There's a big difficulty spike. Normal Maelstrom is good for learning the spawn points and the mechanics but it in no way prepares you for the difficulty of Veteran Maelstrom.

Enemies have more health and do more damage but all the mechanics stay the same.

"That's not so bad..."

VMA is kicking my butt. Enemies do lots more damage so you have to mitigate a lot more damage plus you have to really pay attention to priority targets that will mess up your day plus you have to do more damage to kill everything. There is very little margin for error so you really have to pay attention to what kills you and do it right the next time.

I highly recommend Joy_Division's guide: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/381682/joys-new-and-improved-guide-to-beating-maelstrom-arena

Normal can be done "flawlessly" with random gear and random skills on your bar, just doing light and heavy attacks. Veteran is almost as hard as beating a veteran dungeon solo, with mobs having about the same health as normal dungeon ones, but with plenty of attacks and mechanics that will do 20K+ damage (one shot) if not blocked, dodged, or played properly. IMO there's really no point in doing normal unless you are leveling a character to 50 since it gives decent experience, but you'll learn nothing about veteran. For example on normal most characters can simply heal trough the poison in Vault of Umbrage that comes from ground spores and the archers, but on veteran it will kill you in 3s unless you are a sorcerer with a huge shield that can sprint to the pool until it drops him.

Vet is the single most punishing thing I've tried in the game. Arena 4 is kicking my butt.

And every round I beat is the sweetest victory I've ever earned in this game.

Truly no reward worth having comes without great effort.

The first run on vet is always the hardest.
For me, the first run through, the hardest were 4, 5, and 9. I used a pet MagSorc.
6 and 7 were pretty difficult but mostly due to RNG, the mechanics were easy to deal with.
1, 2, 3 and 8 are easy peasy.
Stage 4 is supposed to be easy according to people, but I found it pretty tough the first run through. I knew to focus the little turret guys before they shielded up but sometimes on the phase where the boss has the green circle and you move with him, I didn't see some of the turrets spawn on the other side despite looking out for them.
Stage 5 took me a few hours over 2 days. The archer and ice mage adds were the worst. They do so much damage!
Stage 9 final boss took me a few hours over 3 days and was the most frustrating. Mostly due to Crem Guards. The mechanics weren't hard. But man I hate the Crem Guards. I had no idea having a Negate ult would cause them to not breath fire, next time I'll keep that in mind. I mostly saved my destro ults for those ****s lol.
It was worth it, got the vMA bow.

I just finished my 2nd run last night, this time with MagDK. It was much faster this time around, and easier (but by no means easy)
This time stage 5 took 20 minutes. Having wings on MagDK helped even better deal with the ranged archers and mages when I didn't have defensive sigil. The boss burn took much quicker because my MagDK has strong DoTs and quicker ult gen.
I did stages 1-8 in one night. I got to the final boss on stage 9 but due to having bad lag, I died a lot and decided to call it quits for the night. Went back the next day, it was still the hardest stage but I beat it and this time the RNG gods were not with me, got the vMA axe and sword...

Not sure if I should continue farming it with MagDK/MagSorc or try with my StamDK. I'm a little scared not having a shield, haha. My StamDK has the best deeps though.

Definitely push through it. It will make you a better player and maybe give you that rockin bow or destro staff.

That was a really odd thing to necro this thread from January for, just saying.

Anyway, good luck to anyone attempting VMA for the first time during the Orsinium event! And good luck to everyone when it comes to RNG on the weapons you want!

When I get asked this in stream I always answer. Normal isn't so much of a learning curve as it is a false hope.

If you have the right sets and decent cp and know the mechanics its a walk in the park, the mechanics are the hardest part of vet maelstrom, normal maelstrom is basically for you to learn them and once you get them down you'll be fine you won't even need gold gear but gold weapons would definitely help. But yeah to answer your question its not even close the same difficulty.

Been stuck on stage 5 for about 2 mos....haven't played in about a month for fear of breaking my PC...once got close to defeating the boss but took too long and last platform was destroyed, and so was I🤬🤬🤬🤬