Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

A4 is most certainly over the top in terms of difficulty.

I'm using a tank build packed with armor, max res, 1700 HP, 5% life regen who's like 6 levels above the areas of A4 and some of the bosses are just absurdly overpowered. I was facetanking normal mobs like nothing but some of these bosses can drop my health down to 10% left in a hit.

How the hell does a non-tank cope with some of this crap?

Piety was making me run around like a headless chicken spending more time recovering health than fighting back. Most of the crap is practically IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. I loathed the A3 Piety, but at least that area was large and you could take cover from her.

Maligaro just floods the area with crap that's too hard to avoid and his desecrate was draining my health away like nothing. Popped a potion, life regen, health still just drops faster than I can say wtf. This is the issue for melee, you try attacking him and you'll quickly be flooded by this and are forced to move and lure him away while he keeps spamming the crap.

Doedre deals quite an absurd amount of damage to a tank, but is at least avoidable.

Shavronne was the easy one, just need lightning resist.

Kaom gets a little too carried away once the raging skulls swarm you. Is this Path of AoE damage?

Seriously, at level 39, I slaughtered Dominus and his goons like helpless children on normal, and at level 43 I am resorted doing the endgame play style of kiting over and over due to overwhelming damage. How bad are will Cruel/Merciless be if normal is this big of a difficulty spike?

Malachai is just... you get hit, A LOT. If you're melee, you have to be in 1 place to attack the hearts, then are immediately drowned in AoEs. The arena is waaay too small for such an AoE infested battle. You can't even attack Piety without being bombarded. You got her, AND HIM blasting you away.
And he attacks too frequently. If you're not a tank, you run, and run, and run, because he will not stop spamming attacks on you.

Dominus is not like Malachai, he has a lot of openings where he doesn't attack. YOU NEED OPENINGS TO ATTACK!

I think they should make it easier in Normal and a bit easier in Cruel. Keep Merciless the way it is. It's not that I dislike difficulty personally, but I feel that new players will get frustrated and quit in Act IV normal. Leave the challenge for veteran players in the higher difficulties, IMO.

Also having way too much trouble on A4 for a decked out 50k dps character that walked through temple dominus before.

Died at least 25 times on malachai, and 15 ish on daresso, everything else was generally tolerable, but it really feels like melee evasion characters simply cant survive any of these bosses reliably solo.

Can facetank merc dominus, no problem. I understand we are supposed to avoid these attacks, but how do melee people do that when the arena is full of aoes?

Yup again this post has my vote =p Act IV normal. It was pretty slow going but alright appart from the later bosses, namely Malakai.

I have been playing since the game came out of beta, took break before ActIV release and avoided videos on bosses so did not know what to expect. I played as ranged shadow using Kinetic Blast and evasion.

I died on all the bosses. Dareso like 5 times, the others 2 or 3 times and of course Malakai. I died on him 20+ times.

It was ridiculious. I was just running in, trying to do some damage and then dieing 15 seconds later. Even after the fighter was over I did not feel like I had won anything. I did not get a cinematic or reward either just a stand portal. Maybe cinematic turned off in options, I will have to check. But still not quest reward or NPC.

It is only normal FFS, what kind of gear does GGG expect me to have. It is just normal items that dropped for me as I leveled. My tree is an unfinished mess. 1k dps, 1k life was enough to get me throug the rest of the game with 2 deaths total and then in Act IV I die 30+ times.

It is not hard, it is punishing. A sudden spike is difficulty, going into fights with no tactics and taking a 1 shot Piety beam of death to the face. Not cool. Save that shit for Cruel and tone down Normal.

This will outright put new players off. Tone down normal, give players the oportunity to learn the game and tactics for bosses. It is like it was not beta tested or they intended it this way. Jeeze.

Animations are killing me! No seriously, have you seen that boss with the temporal chains field effect? I tried to shoot one time and run in circles, it doesn't work. You need to carefully position yourself into the zone without temporal chains, then shoot.

Now, it wouldn't be that bad if it shoots only one ball. But it can shoot three. And sometimes these three fall in the same spot in quick succession basically oneshotting me. The hell? It is just so random, there are not even patterns you can get used to.

Not going to talk about the final boss, after about 10 deaths on normal and cruel I am finally happy that I made it to merciless and will not have to face him again for weeks, perhaps months.

The lowest point is just how little room you have to maneuver. Compare to the dominus first form fight. Sure, sometimes you get sandwiched but it was a fair challenge, where you can avoid most of the damage even better now without desync. But that was a big arena. During the last boss I felt like I am trying to do gymnastics in an elevator. You are not supposed to do it there.

I gotta throw my hat in on this one as well. First let me say that I love challenges, and I love tactical fights. I have been playing MMOs since 1999 and have done just about every form of ultra-hard content in existence, including Kerafyrm (Sleeper) in EverQuest for those that happen to know who that is. All that being said... fuck Act 4 right in its stupid face.

