Act 4 Normal Sucks and Is Way Too Hard

Gotta say, I played the first half of beta and I found it too hard. The only reason I didn't RIP to Mal was thanks to Ziggy's stream. I ended up grinding to 47 to get my HP > 2k. I think it took 6 town portals to get him down (for normal that just seems wrong).

I went back at 50 with cruel gear and A1+A2 bonus skill points - the difficulty was perfect.

A4 should almost be a side zone off of Twilight Strand. Beat Dom and start cruel, and you can work on it at your own pace as gear improves or continue with the other acts.

Either was it was interesting/fun, just a bit overly difficult.

Act 4 after doing the first quests gets way too hard way too quick. It went from a breeze to dying twice per boss or tp'ing all the time.

I think the best way I can describe it is that even though I love PoE and have dedicated weeks of the past year to it, Act 4 Normal is making me think about never playing again. Nerf whatever you want GGG, but at least make it fun and non frustrating. I Real Platinum Godded BoI Rebirth with less of a struggle than this, and that included beating the whole game without taking damage. If I wanted to play frustrating games I would check Steam Greenlight, I think Awakening would have been better off in beta for two more weeks so the difficulty and polish would have been there, instead of forced difficulty and crashing/bug city. PoE is one of the best games I ever played, but if I picked it up for the first time now, I never would have made it to Cruel, let alone Maps. A boss does not have to be frustrating to be challenging. For example Terraria bosses are super hard, but you'll never have to die 40 times to beat one. And even if you can't beat one you can progress in other ways. Just please fix Act 4. Or make it post Act 1 Cruel like someone suggested. UGH

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Johny_Snow wrote:

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.

Doedre? Oh she's great. I love her fight. It's stylish as fuck.
Also: Quicksilvers of Warding pretty much trivialize that fight.

Today is day 2 lot people still playing on. but after a week a month you know,you will see...
when into act4 kinda another game.getting damage a bit hard even from mobs and take long time on bosses fight.

atleast normal act 4 should way to easy

I've been playing on-and-off since the Nemesis hardcore league, and having just cleared a4n, I agree that it really isn't a fair challenge, particularly for newer players (which you'd expect to see what with the big update and all). I'm playing a Tornado Shot Ranger on Tempest, trying to stay as safe as possible being in hardcore and all, but even with this build it's been surprisingly dangerous.

Piety's beam made me alt-f4 the first time she used it; wasn't quite sure what was going on at the time, except that I was missing 75% of my life. That mechanic is actually pretty neat when you're used to it (having mobs crowd the map isn't so great though), but the fact that it was tagging me for over 50% with each pass was a bit startling, to say the least. The Malachai fight was just a really long slugfest involving a lot of portalling out when in danger. The second phase just has so much shit on the ground in such a small area that figuring out where it's safe(-ish) to stand is a nightmare, and DoT and small hits add up when you have shit dps like I did and leech has been nerfed into the ground.

One of the most consistent issues I've been having with the new patch is trying to recover health, even from relatively small hits. A lot of bosses in act 4 lob projectiles and crap that's difficult to dodge consistently and would hit me for ~25% health, which wouldn't be a big deal except that the recovery from (nerfed) leech at my garbage damage levels is basically unnoticeable, making pots pretty much the only option. Combine that with the fact that bosses often have projectiles that can shotgun or other ways to potentially tag me for 75% health, those potion charges tended to go pretty quick to protect against random death. Seeing these damage levels also really has me worried about running evasion going forward, as the number of things that might randomly one-shot me seems to be on the increase. The number of mobs that get crammed into the small boss maps is also kind of crazy, and I dunno what you're supposed to do about it if you don't have strong AoE for whatever reason (maybe it's too early in your build or whatever). It helps that lockstep prevents you from desyncing every two steps trying to navigate around them (lockstep and the item filters are fantastic, btw), but the clutter is pretty insane.

Yeah, I'll admit that I didn't do my research in advance for the most part, and my equips were pretty junky, but I don't think we should be expecting particularly strong equipment--or even strong builds--in normal. This was messy for me with good ranged AoE; I can't imagine what it'd have been like with weak AoE or melee. I don't even know how a new player is supposed to approach something like this (not on hardcore I guess, though I was able to get away with it back in the day). This is giving people who are well-acquainted with the game a lot of trouble; for new players just trying to figure out what they can do... RIP.

Act 4 has a lot of cool ideas, and most of the boss mechanics were more interesting than I was expecting, but I think there are a lot of adjustments that need to be made. Enemy damage needs to be looked at. Map clutter needs to be looked at. Health recovery options probably need to be looked at. This could be some really cool content, but as-is, I think it's unfairly punishing in a lot of ways and seems to force players towards certain builds. Honestly, it's to the point where I think it'd be a good idea to put aside act 4 as optional content and open up cruel/merc after clearing act 3 like it was before until things get ironed out a bit. As part of the regular progression, I can see the large majority of new players dropping off because they simply can't deal with the sudden difficulty spike in act 4, and that'd just be a damn shame =(

I've just concluded that Act 4 is designed to put people off the game so GGG can save money on the number of servers needed..

Act 4 normal is like 30 times too hard generally.. Malachai is just stupid.. and when you get to Cruel 1 2 3.. it's like playing Normal 1 2 3 at level 90.. as if 1 2 3 wasn't "boring" enough already...

Played melee to lvl 80+ several times on hardcore; I think the cone aoe on malachai's tendrils should be reduced. (also either spin rate on piety beam or dmg)

If piety wanders into a corner of the instance you can't beat her without just porting every spin. Trying to get behind malachai is clearly the intention of slam/ tentacles only hitting infront of him but I feel like after I get around the tentacles he is already done with them. Also think he can crit with his slam, can tank hits for 1.8k in norm but died from 2.4k hp.

Lastly new instances of the harvest should allow access to the dark portal if you have killed all 3 minibosses before (and have organs or turned them in to diala).

I played Act 4 once through with a higher level character (on merciless) and didn't think it was tooo bad. Now I've had the "pleasure" in normal.

It's just bad. The game is way too much about cheap and bad mechanics sometimes - a good example being resurrecting *inside* boss rooms, often to eat something that was cast before you died. Dumb.

I just beat Malachai for the first time, it was kinda fun once I got the hang of dodging everything. I was a bit pissed though when I didn't see him coming up underneath me and I got 1-hit though. There's so much shit going on a lot of effects get missed, and that attack did over 1.3k HP.