Malachai Fight is Doable

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vixien wrote:

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Hypetreme wrote:

He just one shotted my lvl 62 Marauder on Cruel who had 3,4k hp. I was 5 lvl's bigger than the area. I think the fight is actually too punishing. This was on HC league. You make one movement mistake and bang, you are dead.

Vaal will do the same if you stand in slam. Don't really see how this is any different. You do realise cruel malachai is only 2 levels lower than merciless vaal before 2.0 and you wouldn't tank his slam with 3.4k hp either.

Problem is the progression from that point. And his other skills were doing idiotic amounts of dmg, not just the slam. Traps were chunking me for a 1/4 of my life as well as exploding eyeballs.

After beating Cruel Malachai, you should be getting portal to Merciless Aqueducts.. Merciless Dominus is easier than Cruel Malachai.

Also "doable" is a pointless word here, because he still would be "doable" if you increase his life by 100x and double his damage. People will manage to kill him. Problem here is the steep difficulty in act 4, and especially Malachai fight.

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CanHasPants wrote:

Just going to say two things:
1) Difficulty in Normal should challenge new players, and force them to reroll if they made too big of a mistake. But it should do so consistently, and should be, by all means, otherwise passable with minimal grinding.

That part I bolded? That is in no way an acceptable outcome from anything in any difficulty. You should know, for any of various reasons, as a new player whether your current skill set is going to perform in content and have the ability to alter it going forward.

The huge power spikes in enemies and the ludicrous overtuning of a select few bosses is counter to actually letting a new player progress through the entirety of the game. Rerolling should never be forced, you should ALWAYS have enough room to rethink and retune your strategy in any given range of areas.

There's a difference between a skilltree that simply cannot function and a skill tree that functions in all content until it suddenly gets brickwalled by massive gearcheck number walls. The former should never be arising spontaneously during character progression, and if the enemy difficulty curve was halfway decently tuned the latter would never happen.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

You're not way off. Since EV characters relied the most on leech, they were the hardest hit. Couple that with the massive amount of physical attack and spell dmg in A4 makes for an awful time.

I tested evasion on of my Standard characters and with the very similar evasion rating I had pre 2.0 I've to say monsters now hit more often and way harder. Prior to 2.0 I mostly relied on instapots. With Acro/Phase and Ondar's you were able a) to completely ignore projectile based monsters (including certain bosses), and b) roll thru melee based mobs without taking any significant damage. Now you're constantly taking damage, which makes leech a necessary tool in your repertoire. And since leech is nerfed, you'd need both life gain on hit and a high regeneration percentage to make up for it. And to make it absolutely clear, I'm talking about a melee character with Arctic Armor, Fortify and a few e-charges, whereas pre 2.0 I only had 3 e-charges to mitigate the physical damage taken.

Well. I picked PoE up for a new go. Never have I seen such a difficulty spike before in a game, and I've played D3 inferno on launch. It's not fun. Game doesn't give me difficulty feedback. Sure I ran a 600hp EV ranger with non capped resistances (cookiecutter build from forums), but it WORKED. Up until a point when it stopped. Luckily I had 5-6 skillpoints remaining and got up to 800hp. Not that it helps. Now, the options according to the thread are: a reroll - are you kidding me? grind for gear - on NORMAL? 4 levels above the difficulty level? are you friggin kidding me? and yes there's a third option of learning the fight. I will. I'll also die lots and don't expect to have any fun at all while at it. Sad thing is, I got a friend who disliked D3 and is really excited for the act4 of PoE. I don't have the heart to tell him about this.

Sure, that's venting. tl;dr/constructive feedback:
* difficulty should be a curve not a spike
* boss abilities should be clearly predictable (emotes, animations, whatnot)
* boss fights should challenge, not annoy

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Autocthon wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

Just going to say two things:
1) Difficulty in Normal should challenge new players, and force them to reroll if they made too big of a mistake. But it should do so consistently, and should be, by all means, otherwise passable with minimal grinding.

That part I bolded? That is in no way an acceptable outcome from anything in any difficulty. You should know, for any of various reasons, as a new player whether your current skill set is going to perform in content and have the ability to alter it going forward.

The huge power spikes in enemies and the ludicrous overtuning of a select few bosses is counter to actually letting a new player progress through the entirety of the game. Rerolling should never be forced, you should ALWAYS have enough room to rethink and retune your strategy in any given range of areas.

