A4 Piety, overtuned? + the burning man

FUCK this stupid fight

lvl 57 scion built for punishment and really tankish and full of life and high life gen and gen on hit with life leach and over capped on all resists with 20 chaos resist and still gets 1hit by her beam even if i hit my pot b4 it hits me and id say i died like 30 times to 1 hits from that thing she just ate me alive if there was durability id be so broken right now.

everyone says this fight is hard but I just facetank her except for the beam. funny thing is, if you run arctic armor and run through piety's backside when she is spinning she gets chilled and goes soooooo slow you can dps her even while the death beam is up.

easy peasy my friends.

(facetanked everything but the beam even in cruel 2 levels under the zone)

oh yeah and bleed flasks are a must just incase you hit the beam

oh yeah my build is dual wield 1h sword wild strike ranger

- Boss rooms smaller and smaller, making ranged attacks irrelevant
- Bosses that require you to be literally right in front of them to hit them, again making ranged attacks irrelevant
- Bosses hit harder and harder
- Pretty much removal of life/mana leech
- Removal of reduced mana
- Removal of GMP
- Removal of CWDT combo

Pretty clear message from GGG: PLAY AS A TANK MARAUDER. We're not responsible if you get screwed by playing any other class, especially ranged classes.

A4 piety on normal+cruel was extremely hard for myself (scion) and my friend that was playing ranger.

My friend and I are both basically new to PoE, starting fresh about a week ago so we leveled together and geared ourself with rares and farmed drylake+daresso path several times to the point we could smoothly roll through that before progressing to A4 Piety.


Scion: bloodmagic molten strike claw+shield. enduring cry, molten shell, whirling blades.

Ranger: tornado shot, poison arrow, puncture+barrage,etc.

Basic gameplay experience with A4 Piety during our co-op play:
+ranger kept getting oneshotted by the beam, or by one of the sphere objects that would appear on top of him while he was in the middle of using his skills.
When the ranger attempted to respawn and continue the fight, he would sometimes immediately die. Flasks felt useless to him and we felt there was no more reasonably obtainable gear upgrades that would have made him survive better.

+My scion has whirling blades, so I was able to use that to dodge through the beam since it grants a short window of invulnerability when used.
I was mostly able to facetank this fight and run around the beam since I had to be close and melee, but I *still* died a few times and pretty much had to carry the ranger through the fight.


**
Long story short, this fight is a ridiculous spike in difficulty and a bit unfair. My friend would have ragequit over it had I not been able to tank and somewhat carry him through this and the ridiculously cheap malachi fight.
The ranger respawned a bunch of times and dps'd as much as he could before dying, but it felt like a cheezy way to win the last bit of A4 compared to previous boss fights.

We are now on A2 of merciless difficulty, currently level 69 and 66, and I can't imagine why i'd even want to put my ranger friend through the pain of A4 piety on merciless since it was such a negative experience for him.

We both really like this game (we both bought supporter packs as our way of thanking the devs for making this a great game) However, the last bit of the storyline mode (A4+Malachi) seems badly designed with small combat rooms that just outright kill certain character builds.

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melodia1 wrote:

- Boss rooms smaller and smaller, making ranged attacks irrelevant
- Bosses that require you to be literally right in front of them to hit them, again making ranged attacks irrelevant
- Bosses hit harder and harder
- Pretty much removal of life/mana leech
- Removal of reduced mana
- Removal of GMP
- Removal of CWDT combo

Pretty clear message from GGG: PLAY AS A TANK MARAUDER. We're not responsible if you get screwed by playing any other class, especially ranged classes.

QFT...pretty much all the boss fights in Act4 (excluding Voll) do just feel too hectic and hectic is never fun. Either your screen gets clogged with adds (Kaom/Malachi) or the mob goes into full-on berserk mode (Daresso/Piety). I can't enjoy any of these fights and they feel way less epic because of that, because you can't soak in the atmosphere/setting (what little there is of it in Act4 anyway).

