The difficulty rating of mines / crash

[thebiomage]

Am I the only one who finds it weird both this level and boss have the lowest difficulty ratings? When I first started playing the game (went with hard mode right away), I got my ass handed to me probably 50+ times by the boss, until I was barely able to get a win. Those falling ceiling tiles especially make it a very tough fight.

I thought okay maybe I was still new at the game, and I didn't have any upgrades, so now on my 2nd run (doing all the challenge achievements, again in hard mode) I fought him again and I'd still rate him as one of the hardest bosses. Am I missing something? I noticed you can grab and throw those falling tiles at him, but actively trying to go for that just got me hit so I preferred mostly using the grapple to poke at him from a distance, or get some melee hits in especially when he does his horizontal grapple charge.

The only bosses I've struggled with as much on this challenge run are the freeze and hacker guys, who are appropriately very high in the difficulty rating. Maybe hard mode is the crucial difference here, maybe on normal you can kind of just brute force the boss without much trouble? Even his level is honestly one of the more challenging ones, those bats can be problematic since they take 3 hits to go down.

Don't get me wrong he is one of my favorite bosses exactly for the challenging and fun fight, I just find it weird how he is shown as the weakest in terms of both challenge ratings. To me the clearly easiest one is the electricity guy.

[DomAnt]

The difficulty ratings were based on playtester feedback before the game's release, and as such may not necessarily reflect every player's experience. It may be better to think them as rough baseline suggestions, rather than absolute truth. After all, when you've got some experience under your belt, the perceived difficulty of the bosses may change, and isn't reflective of first time experiences.

As a development anecdote, Crash in fact was much, much weaker during development, and so he was made harder a few times. Even after all these changes, the playtesters felt that he was among the easiest bosses. This is probably part reason for why his rating ended up being what it is.

Also worth noting: the boss ratings are based on Normal Mode. Even though Hard Mode changes boss behavior in certain ways, these changes are not reflected in the ratings.