A4 Piety, overtuned? + the burning man

I actually have to admit that I do like the Piety and Malachai fights in A4 as well, after I have figured them out. I can see though that specifically Malachai can be pretty mean since that fight deals a lot of damage that you cannot avoid with clever play style.

I probably would enjoy the Atziri fight as well, if I was able to do her ;).

The other bosses in A4 are not that great. Kaom is okay but desyncs very easily, Daresso is just weird and the three bosses just before the Malachai fight are just not very well-designed fights.

As for the Piety fight on Normal and Cruel, please don't nerf it. Challenge is good.

BTW I read on the wiki that it is supposedly fire damage she deals. For the ones that get 1shot: What is your fire resist?

For a boss fight like this I alway try to max all my resists there is nothing bellow 60%. I mostly play hardcore so I alway get myself prepared.

She never one shoted me even when I beated her at cruel, but didnt tried at merciless yet. She hit hard, but it's in the category "you can see it coming and have to dodge it". And I really love the fight I think it's perfect for what it is, Act 4 HAD to be harder than Act 3 in many ways.


The only thing I don't like about the game right now is the difficulty curve after act 4 normal... Act 4 is what it needed to be, better challenges and bosses fights than act 3. But once you finished act 4 and go to act 1 cruel, it's such a let down and you'll have no challenges for a very long time.

I think something should be done for act 1-2 in later difficulties

I think it is way too hard and kills the fun for casual players. I didnt play for a while and started a new char in the Temp League. Played through the acts without much problems and had quite some fun leveling and gearing up, as it should be imo in Normal/Cruel. But Piety(Normal) a4 is just crazy. I even looked up the fight before I went in, but I was nearly killed(1,7k HP) because I didnt have enough movementspeed. I mean, Iam already lvl44(Marauder) with at least okish gear for a complete new started char. Now I have to waste my time to grind even more in a4, until Iam strong enough to finsih a4 in normal. Idk, I wouldnt mind if this fight would be realy hard in Merc, but in Normal or Cruel it should be doable without spending hours of farming.

Even with no movement speed modifiers it is possible to circle her and avoid the beam. Also, what is your fire resist? And unless you are playing hardcore, dying, well, happens.

I was close to max all res, something like 75 fire, 70 cold, and sligthly under 70 light, but isnt the beam 100% phys anyway? At least thats what I saw in some videos on youtube. And yeah you are probably right, it is doable, but you dont realy have the chance to explore her mechanics, because one misstake can result in your char beeing dead. Sure that not a big deal for softcore players, but there are actually hc only players. :)

As I said before, I think its just to much for normal/cruel. Maybe Iam just to bad in this game, but i just wanted to give here my feedback, that players like me dont enjoy the level of difficulty, because it feels like you are playing in merc with crap gear.

She is pretty tame now. After the nerfs, she spawns way less crap on the screen and her beam has a gigantic wind up before starting now. It still hits hard but you really shouldn't get hit by it, even as melee.

Having made it through the end of merciless now on a character that WASN'T receiving an experience penalty in those zones, I will say that there's a HUGE difference to Merciless Piety and later versus how they are on lower difficulties.

Overall, on Normal, Piety is actually a relatively easy fight, that makes it pretty clear how to fight her. On Cruel, she's about the same. In both cases she can be a pretty fun-and-frantic fight. (though her beam does kinda low damage)

On Merciless... There's some tuning issues that could be addressed to help balance her out:

• Overall, her spawn rate for adds winds up being vastly, VASTLY higher; this can be pretty problematic for those without a move that can easily pass through them. (a quartz flask is NOT enough to carry you through a whole boss fight) Keeping pace on clearing them isn't quite feasible unless you're over-leveled and geared. Focusing on the spawners seems to help more than other methods, but she still seems to just rapidly resurrect the spawners.
• For some reason, she is allowed to move a LOT; she can do this while alive, but if you leave or die... She will usually run right over to the wall/corner, making avoiding her beam impossible (as half the area you're supposed to run through is solid wall)
• Like many other bosses, she suffers from a massive "too much on the screen" issue. Between all the adds and her AoE attacks, it can be hard to make out where to move and where to avoid.
• Lastly, the health bars for the latter half of Act 4 merciless are just WAY to long; Act 4 already has an issue with that, (most mobs have around 50-60% more HP than comparable non-A4 mobs in the same level) but Piety makes it extremely problematic. This goes for her adds, (which a lot of builds will NOT one-shot when actually close to level 70 and lacking GG equipment) but also herself: making you rinse-repeat the same tactic (clear adds, dodge laser while working hits in) through ANOTHER dozen cycles does no more to test actual skill than the first 3 or so rounds did: it just makes it tedious, and introduces a growing chance the player will randomly slip-up. (which is universal; skill has nothing to do with it)

Yeah, even going into this area is an entirely optional part of the game: there's ZERO real reward for doing any of that. It's just that tuned as-is, even with the "completionist" angle to press for it, it becomes a big "why bother?" By and far everyone is best-served instead by getting the skill point from Tasuni (and maybe the bonus map from Diala) and then just going straight to mapping: by the time you've leveled and geared enough to balance out the huge jump from Dominus, the drops for the end of A4 have become utterly irrelevant.

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

She is pretty tame now. After the nerfs, she spawns way less crap on the screen and her beam has a gigantic wind up before starting now. It still hits hard but you really shouldn't get hit by it, even as melee.

My only problem appears to be that her hitbox for mousing seems inconsistent, as if it doesn't change to reflect her different animation while beaming. I've had a few odd times where I'd try to leapslam NEAR her, and it'd throw me right on top of and in front of her. (and into the beam)

Ok finally I killed her and I have to say if you get the hang of it it is quite easy. But Iam a Marauder with 2,1k life, max ress and 1,6k armour + artic armour, so I didnt mind facetanking her. And tbh I still think she is too strong, because people might dont even get the chance to get the hang of it. At least not the first time, and an instand death on hc could be kinda frustrating if you dont play that much.

Don't you have to play through SC once to start a HC character?

If not, well, hmm. I feel mediocrely sorry for HC characters that go into fights without knowing it. Atziri was probably done first on SC for most people, too. And honestly, Piety is not the only boss that has that problem. Check out all the stuff in the maps - Shock and Horror or the Orchard boss for example. And dying in a map as a HC is much more painful than dying to Normal Piety I assume.

On the higher difficulty levels, you kind of know what is going to happen already.

Remember the formula for the circumference of a circle.

C = 2πr

Or in other words, the closer you stand, the less you run. Of course when you're busy running mobs are still flooding in. Yep, over-tuned.