A Pointless Boss Tierlist

Currently updated to 1.20.3, Hotfix #1.
tl;dr



https://tiermaker.com/create/wynncraft-bosses-120-233259

- Any raid boss, dungeon boss, boss altar, and Legendary Island boss (including base fights) were automatically included. Everything else was preference based.
- Tasim's image represents Tasim+Aledar's fight collectively. A bit confusing, but I was too lazy to take a good image of them both together.
- I know some images are outdated, but who cares. You'll know what most of them are.
- Bosses listed in the same tier are not ordered in regards to quality.
- Assume that any quest boss not on the list I just didn't consider interesting enough design wise to be put on there (or they were not a base LI fight). For example, none of the ToA bosses are worth talking about on there own (bar maybe Witch Doctor), and are only worth discussing in regards to Death/Death Metal's fight. For the most part, they fall under the category of "miniboss" over this. If I were to include these, all of them would be in D or C tier.

S Tier = Even if every other boss sucked, I would still play the game solely to fight them.
A Tier = Amazing fights that I look forward to on every playthrough.
B Tier = Good fights.
C Tier = Decent/Meh/Passable/whatever other term you want to use for "they exist I guess".
D Tier = Obnoxious and/or boring fights.
F Tier = The only bosses to genuinely piss me off.

Please keep in mind that I play almost entirely without consumables, save for the occasional usage of speed surge or using them in raids when I deem it necessary.

All that aside, explanations are listed below.

Spoiler: S Tier

Spoiler: The Champion of Legendary Island, Doctor Herbert von Legendary

"The tnt is now invincible until it self destructs. Of course, this means you need to pay attention to where the tnt is, since now the arena itself is a legitimate threat. This also means no using lifesteal or manasteal on them, but you won't need to rely on them anymore.

There are three combos you need to actively be aware of in the first phase, which also this phase has standard ranged projectiles like before. For the sake of simplicity, I just call combos based on what they do, so these are as follows: the flying arrow storm, the teleporting meteor, and the flamethrower setup.

The flying arrow storm is where the Doctor will spam charge into the air before unleashing arrow storm. Since it begins this storm while still flying around, you are only going to be hit with a third of the storm at most in reality when he begins to fall back down to the floor. As a result, there's not much strafing needed for this attack, if at all, and it is meant to leave the player disorientated of where the Doctor is.

The teleporting meteor is where the Doctor surrounds himself in particles before teleporting, carrying two separate meteors along with him. The first meteor will be sent flying towards you if you are in range of it before the teleport, and the second meteor is meant for flying towards you once he finishes the teleport. Because of that, you need to be prepared to dodge accordingly based on your current distance away from the Doctor, usually being either a sidestep left or right if it is the first meteor and just backing up even further if it is the second meteor.

Lastly, there is the flamethrower setup. Before it goes off, the Doctor will rapidly push and pull you, and for me I have literal siren alarms going off in my head when that happens. While this may lead to some cheap damage due to being locked in one spot temporarily when it happens, the Doctor not only is inaccurate while it happens since you are constantly moving, but also tends to push you out of the pull range when it initially begins. This mitigates this issue, only being a problem if you get quite unlucky.

Either way, the Doctor will then begin the flamethrower and teleport at the same time. You want to be near the Doctor as a result, since he will then be a proper distance away from you with the flamethrower and thus it will no longer be a threat. The exception is if you have the Doctor in a wall, because then the teleport may mess up and leave him in the same spot. If he is near a wall, then it is often best to put as much distance between you and him as possible.

The Doctor does have two other combos, but one is just charges to reposition himself and the other is charges with a couple meteors to be a threat while repositioning. Since these aren't as "complex" as the others, though, they don't matter too much.

Moving on, the second phase is still the standard melee phase, with three combos you again need to be aware of: the charging multi-hits, flamethrower setup from before, and dual flamethrowers.

Charging multi-hits is self explanatory. He will rapidly charge before unleashing multi-hits when he lands. The more he charges in a row, the more multi-hits he will use when he lands. Since this is multiple multi-hits at once as well, simply jumping over it will not do and instead you will need a movement spell and/or locate him quickly to dodge accordingly.

The flamethrower setup behaves in the exact same way, but this time with the added twist of a multi-hit prior to the flamethrower teleport. Time a jump or keep your distance accordingly, and then do what was previously said about the flamethrower itself (get near him or run as far away as you can if it is near a wall).

I will acknowledge that the dual flamethrowers can be a tad annoying at times. This is because the initial flamethrower has no telegraph and just comes out when it so chooses. That being said, it is not difficult to just backup from this flamethrower when you see it and prepare for the next one, which will be used after the Doctor uses charge. Since he will carry this flamethrower with him with these charges, you now definitely want to be at a distance for it in comparison to the other flamethrower combo.

He can also use a dual teleport, which is a simple combo where the Doctor teleports twice instantaneously. He usually ends up behind you as a result, and this is purely meant to disorientate you so he can get in a quick hit if you panic.

The third phase takes aspects from both of these phases and combines it into the grand finale. Along with the dual teleports to disorientate you and the charge spamming for repositioning mentioned before, the Doctor also has a meteor barrage and explosion spam combo.

He will throw out one or two meteors as more or less a warning sign before lobbing a set of meteors your way. This is relatively easy to dodge, since it is just meteor, and you can avoid it by backing up out of its range or strafing around him.

The explosion spam is a bit odd, though. The first explosion is not telegraphed and comes out instantly, but this is not much of an issue since you will back up for any spell combo you see the Doctor preparing. After that, the Doctor will use charge into explode multiple times. I believe that this is intended for you to get near the Doctor so he flies over you, explodes, run back to the Doctor, rinse and repeat until the combo is over. However, what ends up happening is the Doctor moves barely in any direction with the charge before exploding, effectively making him just a walking time bomb you temporarily stand away from. Either way, it is entirely avoidable by standing far enough away from it.

NOTE: I have been informed after writing this that the initial explosion does way less damage in comparison to the others, so getting hit by it will often not be an issue and is just a warning sign.

As the staple of the Doctor, he still has the flamethrower setup, albeit much more complex. After doing the push+pull spam, he will explode multiple times. Afterwards, he will teleport, pull you towards him, then teleport again with the flamethrower. This is meant to catch the player off guard since it seems like he actually isn't doing the flamethrower at first, causing them to move right into the range of where it will be able to hit you instead of still trusting your instincts and staying near him.

And all while this is happening, the aforementioned tnt is existing. Because of them, you must choose when is a good time to attack and not to attack the Doctor accordingly, accounting for your positioning relative to the tnt that will explode at all times.

I have not explained this all just for the sake of it. It is not a guide thread, after all.

To me, the fact that I can tell how every spell combo works, understand what I do wrong and what I should do in the future for all of these, so on and so forth indicates that this is a boss that is entirely fair and challenging to a player like myself. I feel like everything is my fault and not the boss's in the slightest (ignoring lag, obviously), because no mechanic or combo feels unfair during the fight.

And because of that, I have never been more happy than I have playing this update than when I first fought the Doctor.

Thank you for making one of my favorite boss fights in the entire game, whether that opinion over a funny block game means anything to you or not."

My thoughts have not changed.

Spoiler: Aledar and Tasim, The Heroes of Wynn

Both Aledar and Tasim have 500,000 health in their first phase. Starting with Tasim, he has a standard melee AI and his main combo is three pulls followed by a meteor. Otherwise, he mostly flies around with charge followed by meteor when he lands again. On the other hand, Aledar has a crawl AI, along with a multi-hit spam combo and teleport+vanish/multi-hit combo.

Because of this, Aledar's movement is much more erratic whereas Tasim's is fairly predictable, complementing one another. Tasim will maintain constant aggression on you, whereas Aledar will deploy more of a hit and run approach while fighting you. While this is going on, tnt will also be making certain areas around the arena unsafe, along with minions spawning to try and distract you from either of them. Overall, this phase is pretty good on its own, requiring multiple different things to be kept track of at once (Aledar's position, Tasim's aggression, etc).

However, the second phase is where the fight truly shines. Depending on who you kill first, you will then fight a buffed version of the alive person. Let's discuss Aledar first.

Rather than the hit and run approach Aledar had used earlier, he now will mostly on the offensive in this first part. He only has ~250k hp, and also will spam his tp+vanish/multi-hit or multi-hit combos much more in comparison to the original. Tnt also rains down still to prevent you from camping certain areas of the arena and to keep you even more on your toes than Aledar already does.

In his second phase, Aledar absolutely loses his shit. He will have ~630k health and receive an arrow storm over vanish, now spamming teleport, arrow storm, and multi-hit constantly without letting up for a moment. There will also be unavoidable tick damage throughout the rest of the fight, effectively making it a timed fight without the proper sustain.

For the most part, Aledar is bullshit for builds that rely on slow-paced gameplay and tanky builds (not including spam healing). You HAVE to maintain constant aggression with him, whether that be through spam of CC or sustain, in order to win. He will absolutely obliterate you otherwise if you do match pace with him.

Moving onto Tasim's second phase, it once more remains largely the same. He has 400k health to start with, along with retaining the previous spell combos. He also got to keep the minions for this phase, bar the tnt.

In the second phase, Tasim has 800k health, and his charge combos become much more erratic (along with gaining heavy charge in them). You never really know when he's going to stop charging to either meteor or finish it off with a heavy charge, and thus it's simply best to just let him do his thing while he does so. The minions prior also spawn more often. The obvious change, though, is the bomb, which is a massive blast that extends in a + around the arena, making the corners safe to hide in when it occurs. If you are high enough up, you can also avoid it via that. It will occur roughly every 150k you drop Tasim, but it will appear more frequently if you deal tons of damage to him in a short period of time.

For the most part, Tasim is bullshit for builds that rely on aggressive and fast-paced gameplay and glassier playstyles. You will be severely punished if you try to burst him down quickly via the bombs forcing you into a corner where he can easily hit you, along with possible punishment if you interrupt him during his combos. The minions around the arena will easily chip away at your health if you only center your attention of Tasim as well.

Notice something? The two of them are direct opposites of each other, yet both work in a similar manner. If you want to be as effective as possible against them, you must equally match their pace. Aledar's fight is incredibly fast-paced to the point where it almost feels downright spammy, whereas Tasim's fight is more methodical and a waiting game to ensure you are as safe as possible to attack.

For a moment, let's take a look back at the first phase. Naturally, Tasim is the easier of the two to focus for if you want to get through the fight quickly. He will constantly be in your field of vision since he is fairly predictable despite maintaining constant aggro on you. Likewise, Aledar is the easier of the two to focus if you favor a slower approach, since it takes more time to find opportunities to hit him confidently with everything going on in this first phase.

