fight even with a massive health nerf from a mod to make health totals more solo play friendly, 12k sounds decent for a 2-3 player encounter but too much if I'm solo and it looked like you were struggling to keep up with its healing with the Thulecite club. My last encounter it had like maybe 2-3k health because of the mod and my strategy was to just bring 4 or 5 boat kits and deploy and abandon ship as the boat became too damaged, and even then it cost every boat I brought and barely survived. I also am not a very combat focused player in general so while I prefer brevity over complexity my interest is in keeping things interesting overall outside of combat scenarios. I recently made a post on the forums about a possible Antlion rework changing her tribute mechanic to generate sandstorms outside of the Oasis desert rather than cause annoying potholes, making it less of an automatic disable on world setup that it is now along with wildfires which also need a strong rework, summer in general needs help. For me I usually point to Reap What you Sow as an example of a good all around update and what DST needs more of than character skill trees or reworked boss fights, not that some bosses don't need a rework (lookin at you queen bee). I mean honestly its frustrating that Woodie's only defense from full moons requires dealing with moonstorms till CG is defeated when it could have been made a craftable idol or amulet unique to woodie, gated by the moon orb and materials from the lunar isle or something. And how do they plan to handle WX, if the point of skill trees is to diversify the characters with unique talents that players can mix and match to suit their play style, that's really WX's whole rework in a nutshell so how does a skill tree ontop of an already modular character with room for individual playstyles make any sense? I started a run recently with WX to get an idea of his new gimmick, I'm pretty impressed but I still have notes of things that are missing or could use some tweaks.

Crab pets are required now

with the panflute, the fight will be much more easy, and i dont like the way to spawn ice platform when crabking always summon the sea wave until your boat get pushed away, you can easily prevent to be pushed by building many anchors or other cheese way, so i think it should be designed to make players get away his range on their own otherwise will be freezed, and the consequence is that crabking can get healed for that time

it is worth noting that by putting ocean trawler kits next to your boat before starting the fight, ck will be unable to push your boat back during the wave phase, rendering him completely stuck. the cannon towers are still available to hit you and the boat, but the fight becomes a pushover after that. kinda hope that could be fixed in some sense

WINONA SKILL TREE?!

Was stuck at crab king for 3 years. Finally beat him a month ago -.-

We have needed a life jacket equip item in the game since forever. The whole sea experience is unwelcoming because one small slip up your boat breaks and its reset all over

okok but do bees still work

I wonder if canons would be good to fight him

this might be my chance to beat him on controller without cheese. And 100% agree that having followers be a requirement is a bad idea for a fight, because you have a small amount of boat and it will be funny to see all of your followers fall into the water when the ice goes away.

What do I think? I who never even got as far in the game so it would have been possible for me to even attempt Crab King .. I think it's fine 😂

haven't played DST in a while, but man, does it look like they cooked with these changes!

nice

number of hours i played this game: 1100 number of times i attempted crab king: 0 (to be fair most of my hours were well before ck lol)

NEW JAZZY VIDEO!!!

How to make crabking almost impossible (it's probably posiible but just very hard) things you will put into him is: 1. Pearl 2.pearl 3.pearl Etc.

Jazzy wortox can use a one man band to hire pigmen and bunnies, so it doesnt really affect him. And no you dont need to wear it the whole time - any pig/bunny hired with the band can then be fed food to hire them for real allowing you to remove the OMB.

Im heavily against the rework, i don't get how you can claim this is a more of an ocean boss when you fight it on land. Geyser attack was good and not an instakill not even with purple gems and grass boat. It dealt a lot of damage but it is easy to dodge, plus when the boat dies you loose 1 board. Freeze attack is an instakill but i actually think it's fun to have an instakill attack in a boss fight, especially when its so easy go dodge. All the issues could have and HAVE BEEN fixed, including less claw hp, less boat damage (they overdid it and now claws do nothing at all), managable healing phase, and all gems being balanced. Some are a lot better than others, but I've fought with all variants and even tho the pure blue gem build is the worst by far, its still not too bad, and forces you to fight exclusively outside of heal phase. The rework is unnecessary and I'd love the previous crab with the current number tweaks a lot more. Hp is a very personal preference thing but come on, really? 12k? I get that some people don't enjoy bosses but come on man, pearled crab king takes something like 3 or 5 hours to reach, and then you kill him in 5 minutes. People are into very casual gameplay it seems.

never fought this thing despite having hundreds of hours in DST

Well, that's nice, because Crab King is probably the dumbest fight in all of DST atm. Yeah, Fuelweaver is a mess, but at least it's on land and somewhat interactive. Crab king...uff.

Finally

😮

the fact that you recommend full green gem set up shows how bad they are designed , they should be a thread

It definitely needs alot of tweeks.

It's strange to say, but while this updated version is undoubtedly more balanced, I almost wonder if I won't miss the previous high-intensity of the old Crab King fight. That old encounter was bs, no sugarcoating it, but it was also so well-paced that it forced you to master yourself in order to win it, kind of like how the Fuelweaver has to be tight. That rapid pace has a ton of merit I think, even if it wasn't necessarily well executed. This fight, while more fair, might be a slight step down in terms of keeping the Crab King engaging. I guess my main problem is that I didn't just want the Crab King to be easier per se, I was hoping it to be a steep but fair challenge.

At the current moment wurt break the fight in 2 ways. Merms and mudslinger

Most of your changes to this new crab king fight would hurt it in my opinion.

Says a lot when half your criticisms are suggestions for klei to make the boss harder, maybe I can finally convince my friends to stick with this game past the end raid bosses

true.... just sleeping minions is such a waste of a cool mechanic

It was ass before, now its bad. So yeah it's better

I want new stuff in the game, not remakes of everything =/

From bad to boring

Bosses shouldn't be soloable in don't starve TOGETHER.