Piety, the Abomination is still kinda OP

Hi

So, I've been playing POE again lately - trying to go throu main content again with a new fun build - but I've hit the hard wall of Piety, the Abomination.
It feels like this boss is way more difficult than all the previous ones combined.

Keep in mind that I'm not a total noob (over 450h) and I've been there before - however this time I wanted to create just nice 'fun to play' character (without min-maxing) and beat the main content without dying... but

It's not possible if you are not preared - specifically against this boss - you need to know the boss in advance - and you need to keep it in your mind way before act4 - otherwise it'll just one/two shot you with beam attack.

But to the point - the issue is not the boss itself but rather difficuly curve - all prev bosses went rather smoothly - but in this case the difficuly spike is waaaaaay in the sky comparing to prev bosses (and I'm not saying that prev bosses were easy - not at all).
All the other bosses have the 'heavy bricks' only after first or second transformation - but this one has is stright away.
So for all the new players this can FEEL like mission impossible.

Are you guys considering making any changes to this boss?

Like maybe nerf the 'beam' attack a bit?
Or make it less frequent?


Thanks
vv

Summoners get absolutely smeared by that beam if their DPS isn't high enough to kill her before she fires it.

Piety does primarily lightning damage, gets some lightning res (or just run Purity of Lightning) and she's no trouble at all.

If the beam is what you are worried about, stick to her like glue and walk around in a circle whenever she does it. If you try to stay far away, it will murder you. This is true for ALL bosses who use beam attacks like that due to how geometry works.

Have been fooling around with minions recently. And Shavronne kind of instantly evaporated all my minions... So its not the only boss you may want to have a "plan B" for. But Piety is quite bad for some other builds too.

Edit: In contrast to Doedre who got almost instantly evaporated by my minions...

yea my bottlenecks for certain builds are usually piety act 4 and shavronne act 6. Knowing the damage type certainly helps, but when you rely on secondary damage such as minions or totems it is almost impossible to have enough defense or life at that stage of the game for your minions to survive those attacks. So you just gotta dodge the beam / lightning bolts, then resummon and go ad nauseum. It's just a weird quirk of these particular bosses.

Kitava Act 5 can be similar with the screenwipe fire attack, although for some reason that is significantly less noticeable than Act 4 Piety beam.

Kitava's screen wide fire breath always has a gap either in the extreme left or right of the arena. His moves are actually super telegraphed and extremely easy to avoid whereas Piety 4 and Shavronne 9 can just straight up nuke you without warning at times.

^im talking about the minion deaths, not my own. I can avoid all the boss mechanics at this point no prob. But minions are dumb and walk right into everything

Hrm... I don't play minions so no idea there. But didn't they patch it a bunch to make minions pretty hard to kill in boss fights like that?

Minions need some ele res, leech and regen to survive this sort of stuff.


Baseline res for minions usually are:
40% ele res and 20% chaos res
There are some exceptions to this rule but this is still a fairly reliable baseline.

Bone rings provide 15% all ele res, Commander of Darkness ascendancy another 30% and purity of elements adds some more depending on its level.

On top of that you want at least the "sacrifice" wheel for some regen and leech mastery or "minions recover life on minion death" in case you are spamming some sort of minions like skellies or SRS.
Once you do have other sources of leech and regen the mastery for 8% additional max ele res is the best option for endgame.

Speaking of endgame, if you want them to survive in endgame, it takes a little more than that.
Bone offering + fortress covenant jewel and/or the "decay ward" wheel combined provide some 88% spell and attack block and block will trigger 4% regen (bone offering) as well as 2% life recovery on block (decay ward).
You dont need all 3 but more likely than not at least 2 of those options to keep the bois alive.


For leveling Id recommend you DO NOT rely on any sort of permanent minions like spectres or zombies and the like.
Most likely you are investing into dmg nodes and not minion survivability. Thats obviously your choice and comes with consequences, such as minions dying all the time. Therefore spammable and temporary minions like SRS, skellies or absolution are far superior this early in the game.