If you do the former, you will fight a boss that rewards this aggressive playstyle you utilized to take down Tasim in the form of Aledar's second phase. If you do the latter, you will fight a boss that rewards this passive/methodical approach you utilized to take down Aledar in the form of Tasim's second phase.

This is why I believe that Tasim and Aledar are one of the fundamentally best fights in the game. It rewards ANY playstyle and/or build as long as you can recognize which is better suited for you. Their respective fights only feel remotely unfair when you make a misjudgment in that playstyle. This makes their fight one of the most replayable in the entire game, which is something I deeply value in a game if that wasn't obvious by the fact that I am indeed still playing this game. This is also not mentioning the spectacle of fighting the two people who joined you at the very start of the game at the very end of the game, as nostalgic as that might be.

Spoiler: Bovine Barn

"The Durum Protector's entire purpose is too play off your one greatest weakness at lower levels: a lack of options. Considering that this is level 20, you don't even have access to your third spell yet, meaning you are limited to your t2 first spell and your t1 second spell.

The Durum Protector has 7k hp. He also has what I call "linear" mob ai, where he runs straight towards you before turning around to face you once again once he does a pass by. While this does make his movement predictable, it makes it difficult to maintain constant damage uptime with up close and personal builds, which both Assassin and Warrior will probably need to be using. These melees also hit like a truck, nearly doing a third of your health or more depending on class.

He only has three spells total: charge, heavy charge, and push. He will use push as a one-off spell more than anything else, usually to push you towards the Scarecrows (which we'll get back to later). His heavy charge will often one shot you unless you're a Warrior/Assassin due to class base defense, and even with Warrior/Assassin it can at least halve your health. However, for all intents and purposes, heavy charge is easily predictable when poison is not in question. It has a linear path way where it starts and ends, and only becomes unpredictable when used in quick succession, which the Durum Protector does not do.

In theory, the boss wouldn't be that difficult if it were to be alone. That's why the Scarecrows exist.

The Scarecrows have 400 hp, which is a ludicrous amount of hp for a minion at this level. They also are spaced out in a manner where the only class that can deal with all of them effectively is Archer, as Archer has its concentrated arrow storm to hit them at range. Any other class would have to not only strafe around the Scarecrows, but also strafe around the Durum Protector at the same time if they were to fight them. This is not mentioning that they have heal spell, so if the Durum Protector goes near them, there is a chance he'll get free healing as well.

As a result, the only true good way to go about dealing with them is by only killing one Scarecrow to fight the Durum Protector, now with only 1/4th of the arena to work with. I forgot to mention that they also shoot projectiles at a fast rate, meaning they will be constantly chipping your hp regardless of what you do, and at worse hitstun you enough to the point where the Durum Protector will land a devastating blow on you. You may think that you could just spend the first portion of the fight killing all the Scarecrows in the room, but that is not viable, as they can respawn. Unless you got lucky, killing all of them aside from Archer/Warrior is not an option.

And remember how I said heavy charge is easily predictable? Well, that's true, but that doesn't make it easy to dodge when you have such an enclosed area to work with.

Like I've implied, this is easiest with Archer. Archer still has its concentrated arrow storm at this level, meaning it can kill the Scarecrows with relative ease and keep its distance from the boss. Still, one slip up in your dodges can spell death due to your base defense, especially if you let yourself get hit by a heavy charge.

Warrior actually does the best here aside from Archer. The reason for this is because 1. charge's damage and 2. charge's hitbox. Due to both these factors, you can actually do what I call "charge exchanging" (i.e you charge towards the enemy at the same time as they are charging) to both deal damage to the boss and halt it from charging any farther. You can also use bash to interrupt a charge if necessary, but usually that costs too much mana to be worth it. Charge also helps kill the Scarecrow of your choice, and you can tank through the Scarecrows thanks to your base defense (and even tank a hit or two from the Durum Protector). The only reason this isn't as good as Archer is because Archer simply does more damage and can end the fight faster, which means less Scarecrow spawnrate RNG to deal with. However, these are both relatively the same in terms of difficulty.

Assassin/Shaman are also on the same ish level here. Assassin's vanish actually makes the charge unpredictable when timed incorrectly, as it may cause the boss to charge in a random direction suddenly. You only want to use vanish when the charge is already in effect. Spin attack's most useful purpose here is of course its blind, which can help deal with the respective Scarecrow when it respawns (using vanish+spin to take care of every Scarecrow is often too taxing on your mana and just straight up not worth it). The main problem for an Assassin is just that you will get hitstunned constantly by the Scarecrows, which is detrimental for using vanish properly. Luckily, Assassin's base defense allows you to tank at least a couple hits.

On the other hand, Shaman will be oneshot by the Durum Protector due to its base defense. While Shaman's damage is high enough to kill the Scarecrows at point blank range, it will cause you to not have enough mana to haul when needed if your in a poor position to manually dodge a charge. Your totem position is the most important factor here, as there is no way too reset the totem without placing another. While your totem can block the Scarecrow's projectiles, good luck using it to do that while strafing the Durum Protector at the same time.

However,
https://wynndata.tk/s/2jveb9
...

But Helter Skelter being absolutely busted aside, Shaman is on par with Assassin's difficulty in my eyes because of totem's healing being very nice for tanking through the Scarecrow's chip damage, although it's going to do jack in terms of being hit by the boss.

Mage by far has the hardest time with Bovine Barn. Your heal is practically nothing at this point in the game, teleport often causes you to go straight into a scarecrow, and your damage is abysmally low. This is not mentioning that your base defense isn't exactly high (80%), meaning you'll either be one or two shot by the Durum Protector. Even if you don't get oneshot, the Scarecrows will eventually kill you off since almost all your mana has to go to using tp to dodge the boss. The saving grace is that your melees have range, meaning you can interrupt the Durum Protector's charge when timed properly (as enemy charge has a few iFrames when it first activates)."

I know this focuses solely on the actual difficulty of Bovine Barn, but that is also what makes the boss fight so good. It is fundamentally a very simple fight, but its placement so early in the game makes this simplicity incredibly effective to create an amazingly fair and challenging fight, regardless of the players build in question. I would (and have for that matter) levelled characters with the sole intent of fighting Bovine Barn, because it is one of the only fights I feel that I can be genuinely rewarded for mastering.

Spoiler: Prison of Souls

Prison of Souls is effectively fighting the strength of two bosses at once, yet it does not feel poorly designed in the slightest. To explain why this is the case, I must once again write an entire essay.

The Beast has around 15k hp. It has a burst fire attack roughly every three seconds. It only has two spells, being teleport and meteor. It will often use teleport->meteor, otherwise only using them as a one off spell most of the time.

The second phase, The Unfettered, has around 33k hp. Its AI switches to that of a standard melee AI as well, which moves at a moderate speed. It still retains teleport and meteor, but uses them in a way where it will prepare meteors to be lobbed your way at any distance it teleports. It will also gain the ability to use three meteors at once rather than one offs like that previous phase.

On its own, this wouldn't be a very difficult fight or anything. The teleport->meteor combos can occasionally be hard to predict and the sheer damage of the boss can ruin your day, but it would be pretty easy to avoid with being patient enough.

This is why the second aspect of the fight, The Enslaved, exists. It has roughly 12k hp, along with a healbot AI. Likewise, it only has heal and pull as spells, its only form of attack being a single projectile that it fires at a moderate rate. This projectile is often inaccurate if The Enslaved is moving, as it will gradually approach The Beast/Unfettered should they be separated. Unlike The Beast, The Enslaved also takes quite a bit of knockback.

The second phase, The Unbound, is very different but mechanically still retains this support like enemy. It has ~30k hp, along with moving incredibly fast with a charge AI (or as I often refer to it, "linear AI", where the mobs runs forward in a straight line for a bit before turning). It loses its ability to heal, instead gaining the ability to vanish and charge. Thus, it acts a strong disrupter in the fight like the moderate pull spam does in the previous phase, hitting and running from seemingly nowhere and is quite easy to lose track of.

When these two simple designs are put together, it is more or less a match made in heaven. The Beast/Unfettered will always act as the main threat with The Enslaved/Unbound constantly trying to draw your attention from it. Because of how these two phases interact with each other as well, it opens the boss up to an amazing replayability factor because of the various strategies you can utilize to defeat it.

Let's take Warrior, as an example. As you may know, warscream's knockback is quite ridiculous. If you use it against The Enslaved, it is going to send it flying away from The Beast/Unfettered's attacks and you can center almost all of your attention on taking it down. While yes, it will still attempt to disrupt you via pull, this is easily recoverable and sometimes can even aid you in getting out of the way of The Beast/Unfettered's attacks. Thus, you will control The Enslaved in the back and solely focus on removing The Beast from the equation.

On the other hand, let's take a look at Mage. Because of how Mage inherently works with heal, and especially pulse, it can recover from chip damage rather effectively. While it will not be able to separate The Beast and Enslaved at the start of the fight due to a lack of knockback, it can simply wait for The Beast to teleport away and then focus down the Enslaved. While focusing the Enslaved/Unbound to remove them from the equation, the burst fire will be lightly chipping away at the Mage assuming they are smart about utilizing their range. They can utilize heal during this to negate that chip damage, and thus not have to worry about potential chip damage from The Unbound while dealing with the Unfettered's second phase.

But that can go both ways as well. A Mage can ALSO effectively use The Enslaved as a meatshield from The Beast due to their AoE from meteor and then healing back any damage from the Enslaved's projectiles or pulling them towards The Beast, transitioning them both phase 2. Then, the Mage can utilize teleport to their fullest extent to ensure they dodge both aggressive natures of The Unfettered and Unbound. Personally, I often go for the former in a melee/hybrid build and go for the latter in a spell build, since the former is often more forgiving mana wise due to The Beast not having a very fast attack rate or anything to allow for these pulse heals.

I could go on and on, truthfully, but you get the idea. No strategy is dominant over the other and it comes down to recognizing your own strengths and weaknesses, build wise or not. It's yet another simple fight that works amazingly to create one of the best bosses I have ever fought.

Spoiler: Geyser Pit

The TERA-Mech is a relatively fast melee boss with slow immunity. The boss has knockback resistance and is susceptible to that, but due to reasons we will get to you should be prioritizing positioning/mobility over anything else in this fight anyways.

