What do you think of Act 3?

failpost, ignore please.

It's longer, but if you just clear waypoint to waypoint no area took me and my friend more than an hour to clear. Either way I feel it's really bizarre that people are rating acts based on the RNG rolls of a single playthrough.

Yes, I'm sure that's an accurate method that's repeatable person to person. Not random or anything.

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Foarl wrote:

It's longer, but if you just clear waypoint to waypoint no area took me and my friend more than an hour to clear. Either way I feel it's really bizarre that people are rating acts based on the RNG rolls of a single playthrough.

Yes, I'm sure that's an accurate method that's repeatable person to person. Not random or anything.

I don't know if you read my entire post but I am not rating the Act solely on RNG, I'm just expressing my frustration on how I haven't gotten any decent drops recently on those parts. I'm sure I made a few valid points here and there.

But then again, every experience is different. You may have just gotten lucky to think this way, I am basing my opinion on my experience and I am sure you are too.

I think the feedback about the humongous size of the maps do have merit. Today I was looking for the sewer exit at the slums, and wow I did explore almost the entire map and it's huge! Definitely not for people who have less than an hour per sit-through to complete a quest or so.

As for the waypoints, I'd have loved it to be nearer to the entrance. It would not make the game easier, or harder but would definitely make it more user-friendly and less annoying when you have to spend an hour looking for a WP though you have to log out soon - or lose your progress through the areas. Saying that, I started to notice a pattern where WPs typically spawn near certain exits.. so once we get used to it and remembers the tendency, I guess it's ok.

Apart from those, loved everything else :)

i liked act 3. overall i must say the difficulty has increased significantly and good drops seem more rare than before across all acts but i have last played when the difficutlty didn't come with a resistance penalty yet so it's been a while.

one thing i have to say which is a small concern for me is that gear grind comes into play much earlier than before.
before you could get to the endgame without much grind and then start to work on maxing your gear but now the endgame seems to be gated behind a gear grind. i'm not sure i like this because it effectively shuts out a lot of people from the fantastic map system they have in place.

all of this said - its a relatively minor concern and i also might just have been unlucky with my gear drops until now.

i thought act 3 was great, well done. map size is fine, drops are fine, pretty much what i expected. zones look great, love the constrast with some of the brighter outdoor zones. no complaints here, save for zoning into barracks for the first time and getting instantly introduced to 2 champion arc bitches that proceeded to evaporate my hardcore ass in 2.5 shots. just bad timing, had never seen the zone b4 and bad luck i zoned into 2 champs b4 i knew to rock light res on that map. cleared the rest of the act without a death and just gonna roll thru cruel and into mercy to get a good idea of how the game plays now, b4 rolling my next hc toon.

prob my only gripe was that the piety fight was EXTREMELY laggy with her ice spear ability, some sections of the fight were a bit sketchy with all the effects lag. i would have a similar complaint about ice shot, its effects make it pretty much unusable due to lag, which is really a shame. i found an ele prolif and would love to try it with pierce but it feels really sketchy every time i go to use it and i just go back to other lag free shots.

other than that, great job GGG! really enjoyed the last act. ive played cb daily for the last 2 monthes and it pretty much lived up to all my expectations, felt perfect to me. i think some of the maps just feel big as people learn them for the first time, running around not knowing where your going contributes to the large feeling. some of the earlier act maps used to feel large to me and now i have been thru them so many times, you dont even notice anymore.

I'm surprised so many people dislike the map size. I love huge maps so in that sense A3 made me really happy. The graphic quality of the textures and models are also a massive boost from A1, it feels like a totally different game IMO.

Hard to say on the difficulty or balance. I never played CB so I'm not really sure how to optimally build a char in terms of gear. I thought the A3 boss even on normal was insanely hard though compared to the rest of the fights. There's also some mobs during the act that are a step up in difficulty but it is A3... it should be harder?

to make it short:
i, at this point at least, dont like act 3 at all. it just doesnt give me the feeling that i am playing POE (except for lunaris temple, which is again dark and dirty. as barracks etc are just WAY too clean and sterile)

the monsters in act 3 are totally ok though. the size of maps are ok. but the general atmosphere lacks compared to act 1 and 2.

i cant really tell what it is, but something is missing in act 3. some epic fights missing. (compare act 1 with brutus, merveil. act 2 the bandits, fidelitas etc.

and, i also noticed a huge drop rate decrease.

I don't really understand the complaint about map size in act 3...especially if you all are totally fine with the size of the pyramid in act 2. :\ It didn't feel any worse than that, and it only really felt like that towards the very end in the land of deadends(lunaris3).

Though in general I feel like there is just way too much lightning used by enemies in this game, and not enough fire and to a lesser degree, cold. I bring this up just because of the simple fact that nearly every source of magic damage in act 3 is lightning, and just about anything that's not(outside of the boss fights, which I feel piety's ice arrows do way too much in comparison to her fire form, which could either mean the fire form needs buffed or the ice form nerfed) is chaos.

EDIT: Or maybe it was more of the lightning damage was more noticeable than any other source. As I remember the ribbons used fire but wasn't anything that made me rage nearly as much as those flicker striking dispersing mother @^%#!&$%&@%&^%!&^@ $!%&@%$&^!@*%$*! !@&^$%&!%$%!! and the "cockroches" with their lightning thorns of holy crap why does it hurt so much!?

They should definitely tweak the locations of the waypoints, that's my only issue with act 3.
It looks cool, huge bigass maps, interesting monsters and bosses, nice music too.