A4 Piety, overtuned? + the burning man

I didn't get hit by the beam once on my first fight against her. I had seen what to expect beforehand in beta (so I probably would have died ~once to her beam).

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Just stick to her like glue in melee range, even if you're a ranged attacker/caster. You can run circles around her while she's beaming and still have enough time to get some pokes in to keep her ES from going up.

Also, don't be afraid to dive through the orbs if it means avoiding the beam. They hurt, but the beam will hurt more.

Also, movement skills like Leap Slam, Flame Dash, and Lightning Warp let you hop over the beam, which is pretty cool.

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Malachai is a different barrel of laughs, but after 2.0.0d, may not be so scary on Normal any more.

1.4k down to 600 is almost a 1 shot? What? Yes, you will probably get hit by laser but should only happen once. Heal up, kill adds for charges, damage her until laser again. It can't be that hard to run in circles around her.

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vixien wrote:

1.4k down to 600 is almost a 1 shot? What? Yes, you will probably get hit by laser but should only happen once. Heal up, kill adds for charges, damage her until laser again. It can't be that hard to run in circles around her.

It is if she moves to the room wall and stays there, which is what happened to me. Got behind one of those spike thingys on the floor and wouldn't come out. Nowhere to hide.

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ineffablebob wrote:

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vixien wrote:

1.4k down to 600 is almost a 1 shot? What? Yes, you will probably get hit by laser but should only happen once. Heal up, kill adds for charges, damage her until laser again. It can't be that hard to run in circles around her.

It is if she moves to the room wall and stays there, which is what happened to me. Got behind one of those spike thingys on the floor and wouldn't come out. Nowhere to hide.

I'm somewhat convinced this is a bug.
Really hope GGG looks into how much the Piety AI is allowed to move around in that room.

Until they fix it, I wouldn't go in without a movement skill and/or a huge stack of portal scrolls... or just remake the fight/instance, for that matter.

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cesmode wrote:

Piety is a bit over tuned, and Malachai is way overtuned. They definitely need to adjust it a bit.

But after about the 30th death on Piety I found that is that you have about a 5 second window to do any channeling, casting, attacking, and then when she begins to shoot her beam you need to get real close to her and run in circles around her. You'll out run that beam without a problem.

I think if they removed the blood tadpole guys, the fight would be a lot better.

For malachai...I dont know where to start. That fight is just a mess. Its horrible. I love difficult fights, which is why I think for Piety just make a tweak and we'll figure it out. Malachai...theres just too much happening to have a coherent thought about how to adjust it.

They just hotfixed him in normal. But for the moment I'm just going to buy Piety when I come back online instead of ripping another 1500 hp tanky character to her. Probably Malachai as well because in hardcore it is too risky with the fps drops his area has. Much like how Dominus was boosted a lot in both difficulties due to desync and frame rate drop making that fight hard with the oneshot mechanic he had.

But back to Piety it seems she is worse in higher difficulties as well, in merciless her beam is a one shot to some builds. You have very little time to prepare for her doing that beam. What kind of element is the damage of that beam anyway? It is not lightning since I went in on standard with 0% and 75%, not fire either since I did the same for fire (and it doesn't ignite or shock you).

The adds Piety summons also overwhelm you if you don't deal with them quickly enough (they do lightning damage). It is better to just kill the eye spawns since the eyes they summon on the ground deal a large amount of damage, even for white mobs. I don't think there are much viable ways to deal with Piety and Malachai without using cyclone or having an abnormal amount of damage.

I'm also aware that sometimes Piety hoggs on a wall and you can't avoid the laser spin at all (forcing you to portal out, alt f4 or die).

I loved the burning man! When he exploded it was hilarious!

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Metalsonicx wrote:

What kind of element is the damage of that beam anyway?

Last I heard it's Lightning/Physical.
The bleed stacks are also really fucking huge.

I guess that means IC can be pretty damn handy in the Piety fight as well.

Just hit Cruel Act 4 Piety on Tempest, and I think I'm gonna have to take a break for a while. At 3k health with an evasion build, the beam tags me for about 70%, at which point I get scared that any of the other random crap on the map will end up finishing me off. This wouldn't be so bad if the beam didn't have instantaneous start-up and was actually consistently avoidable, but oftentimes it'll start firing pretty much right at you without warning. Don't want to risk trying to preemptively start running around Piety either for fear that the beam will start on me and I'll end up running with it.

There's also a bug where sometimes when you zone in and she's firing the beam (I assume), you can't see the animation for either the beam or her character (she doesn't spin around or anything). This random video shows it happening.

EDIT: Just testing in normal, it looks like circling clockwise before the beam starts will make Piety always aim behind you, as long as she has you targetted. Will try again without a golem summoned, but not during an ice patches/random speed buff tempest. I don't know if speed buff affects Piety, and I don't want to find out.

EDIT2: Okay that worked; only almost died about three or four times. Things were going great until so many minions had spawned that even after popping a quicksilver I couldn't circle with the beam because the minions were filling the middle, effectively increasing the circumference of the circle I had to run around. Ended up having to use blink arrow to try and keep up, but its cooldown wasn't doing me any favours. So yeah, uh, git gud. Also don't lag. Also over-grind. Also use only Act 4 approved builds. Also completely steamroll the next three acts in the next difficulty once you're done.

Idk why they have am obsession with boss fights in tiny arenas with gigantic aoes you need to avoid. I used to love Piety in Lunaris/Shrine but now the room is tiny. It doesn't make the fight much more difficult though because the encounter doesn't consist of dodging ohko aoe etc. and trying to find the 5% of the room that is safe for .4 sec.

The room is also black with contrasting colors, unlike Atziri or A4 Piety/Malachi where everything from the room to the attacks you need to dodge are all red on red on red and Aoe are spammed like its some kind of innovative boss design.

A3 Piety/Dominus are great fights. Kaom and Darresso are okay, though I vastly prefer Daresso.

The 3 in the Harvest are all good too, though I barely know what exactly Maligaro was doing aside from emptying my flasks. Shav and Deodre were great.

Phase one of Malachi was great too, and the final phase was entirely doable but a little hectic. Which is totally fine.

A4 Piety is just bad design. You run in a circle, hit a few times, repeat. If the beam hits you it does a lot of damage but it didn't exactly instantly kill me. It just wasn't any fun.

Atziri for me is a boss I'll probably never kill, because practicing is not a real option without devoting a lot of time collecting map pieces and even then getting there isn't exactly quick and easy every time.

It probably should be, if I were to have any chance at Atziri. I've seen people with worse builds and worse gear do it many times, but I simply cannot dodge all the aoes because I suck. I have trouble even seeing safe spots to warp or run to because its all red, and the red skills obscure the red floor. Also my build could be better tailored to that run, but then I would be playing a build only good at that and not the one I want to play.

Digression aside, I prefer slightly larger boss arenas. You wouldn't put Shock and Awe in A4 Piety's room, have it spam its laser constantly and expect people to put up with that would you?

just pop a quicksilver and run circles close arround piety to avoid the beam

have fun