Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

Everything's easy, had about 1,7k life in normal, until you face the bosses. They have insane amounts of life, do a lot of damage and they keep kiting you.
I feel that the bosses will be so much easier once I switch to ranged (running ice crash atm). Melee seems to be in a bad position, at least when it comes to the act 4 bosses.

Piety isn't so bad. But a4's mobs are dense as shit and the mines are narrow. Which is fine, since practically, there's no other way to pad out that content.

But then Malachai is just mechanically harder than Atziri on top of being the Destroyer of Framerates.

I ripped my first Tempest toons to one of those closed pit arenas too. Panic-logged with bad positioning tried to go back in and blink arrow to the sides, but just got simultaneously clocked. The mob density can be brutal if your AOE isn't very solid by then.

Yeah. Hell. I did want GGG to make the game a bit more challenging, but they may have gone too far. It would have been very challenging to face the new tougher content if all skills and supports had been left relatively unchanged. instaed, my character has had th shit nerfed out of it. believe this - i took my lvl 77 flameblaster to run act4 normal and killing Malachai took 5 minutes and I nearly died - in NORMAL !!! WTF?
prior to the expansion I was running lvl 70 & 71 maps with ease - I just died twice today in a lvl 68 map - WTF?
combining much tougher content with a severely nerfed character is just plain punishing - it's no fun at all. I fear that only a few masochists and the 5% elite will enjoy the game in its' current state.
I've decided to leave all my current characters alone until GGG fixes this imbalance.
I'll start a new character and maybe actually have a little fun.
thanks for the hard work GGG, but it seems you're out to punish your loyal players.
GGG - put the difficulty level back to where it was, un-nerf the characters, and make only merc act 4 impossibly hard so the 5% can have the punishing challenge they crave. everybody else wants to have some fun with this game.

I don't mind the mechanics of the Malachai fight that much. My character was fairly squishy and I get rather frequent lag spikes, so some deaths are inevitable, but otherwise it wouldn't have been too bad to dodge most things in that fight... if I weren't fighting at around 20 fps or less the entire time. That just made everything far worse. There's nothing GGG can do about my internet, but toning down the fight's graphics intensity should be possible and help a lot.

I also think the fight could be a bit slower in normal, if it isn't already. Characters in normal are probably less mobile and have slower attack/cast speeds, so they'd have to stay in place longer to deal damage. I think it would be reasonable to slow down the tempo of mechanical fights to match. But the fps drops in the battle are a far bigger problem for me.

It sort of matters if you're a hardcore player and you put a lot of energy thinking about how you solve the problem of not dying. You start to think of builds as more of an engineering solution to a problem. It's an appliance that does what you want it to do within forgiving tolerances and sometimes limited resources.

And if you're not a player who thrives in bullet hell games, well you're right properly fucked. By the way, you can't even see the bullet hell because your computer is skipping frames. So have fun with that one.

"

Idioticus wrote:

Melee seems to be in a bad position, at least when it comes to the act 4 bosses.

Melee ALWAYS is (has been) in a bad position! My first char is melee and Dominus was tough. My second a summnoner witch and I was wondering what I had done wrong with my first char. Now I'm running a bow Scion and I can't stop laughing because it's so easy!

To just echo what everyone is saying, Act 4 normal is way too fcking hard. Like I'm a fairly new player playing tornado shot ranger and my god it is frustrating. There is no reason Piety should one shot me everytime I res. Absolutely none. Kaom's area is just a gigantic mess. I'm almost afraid to progress to Malachai if it's as bad as people are saying. Being new and playing through this content, honestly it is just not fun at all for me, it feels like a chore to get through. I played some in torment and that was fun, but this, just no.

I haven't got that far in release yet, but in Beta I soloed it. Zero deaths through Dominus then 31 in the second half of act 4. Definitely could be tough for new players. Ran through ita second time though with another player and only died twice I think. It is way easier when the bosses have more than one target. Just sayin'.

"

mark1030 wrote:

I haven't got that far in release yet, but in Beta I soloed it. Zero deaths through Dominus then 31 in the second half of act 4. Definitely could be tough for new players. Ran through ita second time though with another player and only died twice I think. It is way easier when the bosses have more than one target. Just sayin'.

Uhhhhhhhh.

I agree. Not sure if i will keep playing with this difficulty. In particular the bosses (Piety and Malachi) deal to much damage, at least on normal.

Got literally 1 shot with lvl 45, 900 hp and 1100 es, 75/75/75 - by Malachi, hardly made it through Piety in Act 4.

Or maybe i should stick to standard mode.