Piety Out of Control

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Losian wrote:

Doubt there's much care for my opinion, but I'm too annoyed to not post it, so hey!

Duelist with life drain/armorevasion/melee spec - I guess by merit of melee alone I'm pretty much hosed for most bosses (anything that shoots multiple projectiles seems to all hit melee characters at once for insta-death.) I burned all my portal scrolls trying to kill her and, thanks to server lag, can't dodge her ice stuff. Also, while i was running back to fight her, she summoned about 30+ blood elementals. It doesn't help that my attacks often don't hit, whether by lag or something else that I can't tell what is, who knows. Do enemies dodge? I assume so.. can I tell if they did? No clue.

It's frustrating to spend so long and get this far in a game and get totally snowballed unless I dramatically alter every piece of gear I have towards fighting one single boss.. In my opinion that isn't good game design, it's very much the opposite, and shows a dev taking a deus-ex-machina approach of 'challenge.' i.e. - there's no challenge, but instead it forces some players to stop playing entirely and just grind out gear specifically angled to one single fight, in order to get any further.

I also feel it's worth pointing out that the last area is just absolutely boring and tedious. It's obvious the developers wanted to stretch the end of act 3, and it is grindy and absolutely dreary, and that's all it is. Endless waves of the same blood elementals and elemental skeletons.. over and over.. in a level that is strangely many times larger than any other quite suddenly.

The game up until the end part of act 3 was pretty fun - but General Grevicious was doable.. but only by swapping to bow and running around. His molten shield thing one-shotted me, even with dual fire resist rings, so not sure what a melee character is supposed to do there.

Maybe some of you enjoy being forced to rebuild and regear entirely for one fight and consider that "fun" and "challenging," but to me it's just lazy game design aimed at appeasing some grind-happy Diablo2 kids, while leaving other folks annoyed at hitting a very sudden and dramatic roadblock. I also find it pretty lame to have dramatic jumps in 'difficulty.' If that really is the intention, why can a character breeze all the way TO her without the tools to beat her? Again, just bad game design. In a game with a wide variety of passives and gear, being forced to pigeonhole into the "right" builds just smacks of the same thing: bad design. :(

1. Get more life. You should have plenty of life to survive her if you're melee, if you don't then you've built a glass cannon.

2. Ice form - Hide behind the towers when she is in ice form. Have max cold resists so you can survive 2 to 3 shots of ice spear before you can get there. Destroy her portals if you get a chance.

4. If you can't handle her in fire form. RUN. She won't hit you as often. you don't have to have crazy run speed, just enough to reduce the amount of hits taken. Once again, you should have enough life to cop at least 2 hits. If you're specced into armour/evasion then make sure you have at least 33% chance to avoid attacks with evasion. That why she will NEVER hit you 3 times in a row as only the first hit is randomised with evasion.

3. Normal form. Avoid the ball and SMACK HER DOWN.

4. Honestly, bosses can be easier when you're melee imho. It's probably the only time in the game when a melee toon can be better. You have more life and aren't as fragile as ranged characters. Learn to recognise the patterns and watch a few youtube videos if you have to. With Vaal, watch the arms, you will get to know when it's going to do a smash. But... You should have enough life to cop one of the smashes. Max your lightning resists and you should have enough life to cop 1-2 of the lightning beams.

5. If you're having trouble hitting the blood elementals then check your chance to hit. If it's still relatively good (absolute minimum 85% chance to hit, although I prefer a minimum of 90%) then you may have been suffering from desync. Not a lot you can do about this, I suffer it big time when using cleave and having a lot of monsters on screen. Just wait it out and make a new instance if there's too many monsters there (ctrl-click the entrance). Blood Elementals are actually a good chance to refill your flasks. Take it. Some of the best damage mitigation is your ability to do damage, you should be melting the elementals.

6. You may not have enough good gear to take her on in cruel. It's quite possible you didn't get lucky on some items and are struggling with damage/life and/or resists. Either farm/grind it up or make a new character and just enjoy the ride. By the time you get your new character up to Piety cruel you should have enough good items to take the plunge and give her a right good royal flogging. If you're melee it's absolutely imperative you have a damn good weapon. Duel wielding can be hard for this reason too.