It uses Charge as a tell/setup for its entire arsenal, and dodging any of them requires you to recognize all of them. The first is simple, being a single Charge into Push. The second is two Charges followed by a Multihit. The third is three Charges into a Push, followed by a Heavy Charge. The fourth combo is five charges into Heavy Charge+Multihit combo almost instantaneously. Since the Charge and Multihit happen together at the end, you will almost never get hit by it unless you panic and run straight towards the direction the Charge will shortly be heading in. This largely applies to the other combos as well, since Charge is one of the most predictable spells in the game when used in this way.
While you can know what combo is coming since the Charge timing varies between each combo, it is pretty unfeasible to do so. Instead, knowing and anticipating what each set amount of charges will do is far more effective.

The fifth and ultimate combo breaks this trend. It will start with three Charges into a Push followed by Heavy Charge as per usual, but will then do a Push->Heavy Charge two more times after that. This is followed by a Pull->Multihit combo three times as well, and after that another combo of Charge+Push->Pull three times. Finally, the combo ends with a triple Heavy Charge.

Despite how daunting this combo may seem, it is manageable. Unlike the other combos, this one is easily noticeable since the initial three Charges are far slower in comparison to any of the other combos. The Push->Heavy Charge is still manageable by either interrupting the Heavy Charge at a distance or closing the distance between you and the boss so it overshoots you, the Pull->Multihit is possible to avoid by utilizing the aforementioned ranged knockback to keep out of Pull distance, cancelling the momentum of the Pull with a movement spell, or timing a jump for when the Multihit comes out, and the end of the combo can be mitigated with the "cancelling momentum" stated above, though you want to avoid spamming it since this will put you in danger of interrupting/being sniped by the triple Heavy Charge.

The second phase is commonly referred to as a "self-destruct phase", though the technical term for this is "rage state". The boss is practically invincible in this form, and only has one, long spell combo that must be used before transitioning to the next phase via Self-Destruct. This is split into effectively five main segments with similar combos to the first phase. It will start with two Explosions followed by a Charge, then two Heavy Charges into two Push->Heavy Charges, then a repeat of both the Pull->Multihit and Charge+Push->Pull combo from the first phase, then five Heavy Charges, then three Heavy Charges+Explosions, and finally ending with two Explosions+Self-Destruct. The boss is a bit faster in comparison to before, but you can largely avoid all of these the same way you would have in the first phase. The exception is the new Heavy Charge+Explosion combo, which you absolutely must sidestep the Heavy Charge in order to avoid both it and the Explosion that happens while the boss flies.

Bar lag shenanigans, this phase lasts slightly over a minute. The issue that Self-Destruct phases can run into is not being engaging due to obviously not letting the player speed up the progress of the fight and instead just waiting. However, I do not believe this is the case since all of these combos are still quite lethal and require you to counter them effectively.

The third phase is a direct upgrade from the first phase, retaining the same main combos but gaining an Explosion at the end of the double Charge->Multihit and five Charges->Heavy Charge+Multihit comboes respectively. Along with this, it also gains an entirely new combo of four Charges->Pull->Pull->Explosion(*). It also is much faster in comparison walkspeed wise.

The ultimate has also changed and become even longer, though it is a similar pace to it. It will start with three Charges, followed by an Explosion->Push, then a Chargestack+Explosion, then another Explosion->Charge+Flamethrower twice, then an Explosion->Dual Flamethrower->Charge->Dual Flamethrower combo, and end with two Charges (it will use the first while flamethrower is still active, so it will not move) into a Charge+Explode. The Chargestack+Explosion requires you to close the distance between you and the boss as fast as possible, the flamethrower combos require you to put distance between yourself and the boss while accounting for the distance Charge will take them, and the end of the combo requires you to similarly close the distance or opt to go even further away from the boss to avoid the final blow.

All of these combos are entirely fair. They have varying timing that makes them erratic enough that you can't just brute force your way through with muscle memory in the first and third phases, requiring genuine reaction speed to all of them and acknowledging what to do and when. On its own, this boss would be worthy enough of an A tier placement, and that would be entirely fine, to.

But no, we have to go that extra mile.
During the fight, there will be minions that run around in a maze underneath the arena. They will eventually Self-Destruct and deal massive damage to you. To make up for mob pathfinding in Wynn being easily cheesable, i.e. the mobs having no real way to know how to get over to where you are and rely on sheer luck instead while hugging walls, the mobs spawn in roughly 5-6 different locations in the maze to ensure they have access to all of it. Along with this, they spawn in mass amounts and the maze itself has relatively straight forward pathways, despite the overlap. What this means is that they will be able to make it over to your location in mass amounts if you stay in one zone for too long, but have a very hard time catching up if you are constantly on the move.

Furthermore, there are certain safe zones you can stand in to avoid both the boss and the mobs. They are roughly 9*9 blocks surrounded by the maze, and this makes maneuverability on one safe spot difficult but very possible. In the situations where you are required to move out of a safe zone (most notably when the boss goes for Push/Flamethrower combos) you must account for where the largest cluster of these minions are to adjust which direction you will be heading to minimize danger as much as possible. Since the Self-Destruct has a relatively long time between activation and detonation (with a sound cue to go along with it), you can prepare/react to this with sound as well. Due to all of these factors, there is almost never a time where you will unavoidably have to take damage from a minion or the boss.

In turn, this design also prevents super heavy camping strategies while still benefitting you for playing at a decent distance if you are constantly ready or are moving between the safety zones. The boss will screw you over with its Charge/Pull combos if you just try to camp in one corner of the arena for the whole fight. You are safer and actively rewarded for fighting the boss while in these tight safe spots and moving accordingly.

In conclusion, it is the ultimate combination of arena awareness, positioning, dodging, etc. Nothing in this fight feels poorly designed unless you do not respect the rules the fight itself lays out to you in full, which the boss will then punish you accordingly. It is not unfair to various builds/playstyles, either, due to the inherent nature of the fight focusing on these factors over the ability to tank, spam cc, so on and so forth.


Ironic, isn't it? Well, I suppose there's no point in dwelling on a bug that no longer exists unless you try hysterically hard to break it. I'm happy to finally give you the recognition and respect you deserve.
Thank you for reminding me why I play this funny block game.

*This combo is probably in the first phase as well, but I have never seen it used there, so yeah.

Spoiler: A Tier

Spoiler: Lari

This basically sums up Lari's fight. She does little to no damage outside of mark for death and the area blast, and thus you can effectively afk the whole fight in a corner if you really wanted to.

BUT GOD DAMN IT IT'S FUN!

The fact that I even went out of my way to learn most of her move set should speak volumes to how much I genuinely enjoy fighting her, even if at the end of all it does not matter if I avoid the attacks or not because I can just sit there. An issue I have with "spectacle fights", which are fights that center around solely being lore fodder and/or are super flashy and "epic", is that they tend to rely purely on this "spectacle" aspect of it rather than having any mechanical challenges within it. As a result, these can end up being quite a bore if you do not enjoy these aspects of the fight enough to overlook it.

Lari's fight does not suffer from this issue: she is aggressive and makes the fight fast paced, her spell combos are all telegraphed and avoidable in most scenarios while still being challenging to avoid, and her unique attacks spice the fight up even more so you account for everything at once to avoid it all. The only real problem I have is mark for death, which I would much rather have it be a sort of homing AoE that has a short delay before it activates. This would give you time to avoid being hit by it with good usage of movement spells rather than being guaranteed damage. The potential problem I see with this is that it would be difficult to make a custom spell like that and have it still be able to hit you in the air and such.

On a somewhat unrelated note, her very nature of fighting fits her character, to. She relies purely on the power given to her by Orphion rather than having much of a strategy with her attacks. After all, she hasn't really ever needed a strategy when she hasn't played the offensive in an actual fight for like a millennium (somewhere around there I don't know I'm bad with dates).

Would Lari be a better fight if she was a genuine threat? For a lot of people, probably, but it doesn't matter too much to me. I will appreciate good mechanics when I see them.

Spoiler: Orphion

NOTE: Yes, I am that asshole that runs Nexus of Light at level 79-80 half the time.
No. I am not sorry.

Orphion is the only multiplayer boss that genuinely feels like it requires teamwork, and that is because of one mechanic: crystallization. As you are most likely aware, this will permanently freeze a player in place where they will not be able to interact with anything at all, and it occurs after Orphion loses ~10% of his health. It also has a chance to activate, and the chance lowers depending on how many players are left alive. The only way to escape said crystal is to have other players attack and free you from it, bar like wacky shaman totem shenanigans or something I'd assume.

Not only does this straight up require multiple people, but it also does not feel very forced in any way. First, the crystallized player themselves will get a warning that they will be getting crystallized soon. This gives them ample time to both inform their teammates and prepare to go to a good position for their crystallization. Naturally, they should look for a spot that is out of a blood ruin and (preferably) away from Orphion, though being close to Orphion is fine with tanky setups. Afterwards, their trust is placed into their teammates for them to come free them.

It's up to the rest of the players for what to do based on the crystallized players location. For example, having only one player go get a crystallized player on the opposite side of the arena is fine, because then the other players not crystallized can keep aggro drawn towards them to ensure Orphion doesn't fuck with said players. Likewise, everyone focusing the crystal at once is fine if they are near Orphion, as this ensures they do not get obliterated for being so close to him and not being able to do anything.

Another mechanic is the lightning strike, where an AoE will lock onto a certain player's location before hitting the ground. It's important to keep in mind everybody's locations during the boss fight further because of this mechanic, because you may otherwise walk straight into a lightning bolt and scream "that's some bullshit" when you get hit by it out of nowhere. I believe they also fixed the lightning striking a crystallized player now, since there was basically no denying that it was pure RNG.

It is also the only real boss fight where almost all the classes fit their intended roles: Mage is a healbot support, Shaman clears the ads with ease, Warrior draws Orphion's aggro and tanks it all or acts as a sub dps, and Assassin/Archer are the main sources of DPS. The only real issue I have with this is just due to Wynn's janky aggro system, i.e. whoever does the most damage (and it seems to be hits as well) in a short period of time will have the aggro on them. This makes it where Archers are generally the ones actually drawing aggro, because arrow storm will make Orphion have a deep seeded hatred towards you I guess. Even on my level 79 Archer, I often was the one drawing Orphion's aggro (though it was hard to see unless you were looking at it from far away, since he was just being permanently hitstunned in place). This is partially a problem with Archer's inherent design, but also is, as said, Wynn's aggro system being janky in practice.

