ACT IV Speculation (Possible spoilers ahead)

Some of you may have seen that some datamined information made its way to the forums a couple of months back, which concerned itself with Act IV. I'll not link it or discuss it in any incredibly specific detail, but I will talk about it in broad strokes as it relates to the lore and what we will probably experience as we go into Act IV.






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So. If any of this datamining business is to be believed, we'll be going north into the Highgate mines where the Virtue Gems were first discovered.
I'm not going to go into any of the discussion about how the level progression is going to work or whether Cruel will be removed here: I am only concerning myself with plot.
It seems pretty obvious from the latter master dialogues that we're moving towards an encounter with the actual being that caused the two Cataclysms. Zana and Catarina in particular all but telegraph this.
Additionally, especially throughout the late game, Malachai is continually referred to.
All of this is before you even go into the datamining stuff.
When you factor in the datamining, you're looking at a probable trek through North-ish Wraeclast, encountering Kaom and Daresso as mid-bosses, with Malachai as Act Boss.
That still leaves the entity. The one that Zana and Catarina refer to as the Nightmare, and who is called Kitava by Haku.

Now the next statements require a qualification: what follows are my own personal feelings, informed by nothing other than extrapolating what I've seen already.

My personal feeling is that they are going to leave the Big Dog out of the core Act IV game and opt instead to place it into a map. I think this because to place the originator of the Cataclysm into the core game would be to de-value its own existence in comparison to both of the Atziri encounters, which can only be accessed with those primitive Vaal maps.
So my theory is this: Atziri can only be reached from a map. The Big Dog outranks Atziri. It follows then that the final encounter will take place in a map, likely at a higher level and possibly a higher rarity than the Apex and Abyss maps.
I think that this map will be accessed via Malachai's Rapture device, which the lore says was taken into Highgate with the supposed purpose of destroying thaumaturgy.
So, to sum up, I speculate that you'll have to go into the mountain and kill Malachai, who is tha Act IV boss, to gain access to his Rapture device, which is possibly the mechanism by which you can access the endgame encounter.

They are doing it really cleverly, I think. They're giving you just enough lore that you want a bit more.
I did want to touch on what you said about the Ten-Act Plan, though. I actually think you could bring out the Big Dog right now and still adhere to the ten-act thing, if that is still in fact what they're doing... you could do it provided that what I said is true and the Big Dog is a map encounter.

By placing it kind of out of the core game.. it disconnects it somewhat from the rest of it. Atziri is a good example of this, I think.

Also In theory, and we're getting into wilder speculation here....there's nothing to say that the Big Dog has to maintain its one form in all acts. Zana in particular describes the Nightmare as an "artist" who is "never satisfied". It would not surprise me to discover that this is an organism that changes over time in some way. It's not a person like Atziri or Dominus.. it's a THING. A timeless thing that reinvents the continent over and over again. Why not reinvent itself? I don't think it's too far a call, honestly, but we'll see!

However it plays out, it should be pretty interesting.

I have to read all the master stuff yet, but my bet is that Kitava is the next boss. Too many hints, and there is no info about other targets.

And if Kaom appears as a mid boss as the leaks indicate, Hyrri could be with him.



Maybe they could have loot tables for their uniques (specially on maps).

I hope the masters have some lines or give some quests. New NPCs are cool but the masters just work really well!

For the next acts? Well, there should be a pantheon full of things to kill. Gods are cruel beings.

This feeds the Vorthos in me, \m/

I couldn't agree more with you. I actually think you nailed it right on the head. You can't really kill this thing. Maybe you can get into some "fragment of reality" where some of it resides in some form or other, and the other commonality within what's happened so far is that this Cataclysm always needs to be started by some human agency. It acts first through the Doryani and Atziri collaboration, and then again through the Malachai/Voll collaboration.

Something just occurred to me... Tora says something about the animals on the continent being too strong, aggressive, and reproducing too fast. She goes on to say that she thinks it might be that the Entity possibly needs massive amounts of continuous carnage to sustain itself, which has the dual purpose of providing a lore-related reasoning for all the respawning, and drawing another parallel line between all of the human sacrifice that was going on during the Vaal civilization and its Cataclysm. And what was going on during the Eternal Empire? War. Lots more death. Then Cataclysm.

Food for thought, in any event.

To be honest, just about all that I'd been thinking was plausible was pretty much summed up above, already.

As far as how the level structure will be done, the Master daily quests have shown how mutable areas are; chances are that the levels of each zone will simply be adjusted to better fit. In other words, if Act IV is placed in and then winds up finishing at, say, level 40, then Cruel will have most of its zones bumped in level by 4... And Merciless by a level or two to account for Cruel Act IV.

