Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

Playing duel-wielding dodge duelist.

A4 wasnt -that- hard. First time getting to it in reg, i died a cple times on the major boss fights, but thats generally expected when you are learning fight mechanics.

Just cleared it in cruel, and the only fight that gave me a handfull of deaths was mala', as to be expected. Piety isnt difficult, once you learn to avoid her blood laser beam. Kaom and deresso were challenging, but hardly impossible. The G3 were more difficult, but again not impossible.

It's supposed to be a more difficult act, since it's current end-game. So if you're getting steam-rolled before you even get past piety, then i have to say either your gear really, really stinks (get to trading or farming), or this is your first time playing and you havnt learned to fine-tune your build yet.

Yep same here. I am no pro player, but still I don't remember ever dying on normal difficulty before the awakening. The game somehow feels unbalanced. You run through 3 acts almost like a breeze. Comes act 4, everything slows down to a stand still and then death :). The problem I had is Piety. 3 HC characters died on that freaking lazer beam of "doom and despair". Perhaps I shouldn't play solo, or perhaps the designers intend me to pay some chaos orbs to a higher level character to kill her and the last boss on my behalf...

Piety is the fight that made me feel like I am not worthy enough to be playing this game, I lost the motivation to reroll and go through it all a fourth time.

PS: In all my attempts I came prepared, overlevelled and with appropriate pots, piety just somehow manages to ignore all that and RNG the shit out of me.

i feel the same. idk maybe i have just been getting shitty drops but i keep getting one hit by koam or daresso. even with max res and appropriate amour or es/ev or whatever, i am really struggling to get into cruel atm and have been the second last wipe in beta.
now before anyone says its not hard....only post in this thread if you didn't level with flame totem, fire trap, incinerate, firestorm or a combo of them; oh and cyclone and ice crash.
leveling just seems to really f*$&ing suck now getting through act 4 NORMAL...lol who knew i would ever be saying that.
normally i could get to mecri and maps no probs but now i think i have made into cruel only twice and that is it...pretty shit.
as a example i just ripped to daresso normal. i portaled out to get some pots go back in and as soon as i do and go to move he hits me with his reave and kills me straight away.
Im so close to giving up this game but i really don't want to idk.
i meam i like a challenge that's why i play hc but this is just crappy atm and not enjoyable leveling any more.

Why should they lower it for bads? There is ppls in HC at 90s right now. Get better.

Piety is easy run in a circle in same direction as beam close to her while beam is going off.

Malachi I can sorta understand complaints as it take more getting the patterns down but piety you should not even get it.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

Malachi I can sorta understand complaints as it take more getting the patterns down but piety you should not even get it.

there's a pattern?
from what i could tell about this boss is to dont run over corpses and traps
wich as a melee isn't realy feasible so i just face tanked him and relied on my potions to save my ass.

Too much going on and its relentless, flame totem is currently the solution drop and run away. As a ranger i just do not seem to get time to unload onto a boss its not safe to stop running at any point.

Well Piety is easy due to the low hp she has. I just portal out and back in and let my minions kill her in the Grace period. Oddly enough she often stands against a wall... which makes it impossible to run around her. She also constantly shoots all 3 bubbles on herself, which makes it impossible to run around her as well. With a movement skill that is not leap-slam it isn't that hard though.

And if there really is no way Vaal Immortal Call and Vaal Summon Skeletons take her down well. I didn't had issues with any of the fights before malachai or even normal mobs. Actually the regular mobs seem a lot weaker than those in the areas before except for those Eye-Spawners with blood explosion things, but you can move out of them easily.

The big issue with piety I had is that she does not telegraph were the beam will start. She just starts in a random direction... if you are there you are dead. The G3 on the other hand were a total joke, the same goes for Kaom, Daresso was a bit harder.

My Char has 36% Fire-Res in Merciless now and I killed Kaom without dying, just Vaal Summon Skeleton + Vaal Haste + Vulnerability + Ele Weakness and he was gone.

So going from Act III to Act IV the difficulty is really odd.

Dominus is easy, Voll is easy, Daresso is mediocre, Kaom is easy, Piety is quite difficult, the G3 are a joke and Malachai is your nightmare.

Counting the deaths in Normal Piety actually ranked above Malachai. And up until Merciless the only deaths the char had were in Normal Piety and Malachai and in Cruel Malachai. The Char I had at the point were I was fighting Normal Malachai could likely just kill everything up to Act 4 Cruel except for Dominus without any further levels or better gear, because how different the difficulty there is.

I just finished Act 4 Merciless as a lvl78 Marauder.

All I want to ask if what is the purpose of everything past Kaom's and Daresso's dreams?

Area layouts are annyoing, mob density is not good enough, minibosses are hard and unrewarding and finally Malachai is waste of 15+ minutes of your time. I had 1 death during the clear, Malachai 2nd phase when it could not avoid the clusterfuck that randomly happened in very rappid succession.
I like most of the mechanics in the fight, the tension and focus that is required to clear it. It just does not make any sense to do it more than once so you can pat yourself on the back and never ever return there. There is no reward for killing him in Merciless, nothing except few NPC dialogues in Highgate.

Overall balance of Act 4 is out of place from Normal to Merciless. There is significant spike in difficulty from Mines onward on every difficulty. The act does not feel rewarding. It needs at least additional skill point as a reward, either entering the Belly or by killing Malachai.

Switching from Act4 late areas to basic lvl68 maps will feel like you just upgraded your gear for a few exalts. That is unless you visit Desert map where such feeling will last until you reach the boss.

All in all, I enjoyed beta parts of Act 4, up until Kaom and Daresso, a lot. Unfortunatelly, later parts of Act4 leave bad taste in my mouth without anything tangible as a reward for the effort required to clear it. It is shame that so much effort went into last parts of Act4 and the final fight and nobody will be doing it past first few weeks, certainly not in Merciless.

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Emphasy wrote:

I just portal out and back in and let my minions kill her in the Grace period.

xDDDDD
that's just epic

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Baron01 wrote:

There is no reward for killing him in Merciless, nothing except few NPC dialogues in Highgate.

Dialla gives you a map. In Highgate.

"

silumit wrote:

"

Emphasy wrote:

I just portal out and back in and let my minions kill her in the Grace period.

xDDDDD
that's just epic

"

Baron01 wrote:

There is no reward for killing him in Merciless, nothing except few NPC dialogues in Highgate.

Dialla gives you a map. In Highgate.

Let me guess.. Another Lv 68 Map? WAOW! Thanks GGG!
Do they even play their own fucking game? You get them dropped by just walking through the game in Merciless.