Aside from actually feeling like genuine multiplayer content for a boss battle, the boss itself is pretty good. He has a flamethrower combo, multi-hit combo, and explode combo, usually indicated with non-lethal spells in advance (charge->explode, triple pull, etc.). Along with the above, the blood ruins are important for not just bringing Orphion over to a corner and sitting there the whole fight. The crystal launch also acts a great disrupter in the fight and sometimes even acts as a blessing for evading certain attacks, albeit at the expense of Archer.

On the other hand, the Parasite does feel quite underwhelming. It solely acts as a DPS test because the Sanitizing Void's bullshit true damage projectiles otherwise get involved, but I suppose it does make sense. A parasite is nothing without a host, after all.

In conclusion, I hope to see more mechanics like crystallization in regards to multiplayer content in the future, because these mechanics feel like genuine teamwork is needed over just "moar dps/healing". Orphion is a great fight because of such a mechanic existing.

Spoiler: Warden of Wisdom

This is in a similar boat with Challenge of the Blades and Psychomancer. It's a comedically chaotic fight but one that does not feel unfair in the slightest. The boss mostly just tp spams everywhere with a lethal attack at the end of it, requiring the player to locate the boss ASAP unless they want to get slapped out of nowhere. However, there are some genuine combos that the player can recognize and prepare for as well (ex. the Wave->Charge repeated three times or the Heavy Charges after the Teleport+Wave combo), and the fight can actively reward both playstyles of aggressive/defensive due to the minions only coming out at certain HP thresholds.

Speaking of which, the minions are great disruptors in the fight. They are relatively harmless in terms of raw power, but they make up for it via overlapping their teleporting with the Warden to ensure you try your absolute best to locate the Warden as fast as possible. The temporary particle effect+hitstun that applies if you kill one is also a minor punishment enough to leave the player disorientated briefly without feeling overly punishing, and still encourages killing them if you can recover from it quick enough. Lastly, the "Upcoming Attacks" requiring quick reactions and positioning while still accounting for all of this going on is just the icing on the cake.

Spoiler: Bob's Reincarnation

Housing one of the most diverse move pools of any boss, it's only natural that a fight like Bob's is indeed great, especially now that his stupid amount of health regen is gone.

Let's begin with the swords. Each sword has a relatively high amount of health, save for that of the thunder sword. The water sword acts as a support and is overall the most dangerous because of both projectiles and healing, the fire and air swords act as disrupters via flamethrower or multi-hit respectively, the earth sword acts as a support via debuffing the player, especially with how detrimental slowness can be, and the thunder sword acts as a kamikaze unit, using self-destruct if it lives too long. None of these swords feel particularly unfair when they appear, though it can be quite funny to see RNG decide your time has come and make them instantly spawn back in after killing them.

Moving onto the Archer phase, it will immediately use arrow storm more or less right at the start. This would be pretty bs if every sword did not spawn in immediately, because they often body block the arrows while you deal with them. Afterwards, it will always telegraph the storm with pull or charges prior to using it, giving you ample time to get a good distance away from Bob to strafe it. The only issue I have with this phase is the arrows phasing out of reality and becoming invisible 50% of the time, making it seem like you got hit out of nowhere by his melees.

The Mage phase is fine. It has a clear cooldown for when you can attack it after the projectiles, but it doesn't move much otherwise. When it does move, it's usually just a teleport with maybe a meteor follow up. Fairly straightforward.

The Assassin is terrifying because of how easy it is to lose track of. Almost all of its combos revolve around utilizing vanish and rapid movement to be able to get a sneaky multi-hit on them. It is vital that the player locate Bob immediately as a result.

Lastly, the Warrior phase, being the most predictable of all the phases due to charge itself being predictable when not stacked. However, Bob actively discourages interrupting his charges and instead strafing them due to the ultimate combo, which has pull during the charge stack. Interrupting him during it will result in getting pulled into what will almost guaranteed be a oneshot, while not interrupting it will harmlessly toss you into the air.

Thus, Bob overall is an engaging battle, with each phase offering something uniquely different to keep the fight fresh.

Spoiler: Robob

"Housing one of the most diverse move pools of any boss, it's only natural that a fight like Bob's is indeed great, especially now that his stupid amount of health regen is gone.

Let's begin with the swords. Each sword has a relatively high amount of health, save for that of the thunder sword. The water sword acts as a support and is overall the most dangerous because of both projectiles and healing, the fire and air swords act as disrupters via flamethrower or multi-hit respectively, the earth sword acts as a support via debuffing the player, especially with how detrimental slowness can be, and the thunder sword acts as a kamikaze unit, using self-destruct if it lives too long. None of these swords feel particularly unfair when they appear, though it can be quite funny to see RNG decide your time has come and make them instantly spawn back in after killing them.

Moving onto the Archer phase, it will immediately use arrow storm more or less right at the start. This would be pretty bs if every sword did not spawn in immediately, because they often body block the arrows while you deal with them. Afterwards, it will always telegraph the storm with pull or charges prior to using it, giving you ample time to get a good distance away from Bob to strafe it. The only issue I have with this phase is the arrows phasing out of reality and becoming invisible 50% of the time, making it seem like you got hit out of nowhere by his melees.

The Mage phase is fine. It has a clear cooldown for when you can attack it after the projectiles, but it doesn't move much otherwise. When it does move, it's usually just a teleport with maybe a meteor follow up. Fairly straightforward.

The Assassin is terrifying because of how easy it is to lose track of. Almost all of its combos revolve around utilizing vanish and rapid movement to be able to get a sneaky multi-hit on them. It is vital that the player locate Bob immediately as a result.

Lastly, the Warrior phase, being the most predictable of all the phases due to charge itself being predictable when not stacked. However, Bob actively discourages interrupting his charges and instead strafing them due to the ultimate combo, which has pull during the charge stack. Interrupting him during it will result in getting pulled into what will almost guaranteed be a oneshot, while not interrupting it will harmlessly toss you into the air.

Thus, Bob overall is an engaging battle, with each phase offering something uniquely different to keep the fight fresh."

This still applies, though the arena is larger to make it easier to avoid Bob. This is fair because, of course, Robob is faster than his original counterpart. Along with this, Robob also gains the funny ultimate that puts all of the other ultimates together, which can be avoided with well timed movement spells to cancel out the pull momentum.

Spoiler: Virus Doctor

"I have said in the past that the Plague Doctor is entirely fair to the player, and that still applies to the Virus Doctor. Every combo is well telegraphed in advance using push, pull, or charge. Push indicates that it is about to release an arrow storm and you should stay away from it as a result (circle strafing at close range with enough walkspeed works fine to), pull indicates that it is about unleash an explosion, and charge indicates it is about to use explosion once it lands (or start up the ultimate, which charges into explode repeatedly before exploding multiple times and pushing you away from it). The only way you would not know if one of these attacks is coming is if you are outside of pull or push range, which is highly unlikely unless you are an Archer.

The boss minions also do not have CCI, except for blind, meaning the same utility can still be applied to them as before for the most part. Warscream/Bomb Arrow/Arrow Shield to keep them constantly away from the Doctor, Ice Snake to slow them down on their way to the Doctor, and Smoke Bomb+Spin Attack stunlocking to render them near harmless while you focus on the Doctor.

For Shaman, this ends up being a double edged sword. You can render them almost harmless with the aura prison, but then you have a huge clump of them that you can be pulled into by either the doctor himself or the minions. With good positioning for the former and just good reaction speed with haul for the latter, however, this is not an issue, especially since the minions themselves do not do any real relevant damage aside from the self-destruct (yes, some of them have multi-hit, but this is primarily used to disrupt you and does practically no damage outside of hyperglass builds).

So, yeah, I could not be happier with the Virus Doctor getting the spell combos of the Plague Doctor. Even if you are not as big of a fan of Virus Doctor as I am, it is easily a massive improvement compared to the lame 'every ten or so seconds I will teleport and you will be intimidated by this' fight that was the original version."

Spoiler: Plague Laboratory

I have said in the past that the Plague Doctor is entirely fair to the player, and that still applies. Every combo is well telegraphed in advance using push, pull, or charge. Push indicates that it is about to release an arrow storm and you should stay away from it as a result (circle strafing at close range with enough walkspeed works fine to), pull indicates that it is about unleash an explosion, and charge indicates it is about to use explosion once it lands (or start up the ultimate, which charges into explode repeatedly before exploding multiple times and pushing you away from it). The only way you would not know if one of these attacks is coming is if you are outside of pull or push range, which is highly unlikely unless you are an Archer.

The boss minions also only have blind CCI, meaning the same utility can still be applied to them as before. Warscream/Bomb Arrow/Arrow Shield to keep them constantly away from the Doctor, Ice Snake to slow them down on their way to the Doctor or kite them away from the Doctor, and Smoke Bomb+Spin Attack slowness to render them near harmless while you focus on the Doctor.

For Shaman, this ends up being a double edged sword. You can render them almost harmless with the aura prison, but then you have a huge clump of them that you can be pulled into by either the doctor himself or the minions. With good positioning for the former and just good reaction speed with haul for the latter, however, this is not an issue, especially since the minions themselves do not do any real relevant damage aside from the self-destruct (yes, some of them have multi-hit, but this is primarily used to disrupt you and does practically no damage outside of hyperglass builds).

So, yeah, I could not be happier with the Virus Doctor getting the spell combos of the Plague Doctor. Even if you are not as big of a fan of Virus Doctor as I am, it is easily a massive improvement compared to the lame 'every ten or so seconds I will teleport and you will be intimidated by this' fight that was the original version.

Spoiler: Death Metal

Death Metal fixes most of the problems with the original Death fight, i.e. a bloated health bar and minion RNG. The health now feels fair and the minions spawn in immediately, giving you full control right off the bat.

To paraphrase what I had said in both my thread on new LI and Iboju's video, I almost always go for Witch Doctor/Snow Bear first. They both apply hitstun and can slow you, as well as being able to heal the boss in the former's case. Next, I turn my focus to Alkevo, who is the main threat as a minion on its own. He has pull, which means he will toss you around like a rag doll unless dealt with properly (and at worst pulled right into a Death multi-hit).

Next, I try to keep either Wired Beast or Guardian alive for as long as possible. They both don't move around a whole lot outside of charge, so they are integral for using them as meatshields against Death's projectiles. This is especially true for the arrow storm, which Death will use after three multi-hits in the first phase or just on the fly in the second phase. It's a very fast and thrilling minion heavy fight where the player can utilize said minions and multi-tasking to their greatest lengths.

Argaddon exists I guess.