However, I'll admit there's one thing that I'm a little wary of is how the lore may be handled... Part of the draw of Wraeclast was that there's a lot of unanswered questions. If they add in enough to flesh out every part of it, that might actually detract from its mystique.

And as far as the whole 1 issue = 1 act thing, I might be a bit wary of taking that to mean we'll be seeing up to 10 acts. That would certainly get extremely unwieldy from a gameplay perspective... And would almost certainly start wringing the lore QUITE dry; by that point we'd have likely exhausted Wraeclast's major locations, and have ALSO exhausted the notable locations outside of it, from Oriath, to Ngamakanui, and so on.

Well, it's looking like you're right in saying that as of yet, this thing seems to just be a malevolent, incorporeal spirit. This particular incarnation of baddie is unprecedented in that it's thus far always worked indirectly through an intermediary, and this part is key... has always declined to identify itself to that intermediary, manipulating that intermediary instead.

Doryani expressed uncertainty as to what it even was that they were working to summon. Dominus seems to believe with some conviction that he's actually communing with God.

Malachai (via the little monologue in the Reverie device) seems to be the only one yet who has actually had any success in identifying this thing, and for whatever reason, it chose to insinuate itself most closely with Malachai, even going so far as to expect his return.

The reasons for this are unclear, but I'm going to go ahead and speculate that it relates to his creation of the Rapture device, or possibly the Gemling Queen.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Something tells me that even if you use the capital G for 'God' in Wraeclastian terms, we're not talking about some all-powerful, impartial being.

As much as I hate to admit it, certain guildies of mine were probably right when they said there's something distinctly Lovecraftian to it all.

Those two types of god are not mutually exclusive. Read the Old Testament, ;)

Anyway, if I had to expect anything...it would be that the story becomes sour with time. The enemy is impossible to kill, the continent is doomed or the exile is just a tragic tool of destruction.

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NeroNoah wrote:

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Something tells me that even if you use the capital G for 'God' in Wraeclastian terms, we're not talking about some all-powerful, impartial being.

As much as I hate to admit it, certain guildies of mine were probably right when they said there's something distinctly Lovecraftian to it all.

Those two types of god are not mutually exclusive. Read the Old Testament, ;)

Anyway, if I had to expect anything...it would be that the story becomes sour with time. The enemy is impossible to kill, the continent is doomed or the exile is just a tragic tool of destruction.

Now I like that, actually. If we're going with the Nightmare/Kitava thing needing carnage and all to survive..... well, who's the one giving it to him? It's the one doing nearly all the killing on Wraeclast....Don't think too hard now... spoiler alert: it's you.

That would add a really interesting twist if you yourself were the vehicle for the Thing's return.

The creature lives in another world that in it's own reality lives with nightmare-like beings, blood, twisted chaos...the most vile and crazy things you can imagine, it is what you see when you wake up from a nightmare. In this dreamlike world, Malachai somehow was able to reach through to this entity, actually, he never did...the entity reached out to him, charmed him to make the map device so that it could open a portal to our own world. What happened when he met with this entity still remains unknown to this day, only GGG has the links to what happened once he received the vision to crate such a horrible device.

But...there was a problem, this creature, this thing, could not really go any futher than the realm he was in, it needed death and gems with death linked for it to trigger a reaction the feeds it's power. With enough power, it can deal so much damage that an entire area could be wiped away. Think of a virture gem that is destroyed....it is considered too dangerous. It is the same micro effect you get when you use it to break the walls of the sewers.

If you linked a gem to yourself when this power surge happens, you become part of this creature's property. The creature is quite happy with it's stolen land after the Vaal helped it gain power, and now it is even more happy with the other idiots who feed it even more power.

It is, hoever, not satisfied. It wants the entire world this time, and with our help, we will give it what it wants. With every death, every kill we do, it grows stronger. Rogue exiles and us as well are great tools for this entity, for we give it quite the power. The gems, which carry a will of their own, grow stronger as we slaughter the foes around us. This entity is just living it up.

I suspect that the gems themselves are a part of this creature's will, and what better way to speed up the process of gaining it's thrist then to give us more power to slaughter. Dominus knows this, Piety serves this purpose. Exile us, instead of killing us, because if we whee killed in Oriiath it would not receive the power it needs. Dominus is a puppet charmed just like all the other idiots. You are all idiots for serving this creature as well as me. It all started with the Vaal, they invited it to our world, and now it is like a parasite, twisting the land to suit it's wicked taste. It has no other purpose other than to feed and fester the planet...should we let it go that far.

Does the source of the land's corruption and the dead rising have to be the same as the source of the gems?
Could be two gods, one that destroys men and one that uses them.