Read the mechanics thread and learn how armour and evasion work. They're complimentary forms of defence to your life/energy shield. Big hits will smash through armour and still hit you for big damage. Evasion can hold up well with big hits (giving you a first chance to miss the crit completely and then a second completely random chance to take normal damage instead of the crit) but leaves you vulnerable to being stunned (and stun locked) from regular hits. Energy shield grants you a 50% chance to avoid being stunned. Blocking will only show the blocking animation (effectively stunning you) if the hit would normally stun you.

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Brussel_Sprout wrote:

1. Get more life. You should have plenty of life to survive her if you're melee, if you don't then you've built a glass cannon.

Glass Cannon did (should) not mean: 'dead'. It should be viable if you have a chance to manage to not get hit more then you can survive; if this is practically impossible, its not a Glass Cannon, its NOT EVEN A BUILD at all.

And if stacking some k of life is the only realistic way to be not counted as an unviable glass cannon, diversity and variety greatly sucks: they are NOT present at all then.

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4. Honestly, bosses can be easier when you're melee imho. It's probably the only time in the game when a melee toon can be better. You have more life and aren't as fragile as ranged characters. Learn to recognise the patterns and watch a few youtube videos if you have to. With Vaal, watch the arms, you will get to know when it's going to do a smash. But... You should have enough life to cop one of the smashes. Max your lightning resists and you should have enough life to cop 1-2 of the lightning beams.

How this...

Why should a ranged char be less tanky than a Melee-Char? Most Builds use exactly the same passives as the Melee-Builds for defense only the offensive nodes vary. A Marauder with a Bow is as tanky as a Marauder with a 2h-Mace.

Hi, guys, I'll use this thread to ask some stuff about Piety.

I'm playing a bow ranger on HC and have soloed till Piety on Cruel. Now I'm kinda afraid to face her alone, since she almost wasted me in the crematorium encounter (and I had max lighting res!). I have almost doubled my DPS since then, but my defenses are more or less the same (except I have more life). I have all max elem. res. and cca 1.6k life (with two auras active, else 1.8k).

How comparable is her dmg. output, compared to the encounter in the crematorium? Does she by chance do also any chaos dmg.? (cause I have -20 chaos res.).

Of course I could just team up. But still I would like to hear from others how viable is soloing her on Cruel diff.?

EDIT:
Well, as it turned out it wasnt that difficult, albeit a bit lengthy. 1.5k life, almost max res, a few trips to town... and bear trap! :)

Greetings.

I just killed Piety on normal for the first time at lvl 33 (marauder) on 1st try.

Problem was, it felt way to easy.

Now i suspect it becouse of my character and its dps, becouse i think i got real lucky with drops. I couldnt get a straight answere in game so hope ppl here can help.

My Marauder was at:
lvl 33
1k HP
29.6 regen + 37.3 from totem
2% life leach
0 mana (blood magic)
400 Armor (800 with molten armor) giving 25% to 40% reduction.
60 fire res,
74 lightning res,
40 cold res.

The main thing i think i got lucky with my weapon which is giving me the following.

Glacial hammer DPS 775

Is this OP for the level im at and thus thats what made Peity so easy ?

Its the last boss, its supposed to be a challenge!

Well the Multiple-Iceshot does at least over 1200 damage in some occasions (with max Frost-Resist). So 1600 Life seems not that much. Actually her lightning-damage seems a lot weaker than in the last encounter. The 1200 damage could be less with more armor, since I only had ES, so no idea how high the physical part is.

I normally avoid both her elementary styles and whack her while in normal form. If you kill the adds, abuse town-portals and Alt-F4 if unfortunatly frozen it should be doable. But better hide behind a column if she changes to frost-archer and run if she goes fire. Her normal form on the other side seems pretty weak.

And yes exspecially a lucky weapon-drop makes the encounter trivial. Actually all bosses in normal are a joke. The only bosses I found easier in cruel are the Act 1 bosses, because you normally face hailrake without any cold-resist (since you are only lvl4 or so).

Exspecially as a ranger you should pick a poison-arrow. You won't need it, but since there could be situations making you unable to directly attack her without facing more or less likely death shooting a poison arrow near her (exspecially while in Archer-Form) makes her not replenish energy-shield and even drain some HP. But you might need some TPs, since it is a bit difficult if you are solo to close the portals, since she can use lightning-warp to get to them and they seem to often spawn far away from you, which makes you unable to destroy them.

Exspecially the beginning of the battle is tough since she summons a lot of minions, but after that it gets a lot easier. If you are unsure, try to group up, which makes the fight a lot easier.