Spoiler: Cybel

I will be doing Cybel a disservice here, but I simply don't feel the need to explain much here. Cybel is very well telegraphed with his charge+meteor combos, the cores are a constant threat and arena awareness is required at all times to deal with them, and that same arena awareness is needed to avoid the plates (alternatively, hitting the plates whenever they show up could be beneficial for the player depending on their setup). The only part that feels remotely bullshit anymore is the possibility of being pushed into a core, which, luckily, does not happen often.

Spoiler: Wybel

"I will be doing Wybel a disservice here, but I simply don't feel the need to explain much here. Wybel is very well telegraphed with his charge+meteor combos, the cores are a constant threat and arena awareness is required at all times to deal with them, and that same arena awareness is needed to avoid the plates (alternatively, hitting the plates whenever they show up could be beneficial for the player depending on their setup). The only part that feels remotely bullshit anymore is the possibility of being pushed into a core, which, luckily, does not happen often."

Spoiler: Rotten Passage

This is by far the most well designed swarm fight in the game.

Haros himself only has five spells: pull, teleport, meteor, explode, and heal. He doesn't have much of a setup for any of these attacks, bar the occasional pull to setup meteor or explode. He also has a support AI and rapidly fires ranged attacks, so fast in fact that it is simply not possible to avoid them without the proper walkspeed. Walkspeed is quite rare to come by in high amounts without crafteds at this level, and thus it seems quite unfair for a player to be able to avoid.

This is where the minions come into play, of which there are four different ones. There are the archers, who have charge to reposition but remain still otherwise, the routers, or are slow but tanky and can slow you, the soldiers, who are more or less standard melee mobs, and the assassins, who are the fastest and have multi-hit, but run away when you hit them.

It is important to kill the minions but still keep some of them alive at the same time. Because of Haros's healbot AI, his projectiles will be largely inaccurate while he is moving, along with the minions outright blocking his projectiles to begin with. However, Haros also can pull you into a swarm of them should you keep too many alive, leading to either death or a significant punishment (sometimes even being slowed, which is detrimental most of the time). Thus, the fight becomes a delicate balancing act of not killing too many of his minions but still killing enough of them to not be screwed over by them, especially in regards to the Archers.

However, I still do not like that Haros can heal in this fight. It's better than having him just have health regen, but in a fight where you are meant to take it slow and juggle everything at once, it just seems silly to have it where the boss can heal purely based off RNG. It would be nicer if there were minions that had heal instead, but to be fair, I can't really see which minion you could slap it onto without that minion then becoming overwhelming in comparison to the others, and adding heal onto an entirely new minion would be just as overwhelming.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention that if you're a Shaman then :)

Spoiler: Magmastream Core

To put it simply, the Magmastream Core is a fast paced fight with what is effectively a glass cannon. The boss has relatively low health for a boss altar at its level, only having a collective total of 100,000 health being spread over three different phases, but also has the damage to rival the gods. To give you an idea of how much damage this thing can dish out, its highest damage combo can deal a whopping ~12,500 damage or more (tested with a 0 defense Assassin with only 1-5 fire/earth defense). That is triple or even quadruple the amount of hp a player will have at this level. The boss is also highly aggressive, gaining more and more walkspeed and faster spell chains as the fight progresses.

Despite this, however, the boss is still well telegraphed and you can react quickly to what it does. Sure, you will have to make some split second decisions, but almost none of the combos feel unfair. They almost all revolve around using charge/heavy charge into other spells (or at the same time as other spells). Since charge itself is quite predictable and goes in a straight direction, you will know where the boss is headed when it goes to use it. The exception is, naturally, its charge stack, which this boss does use that to a comical degree. In fact, it charge stacks so much to the point where it starts flying above you. This is unpredictable because the amount of charges allow it to course-correct itself if you try to get away from it too early, but you will always be able to know when it's getting close to landing on you as long as you look up or hear it descending.

That being said, the one combo I take issue with is this combo: Explode->Flamethrower->Flamethrower->Charge+Explode.
As you can see, there is no telegraph before the explosion. It just comes out instantly with no way to react other than sheer guess work. While yes, this explosion deals by far the lowest damage of any attack in the fight (~500 with the mentioned testing), that damage is still a lot at this level (about 1/6th-1/8th of a player's HP or even more depending on the player's defenses). The rest of the combo is fine, but the explosion's damage should seriously be toned down so it doesn't feel like a cheap shot at the player.

Anyways, the boss would largely remain pretty easy if this was all it had going for it. Sure, it could one tap you at any moment, but you could easily react to all of its attacks. This is where the minions come into play.
The minions have ~8,800 health, which is actually rather high for a minion at this level that is designed like this, and it appears a maximum of seven can be on the field while three will spawn in immediately with the boss. They are even faster than the boss, dish out a similarly large amount of damage, and have heavy charge or flamethrower to constantly barge in and distract you from the fight.

Both of these oppressive mobs in the same room create a fight where breathing room is almost non-existent. They will constantly be going on the offensive and never backing down for even a moment, especially in the first and third phases.

Likewise, that is the exact way you beat this altar: play the offensive at all times. I have not mentioned it until now, but the boss and its minions both are susceptible to knockback and hitstun, as they only have blind immunity/resistance, and this will interrupt their charge combos. Because of that, you constantly should be on the move and attempting to apply this CC or punish the boss/minions whenever it is possible to do so. Trying to play slow in this fight will get you killed, or at the very least make this fight exceptionally harder, due to how aggressive these enemies are and the boss's sheer damage to along with it. Along with that, face tanking is non-existent without pumping sp into defense out the wazoo.

Because of that inherent nature, this creates an absolutely adrenaline pumping encounter that actively rewards the above. The fight usually does only last around 1-2 minutes tops, but every single second of it I am on the edge of my seat and actively engaged with everything going on, knowing that I could get absolutely obliterated in a moment's notice if I am not the dominating force. If you enjoy slower and more methodical playstyles, there is a good chance you will hate this boss with every fiber of your being (and this can be especially true for Mage/Warrior, since they are inherently slower), but personally I enjoy using both and will choose whichever I believe is more fit for the fight I am doing. In this case, it is of course that hyper aggressive approach.

If I had to make the comparison to something I have already discussed, I would say that the Magmastream Core is the polar opposite of Rotten Passage. That is a minion heavy fight that rewards patience and punishes aggression heavily (unless you're a Shaman because ORA ORA ORA), while the Magmastream Core is a minion heavy fight that actively rewards aggression and punishes passive playstyles. Naturally, neither allows for ridiculous replayability or anything, but for what they are intended to be they are phenomenal fights.

Spoiler: Bottomless Pit

Despite Panic's gimmick of 99% unavoidable damage every 5 seconds, it is still largely a fair and fun boss fight. This is because most of its attacks are well telegraphed: the triple teleport->teleport+explosion combo, the triple push->either explode spam or wave spam combo, or the double tp+push combo->teleport+wave combo. Even with the clones and snares in mind, good positioning and reactions to each tell allows you to do this all hitless, while still clenching your cheeks the whole fight while being at effectively oneshot range (unless you heal :salttroll:).

However, I still have issue with the ultimate, especially when you get near the 300,000 hp threshold and the special attacks come out at the speed of sound. It lasts way too long to feasibly avoid it all if it uses it this late into the boss fight without a decent bit of luck (bar Assassin because lmao vanish), and it also is really hard to see coming unless you are aware that a spam of particles with nothing happening = weakness/slowness being funny as usual (being the former here).

Also, I am EVER SO SLIGHTLY biased because lagging in this fight equals instant death. I know lag ruins everything, but when 7/10 of my deaths are due to server lag spikes (otherwise the ult probably), I begin to have a very slight issue with it. Still, this does not change the fact that Panic Zealot is a very well designed boss fight outside of the aforementioned issues.

Spoiler: Challenge of the Blades

Despite how chaotic Challenge of the Blades is, it never feels unfair. This is because the Blades only have three spells total: teleport, multi-hit, and vanish, with the only one that is actively being spammed being multi-hit. Along with this, the Blades have the "crawl" AI, where they will stop moving briefly before moving again. This makes their movement rather predictable as long as you keep the majority of them in front of you. You will have to divert your attention to multiple different places at once to remember where each blade teleported or could be in vanish after said teleport, but it is entirely possible due to the above.

I don't have much else to say for this one, either. It's simply a chaotically fun boss fight to go up against.

Spoiler: Aerie of the Recluse

Adamastor is relatively straight forward as a boss. She only has Heavy Charge/Charge, Meteor, and Push in her main arsenal, which she cycles between using. Due to the frequency of her meteors, it can feel relatively nice dodging them all with sidesteps or the like, but she is otherwise a relatively standard projectile enemy.

This is where Urdar factors into the fight. After being tossed around by Urdar's egg for a few seconds, he will pop out to get his car keys and start acting as a major disrupter to the fight. It is practically impossible to outrun him due to his sheer speed, not mentioning his ability to spam Pull into combos like Multihit/Chargestacking. On the bright side, he does a relatively minor amount of damage unless you have easily exploitable elemental defenses, and it is still feasible to avoid attacks like Multihit due to the brief delay after the Pull/lack of immunity to knockback/slow (though he does have knockback resistance, so it shouldn't be relied on). He also has relatively low health, so whether you keep him alive or not is up to your build. The only builds that are really forced to let Urdar live regardless of what they want to do is an earth damage build, since he is practically immune to earth damage.

However, you have to keep in mind that while you deal with Urdar's pressure, you will also have Adamastor still chilling in the back hurling projectiles at you. You also have to account for Adamastor's ability to reposition herself with semi-frequent usage of Charge, effectively splitting your attention between two places at once and complementing each other quite well.

After you either kill Urdar or let him transition back to his egg on his own, you will get a brief moment of downtime between needing to focus on both of them (~15 seconds). However, you can also lead Adamastor far enough away from Urdar to increase the downtime between when they are both working together, as the Self-Destruct will not go off if you are far enough away. To counter this and not ensure absolute cheese of the fight, Urdar will use Heavy Charge spam to fly around and inevitably lock onto your current location, usually harmlessly sailing by you without you noticing it until you all of a sudden get tugged in a seemingly random direction to be greeted by him. Still, the increase in downtime to ~30s is well worth utilizing this.

Thus, the fight becomes a cycle of attacking Adamastor and dealing with Urdar momentarily until you chip down Adamastor. It makes for a great 2v1 experience that doesn't feel super overbearing or plain due to this "cycling" mechanic.

Spoiler: Genesis-Revorse, featuring the greatest redemption arc of all time

As far as I can tell based off my testing, Genesis-Revorse has four main combos, possibly a fifth combo that is the ultimate that I have yet to see. These combos are as follows:

Slowness->Explode(*4, with a slight delay between each one)->Pull->Explode Spam
^It will always start with this combo.

