Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

@scabre: I can feel your pain. IT is actually bad for the game that some ideas/builds are just not feasible. Or they are feasible except for a select few encounters. Which makes them useless in HC anyway.

Better to roll in Warbands where you can take a few deaths and still continue with the game and play something you like.

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Reinhart wrote:

@scabre: I can feel your pain. IT is actually bad for the game that some ideas/builds are just not feasible. Or they are feasible except for a select few encounters. Which makes them useless in HC anyway.

Better to roll in Warbands where you can take a few deaths and still continue with the game and play something you like.

You know, I was thinking on switching to Warbands, but SC doesn't quite cut it for me =/

Damn I still remember that rip and it feels so stupid... I'll just wait to cool it off, most likely I'll be back for the next league.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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scabre89 wrote:

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Kreaper_669 wrote:

i really hope ggg will not listen to whiners in here. im going fully self found, hardly caping my resistances and struggling with damage output and yet the only encounter i sometimes have trouble with its maligaro since my current char is dual wielding/evasion acro/frost blades and he really likes to cast that desecrate under you. besides that evan mala is ok on normal and cruel. the only thing that hurts are slugs he throws.

mark my words: after one month people will be farming harvest merci in softcore and hardcore with flametotems without any further nerfs

Fix'd

Fix approved lol

As a newbie to this genre and to this game (poe first arpg ever) i do agree that act 4 is too much, I did not use any guides didn´t gather any info about the game so i jumped in blind and act 1 and 2 piece of cake, act 3 was a bit harder but even that i managed to do without a single death and now there´s act 4...i don´t even know what to say....3 days of trying to kill those fuxin bosses hundreds of deaths and hours of frustrations and rage and i consider myself a calm person. I don´t know what the developers were trying to do, but what they achieved in my eyes is that i will propably try some other characters till dominus kill and once i´m done i´ll just create like 100th char in borderlands 2 and just give up on this game, because i´m more of a casual player and i just want to have fun and this is not fun at all.

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Maslostroj wrote:

As a newbie to this genre and to this game (poe first arpg ever) i do agree that act 4 is too much, I did not use any guides didn´t gather any info about the game so i jumped in blind and act 1 and 2 piece of cake, act 3 was a bit harder but even that i managed to do without a single death and now there´s act 4...i don´t even know what to say....3 days of trying to kill those fuxin bosses hundreds of deaths and hours of frustrations and rage and i consider myself a calm person. I don´t know what the developers were trying to do, but what they achieved in my eyes is that i will propably try some other characters till dominus kill and once i´m done i´ll just create like 100th char in borderlands 2 and just give up on this game, because i´m more of a casual player and i just want to have fun and this is not fun at all.

Thanks for taking the time to post... you represent a huge number of players who wouldn't bother to take the time.

I simply can't see the reason not to make Normal difficulty play "normally difficult" instead of punishing. It's simple... you're losing p(l)ayers.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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Maslostroj wrote:

As a newbie to this genre and to this game (poe first arpg ever) i do agree that act 4 is too much, I did not use any guides didn´t gather any info about the game so i jumped in blind and act 1 and 2 piece of cake, act 3 was a bit harder but even that i managed to do without a single death and now there´s act 4...i don´t even know what to say....3 days of trying to kill those fuxin bosses hundreds of deaths and hours of frustrations and rage and i consider myself a calm person. I don´t know what the developers were trying to do, but what they achieved in my eyes is that i will propably try some other characters till dominus kill and once i´m done i´ll just create like 100th char in borderlands 2 and just give up on this game, because i´m more of a casual player and i just want to have fun and this is not fun at all.

Thanks for taking the time to post... you represent a huge number of players who wouldn't bother to take the time.

I simply can't see the reason not to make Normal difficulty play "normally difficult" instead of punishing. It's simple... you're losing p(l)ayers.

In addition, these players MIGHT actually start to bother to take the time if the difficulty ramps up in a more sane way. I'd love for PoE to be able to draw people in who aren't necessarily already predisposed towards taking a lot of punishment from a game and sticking with it anyway. That group is pretty small, but folks will start increasing their own threshold for difficulty if they already feel invested/feel an initial sense of accomplishment.

The game, with all its technical flaws, is designed so you'll eventually die somewhere. I don't get what's the purpose of playing in a HC league at all in this game. In Diablo you play HC because at least it's dependent on your skill/luck, you die because you did something wrong. In this game? Lol good luck surviving with all the stupid ping spikes, freezing and absence of any balance whatsoever. Summon a minion? Freeze for 1 sec. Open a strongbox? Freeze for 3 sec. Fighting a boss? FPS cut in half. Earlier my character just died in merciless arena because one of the bosses summoned about 20 skeletons right on top of my character, and my game froze for 4 seconds straight. If this was HC, then I have to start over because of the incompetency of programmers to optimize loading? Lol yeah right. I have a high-range spec laptop and can play Skyrim on max settings, yet a 2.5D game like PoE lags me to no end. My friend has a top-tier desktop computer with first tier GPU and CPU, and she suffers random freezes too.

