Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

I have played for a couple thousand hours, and I can't even get through Piety in a4 let alone the rest of the bosses. I have almost 2k in normal freaking difficulty got through dominus and a3 easily and now I am completely stuck. If the a4 trio was overtuned how is this not? And if I can't get through any of this with all my experience, how on earth is a new player going to pick it up and say "whoa act 4 is so much fun i want to get to cruel difficulty now"? I can't even buy a carry through the rest of it, because everyone else in my guild thinks that it wouldn't be possible, even though they are level 55+. Please at least lower the bosses hp or something, I can't even get rid of Piety's ES before she does her beam again, and I was completely fine damagewise until this point. Again I have 2000 hp, which is more that 1 of my endgame map characters has, and I can't get through normal.

Even tho I managed to finish Normal difficulty without deaths on my new lvl 40 marauder, I agree that Act 4 is too hard.
The difficulty jump from Act 3 is just too big.

From a melee point of view, some bosses are a true pain to deal with, and just un-fun.
I had big troubles with Daresso, Doedre and of course Malachai.

Malachai took me 25 minutes to kill (I had like 1k dps), 90% of the fight consists of running around avoiding stuff, so stressful.

I believe Act 4 will just make new players insta-quit if GGG doesn't tone it down.

people qq'ed about dominus when he was released. hell, people even qq'ed about hailrake. i agree, act 4 is rather tough (far from being extreme (well, amybe on merci it is)). we just need like 10-15 days time for people to adapt to new encounters and then we will see how it goes. persoanlly i like what they did with awakening since actual fight mechanics were absent from most bosses in earlier versions

And it doesn't get any better in Merciless. I find myself just running past some of the ridiculously overpowered monsters on a map. I just encountered this one monster, and every time I get it down by even 1/4 of it's life bar (ie; it still had 3/4 of its life) I goes underground and heals back to 100%. That was a freaking rare monster!! I'm hitting it with a 3797DPS Fireball and 706DPS Firestorm, I finally had to just run past the SOB!!!

There are lvl90+ characters getting butt-raped by lvl 70's maps. That's not challenging!! It's punishing!!!

Here's a video of the difference between challenging and punishing. Maybe if it gets posted enough GGG will have an epiphany!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

Enjoy the pain, died like 30 billion times in act4

I like the mechanics in most of the boss fights, especially Doedre, but there is no reason that the bosses need to deal as much damage as they are dealing. Normal is supposed to be the easiest difficulty, but I have a much easier time going through merciless and cruel on most of my builds. I get that the fights are supposed to be hard, but normal dominus is hard for new players, these fights are just impossible. Dying twenty times and not being able to even lower Piety's health slightly is not fun. I had an easier time with Malachai than Piety in A4 as melee and that is ridiculous. Either nerf boss hp and dmg or buff player hp and dmg, if only through normal difficulty.

just fought malachai for the first time and i have to say that this fight is the most anti-fun thing i encountered in ARPGS since inferno difficulty in vanilla d3.

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shrinkmaster wrote:

just fought malachai for the first time and i have to say that this fight is the most anti-fun thing i encountered in ARPGS since inferno difficulty in vanilla d3.

You read my mind.

Me on the other hand, had actually no problems with piety nor dominus. They were as about as I expected them to be. Not saying that these are in line of what they should be, but character could do them quite easily in fact.


The act 4 playthrough was in fact also quite easy to say. I had not so much of a problem with damage taken and damage wise, as I build almost all of my melee characters with armour, high life and life regen.

Then Malachai comes. Besides my biggest issue is that I simply CANNOT play that fight due to the fact that my FPS going from much higher then 100+ fps on normal plays, to blow 30 and 20 fps.
But ignoring that for a moment. The fight itself seems very good, especially at the first glance. The first phase interacting with piety is just genious. The first problem I felt was the damage done. No matter how I tried to approach the boss to move myself into melee range for an attack, I felt there was no continually way to fight. It becomes a game of gamble.

On phase 2 the other hand, the actual problems occur. One of the problem is the size of map. It could not actually be the problem with the size of the map, but it could be about the amount of abilities that are occuring at the same time and how their size is relative to the map. Having for example one of those big adds spawning at the sides. Combine it with a huge blood pool, spawning zombies, red balls flying everywhere, be carefull not to stand in front of malachai, the 'touch of god' skill, runes that explode and so on. There is no real way to time any of it. You cannot predict any of it, only that you are going to be hit by something. To top it all off, it took me on both normal and cruel more then 20 minutes to kill the boss with multiple deaths. On normal I had about 10~15 deaths, most due to the fact when spawning back and coming into the boss room, actual skills are not shown, but you do get hit by them. Most of the times when I got into the portal, just by activating hatred would instantly kill me by invisible skills. I played the whole time with a friend, he would warn me in advance so I could react on it (and vice versa).

For me, the massive fking failure the boss made my 10/10 excitement about PoE to about 5/10. It's tedious, unfun, no way to mitigate any of it. It's far too punishing.

I actually enjoyed Malachai - Lightning trapper on Tempest with around 1k hp/es at the time. I went in after having watched a video of someone doing him in the beta and generally had a pretty good time with it. It took a while, it was tough, it was scary, it was exactly the things a final boss should be. After just barely scraping a victory, my heart was racing and my hands were tingling. This is why I play hardcore and I think the current reactions towards him are exactly the same as when Dominus was released.

That said, I am a reasonably seasoned player with 1362 hours having played since 1.0 and it was only one build so I don't have the whole picture yet. A couple people in my guild have been doing no-portal runs at level 40 and it's only just barely been 24 hours since release, but on the other hand the yellow swath he cut through the top ranks this morning was glorious to behold.

GGG have never pretended to be interested in letting Normal be a cakewalk beyond the first act - you either git gud or die trying and Malachai is a great example of that.

A4 Piety on the other hand...

I died 2 times (didn't pay enough attention on what's happening around) in normal going self found so it's not that hard, you just need to concentrate on what you're doing.