Charge->Meteor

Charge->Explode->delay->Charge->delay->Explode

Charge->Charge. It seems it can follow up this combo with any other combo almost immediately, including the same one. For example, in one fight I had Genesis charge twice, then go into the charge->meteor combo immediately. In another, I had it where he charged twice, a slight pause, charge twice again, then a transition into the explode combo instantly after the fourth charge.

Genesis still retains his high reverse knockback and slow movement speed outside of this. Judging purely based on the combos alone, Genesis would be a relatively easy fight. Slightly move back for the first combo and time a movement spell to cancel pull's momentum, just dodge the meteor, and interrupt the charge with an attack that will not apply kb (ex. using KB like war scream because of Genesis's CCI).

This is where the new minion design is factored into the fight. The "Genemorphs" have three phases that cycle into each other, two of which are invulnerable. One of them will spawn instantly in phase two, however. The first of these phases is an egg that sits there, menacingly. The only spell it has is self-destruct to transition into its next stage. There are three eggs in total, and thus only four minions maximum can ever be active in the fight.

The second phase has 50k health, and, as stated above, one Genemorph will begin immediately in this stage at the start of the fight. Contrary to Genesis, these are incredibly fast, though they do not hit as hard with a single hit. More importantly, they have pitiful knockback resistance and have access to three spells: push, meteor, and charge. Because of the low knockback resistance, it is possible to temporarily dispose of them with knockback AoEs, though they will shortly bounce back with either their own speed or the charge. They probably have self-destruct as well, though I have never seen them actually pull it off because self-destruct is just inconsistent.

Thus, you have a choice. Do you kill the Genemorphs or split your attention further by keeping track of their position to not get hit by a meteor (keeping in mind the meteor does do a decent chunk of damage) and just deal with the possible consequences of push spell?

Well, the answer to that is more than just a "yep do this all the time" when we consider other factors yet to be discussed. The third and final phase of the Genemorph is also invulnerable, although it can still be impacted by CC (excluding most knockback). In contrast to the phase prior, they have such low walkspeed to the point where it may as well not exist. In this phase, however, they have explode, heavy charge, and meteor. They will always charge stack to move around, though it does a fairly low amount of damage regardless, and generally cycle between either for each charge stack (explode spam->charge stack->meteor spam->charge stack->repeat). This makes them act more as a moving arena hazard rather than a minion, if that makes sense.

With that in mind, which is better? Would it be better to keep them in their second phase, or would it be better to try and transition them to their third phase quickly?

Truthfully, neither is 100% the correct answer. If you pick the former, it means you will effectively be dodging and controlling at least two enemies, or up to five, at once. You will also be pushed around the arena, which can either be a blessing or a curse depending on the scenario. For example, it would be beneficial if they managed to push you right after Genesis pulls you, giving you a free "get the hell away" card. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it could push you directly into Genesis with bad positioning. On the other hand, transitioning them means you will have an area of the arena completely walled off from you, unless getting exploded into oblivion tickles your fancy, while dodging all of Genesis's attacks. It will allow you to focus your attention more on Genesis rather than splitting it between multiple different targets all at once.

Thus, which you choose comes down to either build or preference. For example, I would prefer to keep the minions alive with ranged playstyles, because being in close quarters with Genesis or having a Genemorph charge stack snipe me from afar would be quite painful (and ranged playstyles generally have more CC). On the other hand, I would prefer to transition the minions to the second phase with melee or slow hybrid builds the majority of the time. I am going to be up close and personal with Genesis, or at most a bit of a distance away from, anyways, so the close quarters dodging will feel comfortable and the charge stack has a higher chance to just pass over me in this regard.

You have full control either way, and that is why the new Genesis fight is amazing. It finally fixed its own problem of not having any real counter to ranged playstyles in a clever and unique way, going from a simple punching bag that hit decently hard to what it is now. Honestly, I would say this is the best fight in the Hive now, and I would even be willing to move it to S tier.

Spoiler: Psychomancer

Please do not hurt me.

Anyways, I love Psychomancer. Despite how "what the fuck" he is in nature, there is some predictability to his combos. He has a Teleport+Vanish combo, a combo of Teleports that increases in speed, a combo of Teleports that decreases in speed, a combo of Teleports that stays roughly constant in between each other, and a combo of Teleports that lets him Teleport twice instantaneously to return to his original position. Accounting for these and focusing on mobility during them until they end is the way to ensure the most safety while fighting him.

The ultimate also has become less RNG based and works in a similar manner to the Teleport combo that increases with speed, though it lasting longer before the Explosion spam at the end is the main difference between the two.

However, Psychomancer is overly punishing for melee builds, or more specifically Warrior melee. Unless it has sustain pumped out the wazoo, there is going to be basically no way to effectively dodge everything Psychomancer does due to the walkspeed penalty from blindness. I have had to unironically use galloping spurs on most of my melee builds to deal with him effectively (at least without pots, anyways).

Spoiler: Qira

Again, I'll largely be doing a disservice to Qira here, but her move pool is quite diverse while remaining (mostly) fair for the player to dodge or utilize effectively. For example, while the web spam in phase 1 can lead to some sticky situations, shitty pun fully intended, it also largely does not matter because of Qira's healbot AI and her shooting her own minions. To a lesser degree, even Qira's really funny ultimate EXPLODE->TELEPORT->REPEAT 20,000 TIMES combo in her second phase is avoidable by strafing in a tight circle in between where she will tp to and from. The minions also all serve purpose as disrupters, whether that be with wave, heavy charge nuking you, or the like.

It's once more a fight I can't really describe why I like so much like the others, I just kind of do. I probably had some justifiable college essay I wrote on it in the past, but I probably forgot.

 

Spoiler: I had to put CoW here due to character limit.

CoW begins stalking you the moment you walk into the cave. This is indicated by both the uneasiness your character feels and his physical presence there. When you walk a short distance, you will hit a trigger point for him to appear a decent distance behind you, watching, before disappearing back into the wall. He will then greet you directly face to face, still observing before walking back to the tunnel he crawled out of and summoning some pesky mobs t7o halt your progress temporarily.

Continuing further, CoW's presence grows stronger before you take a drop into a large space within the cave. One would assume this is the boss room, and CoW does indeed come to greet you once more. However, CoW instead summons an entire army of corrupteds for you to fight against. There are assassins, fast melee mobs with low health, soldiers, medium speed and health melee mobs, warriors, slow melee mobs with high health, two mages, who are there to heal their comrades, and a single archer in the back to snipe you. This is still not very impressive from an actual gameplay standpoint, but it superb from the sheer spectacle of it.

After that, you will continue down the cave to a dead end. CoW, with one final trick up his sleeve, then causes the floor underneath you to collapse as you enter his lair.

CoW has 150,000 health, only one phase, and has low knockback resistance. He also only has pull and multi-hit as his spells. To compensate, he is fast in terms of both walkspeed and attack speed. If he touches you, there is an almost guaranteed chance you will be hitstunned into oblivion unless you use a spell to get him off you.

The solution to beating CoW is quite simple. Just spam CC, right? And you would be correct. All you need is a build with good mana regen and intelligence to spam this CC willy nilly and you will come out on top.

But when you use a build that can not do that, you begin to notice small details that ensure CoW is as fair as possible. This is also why CoW to this day has remained one of the most well designed bosses in the game.

Let's start with the obvious. Aside from CoW's sheer speed, the main threat of the fight is pull. Naturally, this closes the distance between you and him, and if you do not cancel it out he will speed over to you. In one of his combos, i.e. what I consider his "ult", he also will pull you into multi-hit. Said ult is indicated by first being spam pulled over to him, followed by a pull into multi-hit three separate times. Otherwise, pull is used as a setup for the multi-hit rather than both being combined together.

The first thing you may notice that CoW's range to pull you is only the standard twelve block pull distance. Even when CoW is a decent distance away from you, you may see the menacing white particles happen and nothing happens afterwards. This means it is possible for us to save our knockback utility for right when we see the white particles occur, as then we have a chance to knock CoW out of pull range before it even becomes a problem. This is particularly effective for Archer and Warrior, the former having stupid high range+kb to begin with and the latter having warscream, especially if more than just the initial kb hits him.

Let's assume that fails, or is not possible simply due to CoW's position in the arena. CoW will almost never pull you directly into him (an exception being something we will get back to later). He will pull you close to him, but it will be in front of his current position rather than straight into him. It only appears to be directly into him because his speed closes that distance instantaneously. That makes a well timed stun counter the pull, i.e. Ice Snake or Spin right as you get pulled to him. Even a well timed Uppercut can apply here, as the launch upwards will of course render CoW immobile briefly. Spin would be a safe bet anyways because of blind, but it is more mana efficient to use Ice Snake over TP in this case, unless it is the ult.*

If both of these fail or are not feasible, you can also simply use a well timed movement spell to cancel out pull's momentum. This applies to any class in any scenario where pull is present. It will not be as efficient or safe as the two other options if they are available (excluding Assassin, cause vanish lmao), but it still will work.

That raises the next problem: controlling CoW while the pull is not in effect. Clearly, if you are holding onto your mana for these situations, there is not much you can do to stop CoW's advance other than melee. To a degree, this is true, but it is still manageable.

Let's talk arena design for a moment. Most arenas in Wynn are perfectly flat terrain, maybe with slight elevations with slabs and whatnot. This is primarily because it would be piss easy to abuse boss AI if this weren't the case. CoW's arena is slightly different than that status quo, as there are two ice patches in the arena that can be utilized (which ice is only ever utilized in Theorick's fights).

Ice slows you down, obviously. However, it ALSO slows down CoW's movement as well. If you are positioned on the ice with CoW, a constant stream of melee attacks regardless of attack speed and range will prevent him from catching up to you because of his movement being penalized. The positioning will vary slightly between attack speeds, i.e. you'd preferably want Super Slow attack speed to hit him as far as possible while on the ice so the cooldown in your attacks does not cause him to speed up fast enough off the ice, but it holds true.

That being said, the issue with such a tactic is that pull has a higher chance of pulling you straight into CoW, regardless of using a CC spell as stated earlier or not due to the ice's momentum. To be fair, it's a rough 50/50 chance because the ice can also just make you slip and slide past CoW as well, but it still exists.

The only true problem I have with CoW's fight is that the minions are mostly irrelevant. Sure, they can build up some chip damage, but that's about it. There's not much you can really do to make them relevant, though, so it's fine.