I am playing an Incinerate Witch and I have 1400 HP and 300 ES at level 39 going into Act 4 Piety with just under 1k DPS on both Flame Totem and Incinerate (all self found). In no way optimal, but facerolling everything up until Act 4 Piety. She absolutely crushed me over and over again. One of the biggest problems with that fight is that the checkpoint for resurrection is INSIDE the fucking fight. So if you die, you have to use the grace period to TP out, zone into Mines, rebuff, then zone back into Highgate and take your TP straight back into the fight. Now granted, this can be remedied by using a TP outside the room and choosing to resurrect in town, but not knowing this before hand (as would be the case for any new players) you are totally boned after your first death. You either try to fight her without buffs or you have to go through a horrid process to either rebuff in another zone, or retrace your path back to her arena so you can TP outside of her lair. If NOTHING else is changed about this fight, PLEASE CHANGE THIS! You should be resurrected outside her lair just like you are in EVERY OTHER BOSS FIGHT... EVER!

Now onto the problem with the fight itself. If you have a skill that requires you to plant your feet to deal damage, kiss your ass goodbye. As an Incinerator I couldn't do jack shit against Piety because no sooner than I started casting there were blobs of whatever, eye creatures, something random exploding that I never identified and then there is her KAMEHAMEHA that she does every ten fucking seconds that hits like a MACK truck and throws massive bleeds on you. Are you shitting me? It took 8 Deaths and completely abandoning my primary attack in favor of using Flame Totem and just hoping it could eat through her shield fast enough to do a sliver of damage before I was WTFREKT again. This is absurd, and I didn't even find the overtuned Trio in beta to be all that bad. They were infinitely more fair than this crap.

I didn't find much issue with the Organ Donors, but I can see how they would be challenging for newer players.

Then there is Malachai... I can't even. 32 minutes of sheer frustration that only escalates as the fight endures because more and more mechanics are compounded on top of each other in a room roughly the size of a walnut. Explosive runes, zombies, grasping hands, tentacle attacks, touch-of-god attacks, whirling circles of death, and I don't even know what I am missing but I am certain that isn't all of it. Couple all of these complaints on top of absurd amounts of HP, horrid frame rates, and practically no windows for dealing damage. I realize now I should have specced for Dual Flame Totems for leveling and not bothering with anything else until Merciless when I would respec and never look at Act 4 again until I am level 90+... and even then, why bother?

I have not rage-quit a game since I was teen. Congrats GGG, you broke me.

I completly agree with the OP. As a player from closed beta with thousands of hours in the game the act 4 bosses are way overtuned for normal.

My flameblast witch with capped fire/lightning res and 1.2k hp got 1 shot by normal piety.

These new bosses are way overtuned as others in this thread have stated and will put new players of the game. Sure the bosses should be hard in cruel and very hard in merc, but normal should be and always has been a point click and stuff dies mode. My experiance is the same as others here face rolling up to the act 4 bosses and then 1 shot !

This is not balance the spike in damage is way to much.

I feel like Act 4 Normal is pretty damn hard... and I did with Flame Totem + Firestorm Templar.

Daresso:

This guy... this guy is everywhere and you have no idea what happens when you fight him. He teleports to you, he uses ring of frozen statues. It kinda feels frustrating, but with pots and some hp it's still quite manageable, even tho I died once.

Kaom:

After fighting Daresso (yeah I fought daresso first), I thought I will be completely screwed, but Kaom was actually much, much easier than Daresso, at least he wasn't everywhere at one moment.

Piety:

Yeah... she is quite ridiculous especially when it comes to her beam, I'm not really sure how are you supposed to avoid that fast of a turn as a mage, even with a flame dash I was only able to get hit by first part, lose half hp, activate pot and run away from second part of beam. still somehow managed to kill her before she killed me. As a melee I'm pretty sure it would be much worse

Doedre:

She doesn't give much time to react and her blobs deal quite a damage for the speed she cast it, it might be really hard to get into it as a melee.


Malachai:

While first part seems kind of okay, even with all shit happening... Piety going crazy and stuff, the second part is just a massacre. AoE is everywhere, random heart popping up while being literally swarmed by Doedre's like balls, Malachai's tentacles, runes and stuff. Damn that's hard even compared to Daresso being everywhere.

For those of you struggling with Piety as a melee, Cyclone basically dumps her for free.

I do not mind hard content as i think it will be more challenging end game wich is what i like.

But making Malachai that hard on normal ruined the whole experience of act4 for me. On normal it does not add anything interesting to the game at all and when i play a new act i play the first time for the story line.

I finished normal with a salty after taste tbh and really disappointing. Make him shit hard on merciless but on normal was not needed.