This whole act feels poorly designed from top to bottom, from the endless corridors (Dried Lake is basically the only open zone) to the uninspired boss fights. In comparison the build-up to Dominus felt fantastic, ascending that tower with lots of interesting bits and pieces on the different levels. Here I'm crawling through a series of narrow tubes and face the be-all-end-all boss on another tiny plattform. All of this had to be done in a color palette that exclusively consists of variations of red apparently.

But to be honest, this was only able to fall short, Act3 had so much visual variety in it that this act could have never reached that level of appeal, no matter what they would have done. Well, let's hope for Act5 to livin' it up, cause this was a truly depressing experience.

Edit (Strategy): OK, so in order for this not only to be a rant, I'll give some observations after latest patches. She fires the balls mostly in your general direction, so the best strategy for me was to stand away from her during that sequence. That way you avoid to run through some of them when circling her in the next phase.
Once she switches to the beam, she does a quarter of a turn counter-clockwise, so she'll never fire it right in your face if you stand still right before that. This sequence starts, when the top ends of her wings/tentacles start to sear with fire.
By doing this, the only thing to worry about are the adds, destroy the pods as soon as they spawn.

The above strategy should work for all chars, melee will take longer to kill her cause you would only damage her during the beam phase. If you don't mind incoming damge, then you can ofc dps her all time, only remember to still take the spawning pods out. Avoid portaling out, it can lead to all kind of nonsense situations. If you sidestep most balls/beam, then the adds will refill your flasks fast enough.


Still not a fun and epic fight.

Did both Normal and Cruel Piety in the last few days, both times I was under-leveled for the zone. Normal was harder than Cruel for some reason. Cruel felt really easy. I did not get oneshot by her beam, but then again I did not try out how much damage it deals.

Seriously, avoiding her beam is not all that hard. If you make the fight any easier, it will get boring.

BTW, I am not sure, but I think that her beam is damage over time, which would mean that you can reduce the damage it deals by either standing far away or running through it in the opposite of the spinning direction.

For those getting oneshot by her beam: How much life / ES do you have?

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Char1983 wrote:

BTW, I am not sure, but I think that her beam is damage over time, which would mean that you can reduce the damage it deals by either standing far away or running through it in the opposite of the spinning direction.

I tried this with my Lvl82 (all Evasion/not a single point Armour) char on Normal, it seems to hit at short regular intervals rather than being a DoT. I spec'd out of Phase Acrobatics and tried my best to stay in the beam which lead to the bleed stacks going up rather quickly. You still seem to have a maybe 1/2 to 1 second between the hits/stacks. It's still short enough so that one wrong move in Merc may end your struggle, I'd advise against trying to jump the beam with any teleport skill. Your timing would have to be spot on, otherwise you might portal right into it or too late away from it. The circling method gives you more leeway when it comes to reaction times.

Do we know what kind of damage it is? Physical? Fire? Chaos?

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Char1983 wrote:

Do we know what kind of damage it is? Physical? Fire? Chaos?

I think it's physical dmg, well the corrupted blood charge are physical.


and my opinion on that fight is, It's well tunned and not too hard. It's a mechanic fight, pretty much like Vaal Oversoul where you have to dodge specific attacks. Doing so the fight get relativly easy. aka runing in circle isnt so hard.


and for the burning man it's pretty much the same as you have to run away after killing him


On a personnal point, I do enjoy greatly theses mechanics, I think a boss fight should never be an entire face-tanking fight. You should have a couple of things to dodge once in a while, to make it a little bit special.

I do enjoy alos having a little normal mob or a unique monster that give us some specific mechanic that need to be dodged. Like Kole or the Unique Rakanok in Kaom's dream. Or like the Giant Skeletons from the archives, they attack really slower and you can move away from the hit, but when they land it it's a ton of dmg, especially when it's a rare mob.

Not ALL monsters should be like this. But one once in a while it make the fights feel special and interesting.