Otherwise, CoW is a fight where everything is near perfect. He is one of the only bosses where all of this theoretical, wacky shit comes into play with arena design, all of his attacks are reactable regardless of the player's build in question and well telegraphed despite his fast paced nature, and the build-up to the fight is a spectacle to behold. It is a timeless masterpiece of a fight that showcases how even the simplest of boss design can be utilized to its utmost potential to create a wonderful experience, very similar to that of Prison of Souls and Bovine Barn in S tier.

And yet, I can't place it in S tier. It's quite a trivial matter after all of that, truthfully, but there is the elephant in the room yet to be addressed.

No matter how you spin it, being required to use a helmet to fight CoW is a negative factor of the fight. At best, the helmet will act as a slap helmet if your gear is just that terrible for this fight. At worse, it will make your build worse tenfold, possibly even breaking it depending on the setup. Out of any quest helmet, the most intrusive one for whatever reason was left completely untouched (bar old Realm of Light's helmet, which was even more intrusive). I do not care if it fits the lore or whatever. Please, just swap it to some random item we need to keep in our inventory or something.

As soon as that happens, CoW will be fit for the S tier placement he rightfully deserves.

*CoW now has slow/blind resistance, which makes the timing and usage of teleport/ice snake/spin/smoke bomb a lot more important. Otherwise, this explanation is still spot on for me since if you are worrying about the timing the other stuff still applies, but it is worth noting that at the very least.

Spoiler: B Tier

Spoiler: Canyon Colossus

NOTE: Of any boss in the game, bar 1.20 Corrupted Theorick, I have fought The Canyon Colossus the least. While I have fought it with every class if we include some raids in the beta, I have realistically only done it on Warrior/Assassin (as in I have only done it on these two out of beta). Make of that what you will.

I know the comparison has been made 20,000 times, but it certainly does just feel like The Eye 2.0. Most of its attacks are well telegraphed in advance, but you can just back up to avoid the majority of them. I like the addition of the arena itself becoming more of a hazard in phase 2, however, as this makes you actively have to switch between attacking certain parts of the boss (as well as the mouth's arrow storm). However, you end up still just kind of wailing on the mouth anyways because it is far more dangerous with its spells. Lastly, I do enjoy the third phase as well, since it rewards both a slow playstyle (only attacking when you attack) and aggressive playstyle if you have the sustain for it, which the latter usually applies for most parties with a dedicated healer.

However, my issue with it still just feeling like a solo boss with multiplayer tacked on applies here, similar to the Grootslang. Admittedly, the colossal cores at least attempt to do this by making you want to prioritize keeping certain players alive for that silly puzzle thing at the end, but it still just feels like it could be largely ignored otherwise in regards to teamwork (and in my TCC raids, that has been the case). There's still not many actual multi-player mechanics present in the fight itself other than "moar dps/healing".

I still do enjoy fighting the boss despite this, though. It's not amazing or anything, but the mechanics to be a good fight are all still there.

Spoiler: The Eye

I am assuming this will be the most controversial placement on the list, bar maybe Psychomancer or Lari, but oh well.

The Eye feels monotonous to fight in its first two phases. The greatest issue with having a boss that can NEVER move is that it often makes the fight incredibly repetitive. When a boss's attacks can only come from one, single direction, it becomes piss easy to just back up, wait, and then slap the boss. To be fair, that on its own is not much of an issue, because that just means the boss is well telegraphed. The problem is The Eye's collective hp for these two phases makes me lose engagement during the fight as it continues, because 1.6 mil HP of literally doing this over and over and over and over again is boring.

This is why I find the third phase to be amazing, because the attacks are now coming from all directions all the time for you to dodge. You have the purple circles being sped up to close you off from camping the corners of the room, the hole spawning more and more often to avert your attention from The Eye, the looming threat of the gazers constantly streaming in from the back, the Wretch demanding your attention any time is on the field, and, of course, The Eye's attacks now being sped up to a degree where you will be punished severely for a misstep. This phase actively requires my attention and thus makes the fight feel fast paced and fun, despite having around the same HP as the previous two phases (1.5 mil vs. 1.6 mil).

I absolutely despise the last phase with every fiber of my being, though. It's just underwhelming if you can tank through it or it's an unpredictable nightmare that is the bane of glass cannon's existence, especially that almost entirely RNG "fuck you" arrow storm+tp combo. It is simply not fun in the slightest bit.

If the third phase didn't exist, The Eye would be either a D or C tier. However, because I feel actively engaged in the third phase and am having the time of my life, it has been bumped to B tier.

...Oh right, those two survive sections.
They exist, I guess.

Spoiler: Charon

Charon's gimmick is pretty neat, albeit a bit janky. Even though most people just end up spamming Graken, there is a lot of different strategies you can play around with when using the other soldiers.

The Slayers are amazing at killing the Drudges due to their thunder weakness, and can hold their own against the Warriors as well. Usually, I'll end up using them if I see a lot of Drudges spawn at the start of the fight, because it will dominate them. They work especially well with Warriors, since the Warriors will kill the Undead Warriors/Warlords while they will take out the Drudges.

The Defenders are basically a hard counter to Warlord RNG at the start of the fight. They can not only 1v1 them, but are so superbly tanky that even if they get swarmed by tons of enemies at once it will take a bit of time before they die. They also are invaluable for drawing aggro onto themselves at the start of the fight, allowing for some quick and clean kills once you get 2-3 of them and start summoning other soldiers. The downside is that the Defender's themselves have a "cooldown" where they must run back to their spawn before attacking again, but this is fine because of the aforementioned aggro drawing (and their range to actually go kill something is quite large). Easily the most well designed soldier in the fight.

The Warriors hit like a nuclear missiles when fighting either the Undead Warriors or Warlords, dealing so much damage to the point where they could almost 1v1 either. They also can be reasonably spammed, so when used in conjunction with the Defenders you can get a mass army of these glass cannons no problem. This is countered by both their survivability, as they are slow and effectively glass cannons, and their inability to properly fight the Drudges, who mostly appear in swarms and are resistant to earth anyways.

The Scouts are the only units I would argue are inconsequential to the fight. Despite how spammable they are, they do little to no damage against anything (even the Drudges). Their knockback to enemies also draws out the fight way longer than it should. However, they still can be utilized to rush down or snipe Charon due to Charon's air weakness and their speed. Due to the janky AI, which we will get back to in a moment, this doesn't happen how you want it to most of the time, though.

Lastly, there is of course Graken, the jack of all trades. However, I would say Graken is a bit overtuned for only having a 14s cooldown. His actual damage and stuff is fine for what is effectively a trump card, but you can reasonably spam him and win eventually.

I would prefer if Graken was a unit separate from the cooldown of the rest of the units and then had his cooldown increased, ex. Graken has a 30s cooldown (that also applies at the start of the fight so you can't just insta summon him lol) but you can still utilize the spawns of the other soldiers. Alternatively, make it where you need to kill a certain amount (stronger minions = more value) of undeads before being allowed to summon Graken. While this doesn't fully fix the spam Graken issue, since you would still just summon him off cooldown whenever possible, it would discourage solely relying on him.

That all being said, the issue with Charon's fight overall is just that it relies on the mob AI doing what you want it to do. Needless to say, Wynn's AI isn't exactly the greatest in the world, and thus there is a large RNG factor in your strategies. For example, I have had it on multiple occasions where I will summon, say, a Warrior, and they will immediately make a straight beeline for Charon for no reason and get absolutely clapped by mobs spawning near him. It is jank because of that, but still overall pretty fun due to the strategies still generally working out in the end.

Spoiler: Corrupted Witherhead

Corrupted Witherhead is a direct upgrade from Witherhead mechanics wise. She is much faster with her pull->arrow storm->arrow storm combo and the wall mechanic for blocking said storm is much more punishing since it takes a lot longer for a wall to respawn. It actively rewards you for utilizing them to their greatest extent rather than spamming them.

Spoiler: Corrupted Hashr

Corrupted Hashr fixed the issue I have with the current Hashr, i.e. a lack of aggression in the second phase. He uses his charge combos much more often to create a fast paced and engaging fight. Not much else to say outside of that, though. It's just a pretty fun fight.

Spoiler: Slykaar

Slykaar is probably the best dungeon boss from an overall standpoint (excluding his variant, of course). At the start, there are three different slimes that utilize heavy charge and push. One of these slimes is Slykaar while the other two are either a large clump of minions or the invulnerable healing slime (pink one), Slykaar being the one with more health.

As a result, you can control who you will be dealing with to a decent degree. For example, I tend to try and take out the two supporting minions on low walkspeed builds asap, so that way I don't have to deal with getting shoved everywhere and wasting mana on movement spells. Other times, I keep the two supporting minions alive while only focusing on Slykaar so I can use them as both meatshields from Slykaar's projectiles and activating manasteal/lifesteal. Occasionally, I'll just not give a damn and focus all three at once just because I can.

Slykaar himself is rather straightforward afterwards, simply teleporting/vanishing and having a clear cooldown in his projectiles where you can safely approach him. However, this is also where I take issue with the fight. Slykaar's teleport does ludicrous amounts of damage. I don't know if it's because of earth/water weakness or what, but he was dealing ~400 damage a teleport with around 20 defense investment on a literal Warrior (including war scream). For reference, that's around a fifth-sixth of the average health a player has at that level. Most players will be probably investing more into defense than that, but holy bovine.

Spoiler: Corrupted Slykaar

"Slykaar is probably the best dungeon boss from an overall standpoint (excluding his variant, of course). At the start, there are three different slimes that utilize heavy charge and push. One of these slimes is Slykaar while the other two are either a large clump of minions or the invulnerable healing slime (pink one), Slykaar being the one with more health.

As a result, you can control who you will be dealing with to a decent degree. For example, I tend to try and take out the two supporting minions on low walkspeed builds asap, so that way I don't have to deal with getting shoved everywhere and wasting mana on movement spells. Other times, I keep the two supporting minions alive while only focusing on Slykaar so I can use them as both meatshields from Slykaar's projectiles and activating manasteal/lifesteal. Occasionally, I'll just not give a damn and focus all three at once just because I can.

Slykaar himself is rather straightforward afterwards, simply teleporting/vanishing and having a clear cooldown in his projectiles where you can safely approach him."

This still applies, albeit just faster paced. I also greatly enjoy the addition of the unique arena attacks, as it spices up the fight quite a bit to try and keep Slykaar's location and their explosions in mind. I also like the ending attack because it fits Slykaar's character to have one final, desperate trick.