There's a difference between a skilltree that simply cannot function and a skill tree that functions in all content until it suddenly gets brickwalled by massive gearcheck number walls. The former should never be arising spontaneously during character progression, and if the enemy difficulty curve was halfway decently tuned the latter would never happen.

I'm not exactly sure what you're disagreeing with. The part I underlined should explain it all. Perhaps I should have said "force them to respec, or reroll outright if they made too big of a mistake." Edit: I.e., players can already brute force respecs or difficulty walls via grinding out (either levels, gear, or regrets), however at some point one must consider that, if they made a mistake, it might cost fewer resources and less time to just reroll and do better next time.

Otherwise, we're definitely not in disagreement.

What I disagree with is this notion that normal should be easy for new players to progress through. No, it should be a challenging learning experience, and to reiterate, it should be consistent. I.e., not spike and wall all of a sudden, then sink back to mundane. Difficulty should progress smoothly through all stages of core content, culminating in a challenging end-of-difficulty encounter, and leading to a more difficult next difficulty. Early act 1 can be easier, as to ease into the heightened difficulty progression, but not act 2, and certainly not act 3. I'd say Cruel Merveil should be able to whup any of the end-of A4 Normal bosses--otherwise, why the heck is she cruel?

But that's a tangent. The point is GGG has consistently gotten difficulty progression wrong. I'm not saying anything new here.

Killed piety and malachai yesterday for the first time, and I like them both.

With Piety, I had a lot of fun leapslamming over her beam (could do this for hours), and she didn't put up too much resistance otherwise.

Malachai has this tentacle stuff that hurts a bit, but otherwise seemed to be pretty easy.
Took me a while to figure out I'm supposed to kill the hearts, but other than that, it was a quick fight.

And I certainly wasn't overequipped:

Here's my only issue with this "Boss fight".
I run around more than actually fight him, that's not a boss fight.
- Room is too small for all that clusterfuck
- Way too many graphical skills which are all dark or red, which becomes hard to see in the end
- FPS Drops due to overload of clusterfuck

If I didn't roll Flametotem I'd just hate that fight in every single way.

Ok, today I fought Malachai for the first time post-beta, I did the fight on 2 chars on normal difficulty. The results:

With summoner I had no real problem, fight was very smooth. My minions died quite fast, but summon skeletons (hardcasted, not totem) carried me through the fight all by itself. For a while I thought I'd finish it without dying, but right before the end I got pushed into a corner and hit by the ground aoe + tentacle. So I died once.

With my life regen scion the fight was slightly harder than with summoner. Movement was harder because I was melee, and attack windows were small because of the boss aoe + teleports. Still, I ended up finishing the fight with no deaths.

I did notice that at times the graphics stuttered a little. It seems to be quite a graphics intensive fight. And because nearly everything can potentially kill you, even the smallest non-smoothness feels dangerous.

Overall the fight is very doable now, and appropriate for normal difficulty imo. So good job adjusting it GGG.

Just beat Act 4 Normal with my weird gimmicky caster duelist today, and ignoring the fact that my build is extremely atypical I have a little bit of feedback:

Piety wasn't too bad. Just circle around her in order to avoid beam, stay close to her, and even run backwards through the beam if necessary (it seems to do very little damage if you do this). The lightning balls are a little annoying, and the visuals are a little bit busy, but it's not too bad.

Malachai wasn't bad for me, but he seemed like a nightmare for other builds. I only died twice, but that's because I had 1.6k life - way more than most builds will have at level 42 - and I was doing very high DPS with my 6L Searing Touch - and item new players would never, ever have that early. Even with high DPS for that level he took FOREVER to kill.

The visuals were so insane I couldn't tell wtf was happening (I've fought him twice before with strong toons and I still have no clue what is going on inside that beast anus) and I only survived as well as I did because, as a ranged caster, I could run around and shoot him/the hearts with fireballs. I have no idea how the hell melee beats Malachai in normal, let alone in merciless later on.

I don't want to exaggerate: he's not totally broken or "impossible" or anything, and I'm glad the game forces us to learn his moves and how to avoid them, but his life/damage is still too high in normal even post-nerf. It's just a matter of tweaking right now, but it still needs to be tweaked.

As a side note, I'm ok with him being insane in merciless, because it's actually optional content at that point.