Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

I have even been following a build guide, and I'm not going to bother trying to play Act 4 anymore. I got to the two portals at the end of the mines, I've got my resistances up, and my equipment is actually more ahead of the curve than it has been for most of the game, and it's not even worth trying.

The incoming DPS is insane from normal mobs, and I can't even get past the occasional rare mobs to see the bosses.

Of course, I just might not be hardcore enough to play through on Normal... but seriously, with a build guide, I expected to handle Normal.

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brainsare wrote:

I imagine casters and rangers should have a harder time.

That's the main problem imo. We need more viable evasion and mana based defense systems. I'm now playing a caster Templar but I'm stacking armor (4k hp, 46% armor at lv 70-something). Even farming Dried Lake sometimes you get hit by fairly high amounts of damage, and I wonder how does someone with evasion or MoM gets through this.

Specially when some boss rooms are so annoyingly small. AKA Kaom's and Malachai (specially phase 2).

Regarding the difficulty... well I'd say Normal and Cruel are fairly easy. Merciless Act 4 is when things get criminally insane. Haven't tried maps though, I'll be farming Lake at least to 80.

People still have problems with a4 normal? After tons of nerf its peace of cake. If you die a lot then its your fault not the game.

Yeh, I think normal is appropriately 'normal' now. Cruel ramps it up if you're not reasonably well geared, but by then you should be really.
For me the game's main problems at the moment are the physical damage spikes (evasion builds especially in hc affected, less build variety etc), bit low map drops (all the nerfs add up and you can really feel them - its understandable to struggle to get the very best maps but anything more than that is imo poor game design) and the change in unique rarity means that the cool items that weren't op but made the game feel great when they dropped have simply disappeared. Reducing their drop rate made sense, but going from one extreme to the other, overkill. A build that only has rares is kinda unfun imo.

Having said that all of these things could be very easily fixed, and I have faith they will (but USE A SCALPEL, NOT A HAMMER!)

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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 really don't get posts like these. And I'm saying this in the most humble way, I don't intend to start an argument or whatever.

I run the game with an almost prehistoric rig:

Athlon 64 x2 5200, 4gb, 160gb HD, and an XFX HD5770.
I don't have gamebreaking freezes, my fps don't go down by half on boss fights (and I usually play on 60-50). The only time I get a split second freeze is when I open a rare sbox with lots of mods and a Rogue Exile, so you identify rares, and either you pop flasks before opening it or you skip it. That's it.
I've owned Cruel Malachai with two toons on Tempests, one of them is still alive and farming Merc Lake up until it hits 80 and gets some solid gear.

As I stated before this is not the reason why most people rip. It's because if you don't go armor you're dead. As simple as that. And sometimes you can go 50% armor and still get hit extremely hard. This is what GGG needs to balance. You build eva (or Mom), you're dead, cos' as soon as RNG stops working on your favor and a monster manages to land a hit or two on Merc, you're gone.

That and absurdly small boss arenas. I'm looking at you phase 2 Mala >.<

*edit* deleted my hogwash post, bad character design makes for a bad time.

Originally I tried act 4 as claws life leach stuffs but was using a crappy self made build when I really don't know all the mechanics yet. Died over 30 times trying to get to Kaom.

2nd and 3rd character through act4 was a breeze, Ele tornado shot shadow and stun heavy ground slam marauder. The marauder cleared to Kaom and killed with no deaths, compared to my first attempts yikes!!!

Act 4 Cruel and Merci start 2 suck from "harvesting" point forward - sometimes just wondering - why did they put there shouting Malachai wit all that bullshit going around or Piety with her lololol "laser" + mortars xd, not animated B52 bomber with nuclear bomb and big sentence: DIE,DIE,DIE or Darth Vader with his Deathstar:D Where's the damn difference? It is stupid chaos anyway, no point to come back to them after killing them in Cruel. Prolly no point to kill them at all in Merci. What for?

Not big deal after all, who cares :D

I find these posts funny.
I came back to the game after a year+ break. Started again with Flashback now.
Went blind through all the new 2.0 post content with a randomly self-build character and self-found sub-par gear. First death was an invasion boss in merciless that oneshotted me.
Mind you I played melee. This game is 99% melee anyway... I dont consider shooting arrows onto targets 5 meters away as ranged.

Anyway, guys, those league-mods are WAY harder than any of the games act-bosses.
You need to stop jumping into any fight thats ahead and mindlessly hold down your attack-skill.

Piety, Dominus, Daresso, Kaom, Piety with fire-lazor and even those bosses in belly of the beast including the final boss of the Game can all be done with taking minimal to no damage just by avoiding it actively.

The first thing I did when facing these new bosses I had no clue about because I did not look up what they do was walking in cricles.

Just walk in circles around the boss for a while and observe all its skills and patterns. Once you can read his animations and feel comfortable only THEN you engage in close range.
Hit him for that second where he doesnt perfom any action and go kiting again.


Patience is key here. With this its relatively simple to the point where I say. Please buff all content, its to easy...

The most difficult is probably Daresso as his 'reave-type' attack is very instant and hardly predictable. Slap on a movement gem and avoid it with only taking damage of one wave and its suddenly perfectly fine.

Kaom was a joke, just like the final boss. There are many blind spots in the final fight where you can stand and take no damage from surrounding events. (Fireballs, traps etc)

OBERSRVE, that is all.

Edit: I don't mean to brag with this in any way. I am just honestly puzzled by our current generation and its 'feed me' mentality. Must everything be a cake-walk these days?

"I am just honestly puzzled by our current generation and its 'feed me' mentality. Must everything be a cake-walk these days?"


What are you talking about? Well THAT"S puzzling :D We just tried to say some of act 4 stuff is not entertaining for some of us. Get over it same, as we do XD

People play differently, with different restrictions on themselves... so trying to reconcile one person's feedback with your experiences is kind of pointless.

Act IV is too hard. Or it's too easy. Key thing is... people aren't really enjoying it.