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melodia1 wrote:

The game, with all its technical flaws, is designed so you'll eventually die somewhere. I don't get what's the purpose of playing in a HC league at all in this game. In Diablo you play HC because at least it's dependent on your skill/luck, you die because you did something wrong. In this game? Lol good luck surviving with all the stupid ping spikes, freezing and absence of any balance whatsoever. Summon a minion? Freeze for 1 sec. Open a strongbox? Freeze for 3 sec. Fighting a boss? FPS cut in half. Earlier my character just died in merciless arena because one of the bosses summoned about 20 skeletons right on top of my character, and my game froze for 4 seconds straight. If this was HC, then I have to start over because of the incompetency of programmers to optimize loading? Lol yeah right. I have a high-range spec laptop and can play Skyrim on max settings, yet a 2.5D game like PoE lags me to no end. My friend has a top-tier desktop computer with first tier GPU and CPU, and she suffers random freezes too.

white-knight fanboys with "lol git gud computah u scrub" incoming in 3...2...1...

My 'solution' to overcoming A4 is not to try... I just play my old already levelled characters from 1.3, get the 3 skill points, and don't create new characters... Before 1.3 I created new characters often to try out new builds.

Not only is A4 way too unbalanced compared to the rest of the act content, but I also find it incredibly boring, at least the last half.
The unbalanced part can be overcome by death-zerg'ing, but the boredom can't be overcome, and the death zerg'ing just enhance it :-/

Dried Lake, Mines and Crystal Vein are great...
Kaom's path is decent (though much too red)...
The arenas in Daresso's are very impressive the first times you try them, but then become boring given the same'ness (why always wolves?), and the intervening corridors are just statues, statues, statues... *yawn*
The Harvest is where it just goes to *beep*... Not only is there not much content apart from the bosses, but the boss-fights are all basically the same... On top of Kaon/Daresso, it is another six cage-fights in a row without any meaningful difference. Sure, they use a few different mechanics, but the areas are by and large identical (small round arena with no obstacles).

To be honest, it looks to me like they planned A4 to be much larger (it doesn't have anywhere near the content of the other 3 acts), created the bosses, but ran out of resources after they created the Daresso arenas, put in existing statues for the Daresso corridors. Did a quick job of Harvest, and forgot about the intervening stages between the bosses. The bosses were given generic round areas.

What I would do was:
* Make is so you could advance to the Harvest through two paths, either Daresso or Kaom.
* Remove the three sub-bosses and save them for the next act (whenever that is).
* Reduce Malachai to one encounter.
* Nerf Daresso and perhaps Piety a bit.
This would give the act three prime boss fights (four if you count Voll) which is about on par with the rest, or actually still way above the rest considering this is a very short act...

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melodia1 wrote:

The game, with all its technical flaws, is designed so you'll eventually die somewhere. I don't get what's the purpose of playing in a HC league at all in this game. In Diablo you play HC because at least it's dependent on your skill/luck, you die because you did something wrong. In this game? Lol good luck surviving with all the stupid ping spikes, freezing and absence of any balance whatsoever. Summon a minion? Freeze for 1 sec. Open a strongbox? Freeze for 3 sec. Fighting a boss? FPS cut in half. Earlier my character just died in merciless arena because one of the bosses summoned about 20 skeletons right on top of my character, and my game froze for 4 seconds straight. If this was HC, then I have to start over because of the incompetency of programmers to optimize loading? Lol yeah right. I have a high-range spec laptop and can play Skyrim on max settings, yet a 2.5D game like PoE lags me to no end. My friend has a top-tier desktop computer with first tier GPU and CPU, and she suffers random freezes too.

I have pretty much high tier pc too, r290x and i5 4670k game is placed on 450/450 ssd, yet when im fighting Malachai my fps on MINIMUM settings drop from 200 to 30-25, how can you even try to dodge at those circumstances? Also Malachai arena is too small, and there is going too much on it, if it'd be about 25% bigger it'd be still challenging but less frustrating to play.

Just curious, do most people having a super hard time on Piety/ Malachai have like -30% chaos resist and little armor? Going through as a templar on normal and cruel I've died two or three times, I imagine casters and rangers should have a harder time. My phys is 51% and chaos resist 25%, but only have 2300 HP.

I don't mind the Malachai fight as much, but the Piety fight before it is really putting me off wanting to make a caster or ranged character in the future.

(Not trying to defend the design of this btw)