Unbalanced Piece Of Junk
An arena mode DLC, which suffers from lots of issues. The concept of this DLC is great, but it has been poorly executed. Player is thrown in the small arena, which aesthetically resembles campaign map areas. They look nice, and there are about 5 different environmental versions.
Crucible was done in over-the-top hardcore, unbalanced fashion, in order to please some of their fans from Grim Dawn's official forum, known as "praetorians", a minor, opinionated, toxic, hostile, vocal group of Crate's groupies, who worship Crate Entertainment's developers as their deity. Praetorian is their forum rank, thus the reference. Unfortunately, people who do critically think of this game are outvoiced by this blindly supportive minority, which keeps their forum echo-chamber safe from the rest of folks. Discussing with them results in wolfpack joint verbal attacks. Whenever I tried to point out crucible's flaws, the pack was preying on me with insults, personal attacks and defamation. It was experience akin to Crucible itself.
Monsters spawn from all points of compass, and the goal is to beat them all. At player's disposal are some NPCs which provide certain services in order to boost player's attributes, resistances and damage output. Player can construct defenses which offer additional crowd control and damage. These services are expensive, and currency used as payment is scarce.
Most builds which work in the hardest difficulty of the campaign mode aren't viable in crucible due to exaggerated challenges awaiting inside the crucible. Even praetorians struggle to name more than 10 viable builds that work in crucible. Only one-handed weapon + shield using Soldier mastery and its skill Overguard are viable melee builds. Dual-wield and two-handed melee are generally not viable. Some rare caster and ranged builds work, but only if combined with, again, Soldier mastery.
Due to the huge number of monsters, all those visual effect are overkill for the GPU, thus cutting the FPS, and making survival even harder. Do not buy this.
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