🦀 How to Beat Crab Rave in Set 11 🦀

One of the most popular Portals in Set 11 is "Crab Rave". It is quite similar to the Portal "Scuttle Puddle" and will transform all PVE minions into Scuttle Crabs with bonus loot. These rounds are effectively free and can be beaten by any board.

The main difference with Crab Rave appears in Stage 5-7, where you will encounter the Monster Crab. This PVE Stage is extremely difficult to beat, often resulting in players losing the fight and potentially dying in the process.

Figuring out how to survive the Monster Crab can be difficult, so this guide will cover different approaches to help you find success!

Starting in Stage 5-7 you will be facing the Monster Crab. It has some pretty impressive stats:

• 20.000 HP
• 200 Armor
• 200 Magic Resistance

The main problem besides the ridiculous defensive stats is the board wide damage that increases with each cast. This means no matter where you position your units, they will take damage from each wave. Once the fight goes into overtime, it becomes quite unlikely for your remaining units to survive any longer.

No matter the setup, the most important aspect you will need to defeat the Monster Crab is Omnivamp. Some popular sources are:

• Items: Gunblade / Bloodthirster / Hand of Justice / Death's Defiance
• Augments: Harmacist
• Emblems: Heavenly, Sage
• Integrated Healing: Fated Sett

Some comps will always have a lot easier matchup against the Monster Crab, especially Melee Carries like to run sustain items like Bloodthirster, which gives them a considerably advantage over ranged units that focus more on damage and utility items.

Since the Monster Crab has such a high HP pool and strong defensive stats, it only makes sense to run items with a burn effect to maximize your damage. Unfortunately this will only work to an extent. It doesn't matter if you have Sunfire, Red Buff, Blistering Strikes, Annie or a radiant Morello, the burn damage against PVE minions is capped at 100 true damage every second.

Since the Crab Rave fight becomes extremely dangerous after 20 seconds, you can expect an item like Sunfire to deal between 2000 and 2500 True Damage in the Stage 5-7 fight. While this only makes up for 10% of the total HP, every bit of damage can make the difference to come out victorious.

Outside of Healing and Burn items you should also make sure you have a Sunder or Shred effect for your main damage type.

• Sunder (Armor Pen): Last Whisper, Evenshroud, Obsidian Cleaver, Aphelios, Irelia
• Shred (Magic Pen): Statikk Shiv, Ionic Spark, Obsidian Cleaver, Aatrox, Alune

Considering the high defensive stats of the Monster Crab, not having any Sunder/Shred will make the fight quite difficult.

There are a lot of Artifacts that can be quite useful throughout the game and for the Stage 5-7 fight.

• Deathfire Grasp - Deals over 1600 magic damage if you have Ionic spark at start of fight
• Horizon Focus - Deals over 2500 magic damage per CC if you have Shred
• Death's Defiance - Strong sustain item for Melee Carry
• Gold Collector - Can execute Monster crab for ~2400 True damage (if below 12% Health)
• Talisman of Ascension - Massive combat buff if carry survives long enough

You're not limited to only these Artifacts, a lot of them will provide your team with a nice combat buff.

Since you’re only up against a single unit, all Spectres will haunt the Crab, granting your main carries a massive damage increase early into the fight. During the game you can pick up several 1 star ghostly units on your bench and replace your most useless unit or traits. Especially frontline units are often worth replacing since they tend to barely contribute anything towards the fight.

Dragonlord is an easy trait to fit in and deals max health true damage to the Monster Crab after 8 seconds into the fight. Even with only a few Dragonlord units you deal an additional 1000 or 2000 true damage and grant your entire team an Attack Speed buff.

Umbral Comps tend to perform quite well against the Monster Crab, because Sylas tends to stay alive for very long due to his high sustain and the execute effect from the Umbral trait is quite powerful. Even if you don't have a full Umbral comp, you can consider replacing weaker units to slot in two Umbral units, if you can guarantee that they stay alive long enough to finish the fight with the execute effect.

Unless you're playing a Sniper comp, your position against the Crab won't matter at all. This means if you're running traits like Sage you should move everyone into the first two rows so they receive Omnivamp. This also opens up other strategies based around "clumping" your board.

• Redemption - Give redemption to a ranged unit and circle your entire team around the Redemption for healing + damage reduction
• Hwei - Especially as two star and with a lot of AP he has a very strong heal. Make sure your entire team is clumped to max out your healing
• Amumu - You can move two ranged units behind Amumu so they profit from his healing

This is a bit of a special strategy, but the "easiest" setup to defeat the Monster Crab is Irelia*2 with a Corrupt Vampiric Scepter, a Guinsoo's Rageblade and one damage item. Since she will never stop weaving her blades in a circle and doesn't waste any time with her ability, she is capable of defeating the Monster Crab all by herself. She does need to be 2 Star, since otherwise she will get one shot too early into the fight.

There also two important aspects you need to pay attention for:

1. You can lose one of the Gold Orbs from the Monster Crab if you're playing Lissandra. If you're confident you can win without her, you should consider benching her for the fight
2. Fated used to be strong, because connecting to Sett gave everyone a ton of Omnivamp. However this interaction was bugged and the Omnivamp was based on pre-mitigation damage. This is now fixed and you can't rely on this interaction anymore to win the fight for you.