The PoE2 Crab That's Killed More Players Than Almost Any Other Monster
Path of Exile 2 is still in early access, and it has a crab problem. Specifically: one particular crab enemy has racked up the third highest player kill count in the entire game. Out of every monster, every boss, every nightmare the devs threw at you. Third place. A crab.
And the reason is a bug. A nasty one.
Here's What the Crab Does
The crab has a move where it fires a volley of projectiles. Normal enough. The bug: if the crab dies mid-animation while executing that attack, every single projectile it was going to fire gets launched simultaneously. All at once. Like a shotgun blast straight at your face.
If you're standing on top of the crab when this happens? Instant death. Doesn't matter how tanky you are. You're done.
In a normal playthrough that's annoying. In hardcore mode, where one death permanently deletes your character, that's catastrophic.
Zizaran Found Out the Hard Way
PoE streamer Zizaran lost a hardcore character to this exact bug. Died to a crab. The whole thing got enough attention that co-game director Jonathan Rogers confirmed the team went back and investigated what actually happened. They identified the crab as the cause.
That's a death worth investigating, apparently. When a single mob is sitting at third place on the all-time kill chart, you look into it.
It Gets Worse in Remnant Encounters
The crab shows up in Remnant encounters in the current league. Remnants drop a large group of enemies in a circle around you. So now instead of one murder crab, you've potentially got several of them in close range, all capable of the same bullshit shotgun death if they die in the wrong moment.
The geometry of that situation is genuinely threatening. Standing near a dying crab is the mistake. In a Remnant encounter, not standing near a dying crab is the challenge.
The Typo Problem
Rogers mentioned something that's kind of horrifying from a design perspective. Some of these monster damage bugs come from literal typos. Someone enters a number in the wrong column. That's it. That's the bug.
He brought this up in the context of a separate spider bug that was doing 100 projectiles over 100 milliseconds, landing 200,000 total damage. Someone typed something wrong and now a spider is deleting players.
The PoE2 damage formula apparently has columns close enough together that a misplaced number can turn a normal mob into a one-shot machine. That's a spreadsheet problem with real consequences for every hardcore player running into these things blind.
Third Place Is a Statement
Think about what it means to have third highest kill count. PoE2 has genuinely brutal bosses. It has endgame content specifically designed to kill you. And a bugged crab is out here farming hardcore deaths at a rate that puts it ahead of almost everything else in the game.
That's not a balance issue. That's a bug with serious teeth. The developers knowing about it is good. The crab still showing up in Remnant encounters in the current league is the part I'd want answered faster.
If you're running hardcore right now, this is your heads up. Kill crabs fast. Don't stand on them. Don't let them die mid-animation while you're adjacent. It's dumb, but it's the game as it currently exists.
Source: Pcgamer