"The mouth will not open while any of the Guardians are still alive"

Are you kidding me? Okay, so I got to harvest last night, killed all the guardians, talked to piety, but never went into the mouth thing as I knew it was a big fight but had to sleep. Come back today, try to solo malachai or at least try before doing party, mouth says it won't open while the guardians are still alive since presumably they respawn after new instance...

Do I seriously have to fight and look for all 3 again? What the hell is this, I defeated them, got their guts, gave them to piety, yet can't get in unless I spend the 20-30 minutes trying to kill all 3 clowns again just because I didn't attempt to go into the mouth to fight malachai?

I really hope this isn't intentional and simply an overlook by GGG, but that's not right. Maybe QQ, my fault and all for not going into the mouth but still a silly thing given I gave all the guts to piety and was basically given the "ok" to go into the hole...If you have to kill all 3 each time you want to create a new instance for malachai...then screw you GGG that's not right.

Yeah, but I don't think you understand the mechanics of instances if you think GGG will simply keep it open for you forever and a day while you go off to sleep, eat, and take your time coming back to play. I think, off the top of my head, that the instance remains open for 10 minutes worth of inactivity, after which the game resets it. It's all to do with preserving precious resources on the servers.

Also, I think the main reason GGG have set up the three guardians as part of the process is to actually mitigate against people trying to farm Malachai. The battle is long enough - and hard enough - to deter most people going that route anyway, but having to knock off the three guardians each time as well would be the deal breaker, at least in my view.

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timbo1959 wrote:

Yeah, but I don't think you understand the mechanics of instances if you think GGG will simply keep it open for you forever and a day while you go off to sleep, eat, and take your time coming back to play. I think, off the top of my head, that the instance remains open for 10 minutes worth of inactivity, after which the game resets it. It's all to do with preserving precious resources on the servers.

Also, I think the main reason GGG have set up the three guardians as part of the process is to actually mitigate against people trying to farm Malachai. The battle is long enough - and hard enough - to deter most people going that route anyway, but having to knock off the three guardians each time as well would be the deal breaker, at least in my view.

I know how they work, I'm saying the fact that it was basically a quest and now all of a sudden you have to do it each time you do make an instance.

And that's also the point I'm getting at, the fight is a mess, visually intense, hard, and long, yet they add this additional condition which takes even more time. People who farmed dominus literally farmed him for hours for days or even weeks, while quick to get to and even quick to kill you still had to spend a substantial amount of time to do it all, not included multiple clients for lofty returns. This just punishes everyone instead of multibox guys, which perhaps didn't even need to be punished given their investment into the game and given that eternals no longer drop.

So let's say this for example, new player joins the game, somehow reaches act 4 to malachai, dies and dies to him and gets frustrated and turns the game off to cool down or take a break. They come back, and what, now they have to kill all 3 guardians AGAIN just attempt the hard boss? That stuff irritates and scares potential new players away, which i imagine is the opposite of what GGG wants. But alas, I killed him already so I'm calmed down now given I don't have to fight him or his dumb gaurdians for a least a few hours/rest of the day :^()

Okay, I don't see how you understand the way instances work if you still think reaching a certain stage - any stage - should entitle you to keep an instance open. The game doesn't make allowances for situational circumstances - if you don't play for X amount of time it will reset to preserve precious server resources.

Take your Dominus example. I've farmed Dom for weeks and months in the past, and the situation is pretty simple. If I don't want to have to go back to the very beginning I have to get Dom and wear him down to 10% life very quickly, port back to change into my IIR/IIQ gear, return to finish him off, then get back to the portal in a certain amount of time before it times out. Sometimes, if it's taken me a while to get there, I'll even port back for a second to reset the clock on the instance just before entering the tower to fight Dom. But to take it to your example of Dominus, if you applied the same rules to him that you seem to think should apply to Malachai, then a player would be entitled to wipe out his guardians, port out to refresh flasks and whatever, take a lunch break while doing so, and be entitled to re-enter the fray to finish off Dom at their leisure. That's just not how it works. The game doesn't sit back and say ok, we have to make an allowance here because so and so is 70% of the way through a fight. Doesn't matter what instance you're in. Once you exit it the clock is up and running, and if you're not back in X amount of time it will disappear. I'm sorry you're disappointed, but I don't think there's a player on here who hasn't lost an instance at a crucial point for some reason or another, self-inflicted or via a crash or bug. I think the point is that once you enter a fight with one of the bosses you have to see it through to the end rather than risk losing all that hard work. Best of luck, and enjoy the new content.

He is talking about preserving the quest state, not keeping an instance open indefinitely.
It wouldn't be too hard for the game to remember whether or not you killed the 3 guardians in between logins.

what it really does is screw the 'logout-heroes' out there

if you do the chicken move and log out - have a nice day re-farming the guts

but.. it doesnt matter anyway because there is not a single reason to kill the final boss in this game right now. i've done it once, on normal with a low lvl flameblaster, and see no reason to repeat that experience.

You don't need to kill the final boss to get to cruel and merc?

I'm with Tokyo on this; I got through the three Guardian fights, spoke to Piety, jumped into the Mouth and had a (blind) crack at Malachai, discovering two (for me) 1-hit kill attacks. It was late, so I shrugged and gave it up for the night, figuring 'oh well, I can bash my head against that brick wall another day'. Only to get the whole 'mouth will not open...' message.

I can understand why GGG don't want players farming Malachai...oh wait, no I don't. Isn't half the point of PoE to farm bosses or w/e for experience and gear? I expect those who want to farm him will group up in 3's, take a guardian each, then 3-man him - seems like a logical approach to me, although there may be party difficulty mechanics I'm not aware of.

Considering it's two entirely separate quests (Corpus Malachus and The Eternal Nightmare), it really shouldn't be hard to code in 'if x Quest complete and y Quest incomplete, allow access through mouth'.

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Once you exit it the clock is up and running, and if you're not back in X amount of time it will disappear.

Key words here are once you exit. As far as I'm aware, an instance that you're actually in will remain open indefinitely. Certainly I've gone off for an extended lunchbreak whilst in an (cleared for safety) instance and I've not been booted or d/c'd for inactivity. Whether that would hold true overnight...maybe I'll try sometime.

On the flip side of the above, has anyone been in Malachai's area long enough (8-15m) and then died (without a portal) and found the previous area (with the waypoint) has reset, or are the two areas part of a single instance?

This seems to be a very deceptive move, to masque an instance-thing as a quest. Lucky for me I kept going until the end.

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sidtherat wrote:

what it really does is screw the 'logout-heroes' out there

if you do the chicken move and log out - have a nice day re-farming the guts

I don't know about that. Doesn't the instance stay open for several minutes after the player leaves or logs out or is disconnected? I know that portals vanish when logging out, but I'm pretty sure I've been able to take a waypoint back to a solo instance after getting disconnected.