Spoiler: Theorick

A very simple but decently tough fight at level, Theorick primarily uses his specters and the ice around the arena to slow you down when you try to get near him. Along with this, he attempts to confuse the player by applying blindness with one of the specters teleporting, along with just teleporting a lot himself. Funnily enough, playing aggressively against Theorick is what you want to do despite this, as it prevents him from teleporting immediately when you try to approach. It doesn't feel unfair most of the time, even on melee setups, and is just a fun bout with the husk that Theorick is now.

Spoiler: Corrupted Theorick

For the most part, the same stuff said about Theorick applies here. However, due to his additional increase in speed and his burst fire in the second phase, utilizing the Specters and waiting for Theorick to do his thing due to his more frequent usage of Push slip and slide+Slowness if you stick around him too long is a more viable options than the original fight, which is neat. According to @Treebeard68 in a previous reply on this post, Corrupted Theorick has Arrow Storm/Heavy Arrow Storm in these phases as well. I have genuinely never seen him use this move before, even after attempting to sit in the boss room for around 8+ minutes straight, but if it does exist then it most likely can be countered in a similar fashion with the Specters body blocking.

Spoiler: Theorick (AHC Variant, which I refer to as "Prime Theorick")

I refer to this as "Prime Theorick" because it is roughly what I envisioned Theorick to be like in his prime myself, utilizing his ice magic to its fullest potential. He has a lot of flashy spells that mostly just temporarily debuff you and aren't much of an issue, but hey it's still cool to see. It's also fun just slip sliding around the arena while he does his spell combos, though I will acknowledge that he uses that new arrow storm combo a bit more than I would like him to. Hell, sometimes he just spams it, but it's not enough to ruin the fight for me since it's kind of a patience fight anyways.

Spoiler: Maxie

Maxie's fight is a pretty bread and butter 2v1, if you will. You have a ranged attacker in the background who can use arrow storm and teleport, with a melee enemy constantly on the aggressive and acting as a disrupter. The disrupter will multi-hit spam, explode spam, or pull spam, depending on which you get. Personally, I often go for the sniper in the back first to minimize possible RNG with the tp+arrow storm combo, but going for either really works. Doing this requires quite an aggressive approach to the fight and trying to be constantly up in the snipers face, while the opposite requires you to kite around the disrupter to ensure there is good distance between you and the sniper at all times (along with watching out for the thunder clouds above you).

Maxie's phase is meant to be kind of a joke please don't take it seriously.

Like I stated, it's fairly basic for a 2v1 bout, especially for endgame standards, but still a lot of good fun.

Spoiler: Solar Vanguard

The first phase of Solar Vanguard can be largely underwhelming. He does have some neat explode and meteor combos, but it may also just spam the flamethrower combo because it is funny. However, that second phase is largely why Solar Vanguard is here. That charge->explode combo is terrifying, but still remains entirely fair to dodge by sidestepping at a distance repeatedly. Again, it's another fight I can't really describe in great depth why I enjoy it or anything, I just do.

Spoiler: Spirit of Gale

Alright, we can all acknowledge that Gale's fight is just kinda supposed to be comical. She just zooms into the stratosphere and pulls you along with her for the ride, but as a result of that almost always misses 90% of her attacks unless you interrupt her during it. It's still fun to just say "weeeeeee" as you get rocketed, but there's not much else to really talk about in regards to her.

Spoiler: Oceanic Judge

I think that the Oceanic's Judge wave and teleport combos are fun to dodge.

Yeah that's like literally all I have to say.
I wish I could go into more detail here, but that's all there it is to it.

Spoiler: Sunrise Canyon

Alright, let's get this out of the way. Screw the invisible arrow bug. The amount of times I've gotten a jumpscare from being hit by seemingly nothing hitting me is more than the amount of times I have malded over Redbeard in the discord.

Outside of that, Luke is quite fair, albeit terrifying because of how much damage he deals. There are very clear times for when you should go in for some damage and then dip out, especially when he switches to bursting in his second phase. The arrow storm, for the most part, only comes out when he goes to do some charges as well, making it easily reactable as long as you prepare. I can see why some may find this fight boring, because with stuff like "heavy melee esque" (where you do not have anywhere near enough speed to strafe properly unless you use GALLOPING SPURS) the fight will take eons to complete, but the simple fact that the fight can end in a literal instant with bad timing is enough to keep me engaged throughout the whole encounter.

Alternatively, any ranged playstyle known to man kind will counter Luke, despite him being the one with the gun. The power of circle strafe is too strong.

Spoiler: Corkus Accipientis

The first, fourth, and fifth phases are fine. They're fairly straightforward, with push->charge, triple arrow storm, or "why are you running" respectively. The second and third phases are quite fun to avoid though, one having a teleport->meteor combo while ending with an explosion and overall rewarding aggression, while the other is aggressive with its charge->multi-hit combos.

Spoiler: Mecho CoW

"It's quite easy to avoid the pull combo as a result. Vanish still remains stupid effective at dodging due to breaking aggro, Warrior has warscream to send CoW flying (alternatively, shift uppercut works to since the pull will then fling you into another universe), Archer has it's entire toolkit of spamming kb, and Mage has ice snake+tp (CoW pulls you to the point where you will be directly in front of him but not inside him if he is not knocked back, meaning the 1 second freeze of Ice Snake is enough if timed correctly if you can't spam it).

Shaman, however, is a lot more tricky. You still have access to your aura prison, and as a result, you can push CoW with your totem away from you so you don't get pulled into him that quickly. The other way is to just spam haul and pray, which is generally what you do for if you forget to push your totem when he does the multiple pulls.

Now though, the issue people seem to be having is that they are pushing Mecho CoW into a wall and locking him there. For Assassin, this is fine, because vanish exists. The same applies to Mage because it just doesn't really have knockback to begin with. For the other three though, this is a hinderance and you should be trying to avoid it, because then you can't knock it back properly when it preps its pull combos. Sure, you can use movement spells to get away (especially for Archer), but it's just more consistent to use CC for these three.

All that being said, is Mecho CoW still easy? Well, yes, aside from a glassy Shaman or the like I suppose. CoW is fair even with the low mana you could possibly have when you fight him if your CC is well timed, and that same logic applies here except you probably will end up having way higher mana sustain in comparison to before. But I'm happy that it is, because it would actually be bullshit if it were to be buffed to the degree of where you couldn't easily counter it with this CC without overhauling the design."

To further build off this, I believe that CoW's simplicity is much more suited for a boss in the early-midgame rather than in the endgame like Mecho CoW. Mecho CoW also removed the ice from the arena which I praised so hard earlier (and the buildup, obviously), so it gets less enjoyment for me because of that as well. Still pretty good as a boss on its own though.

Spoiler: Mummyboard

"The Mummyboard still has a weird flaw that brings down the fight a lot for me, i.e. Mummyboard's aggro range is one of the lowest for a boss in the game. This makes it easy to avoid Mummyboard's entire arsenal, and mind you it's not a difficult arsenal to avoid, by just running in the opposite direction of where it is. Yes, it can teleport back into the aggro range on occasion, but that usually doesn't happen.

I wouldn't have a problem with this if it didn't make it so heavily in favor of Archer. I understand Archer is supposed to have the range advantage over the other classes, in fact that's the main reason Archer is so ridiculous right now along with the second highest possible DPS in the game, but being able to just sit at the other side of the arena and avoid all threat just should not be a thing. Technically, every class can do this as well, but they all will pale in comparison to the sheer damage Archer does while doing so.

Realistically, this applies to all wide, open arena boss fights like this in Legendary Island, but I bring it up for Mummyboard since it just feels like its aggro range is a lot lower. Whether or not this is just a minecraft limitation or not, I have no clue, but either way I believe that the bosses in these open arenas in LI should be able to see the player regardless of distance if it is possible for them to be able to do so.

With the aggro range rant out of the way, I'll discuss actual mechanics now. Mummyboard largely feels the same, but with better telegraphed flamethrowers. Each flamethrower will be used either with a charge or a series of teleports, along with what I presume to be his ultimate in his second phase being telegraphed with spam pushes as well.

The charge flamethrower comes out (relatively) slow and you can back up to avoid it. The series of teleports with the flamethrower is meant to disorientate you before you realize where the flamethrower will be coming from, often putting Mummyboard at a distance enough away to where you will still avoid the flamethrower if you are quick to locate it after the teleports. And the push spam, well, that's such a glaring red sign of "get near me and you die" that you should only be getting hit by the teleports with the flamethrower after the push spam. In other words, it usually ends up being your fault if Mummyboard is able to land these flamethrowers, minus the unlucky occasion where it may teleport right on you with the series of teleports.

That being said, Mummyboard also seemingly does nothing in some of its combos. You see the particles, but then...nothing happens. This is because these are both slowness and weakness respectively, which are some of hardest spells to visibly see in the game until you get the random status from them. This isn't much of an issue since a good chunk of Mummyboard's spell combos you can avoid by just walking away, but it can be annoying when you seemingly get these debuffs out of nowhere.

Overall, I'd say Mummyboard has went from a mediocre starting boss to a pretty alright one, probably even good one. Aside from the aforementioned problems with the aggro range and lack of real telegraph for the debuffs, I don't have much of an issue with it and its simple but fair to the player. I'm not expecting some insane boss for the Bronze Division or anything, and Mummyboard fits the first boss in it quite well."

Spoiler: Matrojan Idol

"Even as different as each phase of Idol may be, though, there's only so much you can do in a fight with that many phases to make it enjoyable for that long.

Phase 1 falls under the more obnoxious side of it. I don't have a problem with needing to position Idol properly so you can stand at the opposite end of the arena to avoid its flamethrower. I have a problem with Idol being able to pull you into the flamethrower itself. While yes, it usually will use the pull to either setup the flamethrower or just as the aftermath of the flamethrower, Idol will pull you into the flamethrower itself as a part of its spell combo (the second time it pulls you, generally). For anyone except Assassin, this is pretty much unavoidable damage unless you get lucky, because the tracking and then hitstun of flamethrower will prevent you from being able to get out of its range unscathed. Just remove the ability for it to pull mid-flamethrower and I have no issue with this phase.

Phase 2 is fine. You get pulled way in advance to the meteor coming out and have plenty of time to avoid it.

Phase 3 I find quite enjoyable because jumping over the multi-hits after you get pulled towards Idol is quite satisfying to do, especially if you manage to do it while Idol is vanish. Yeah, it's not very hard to do as a result of just multi-hit inherently not being that dangerous if you know its there and it doesn't have good setup, but its still satisfying to time your jump over it regardless.

Phase 4 is the worst boss phase in all of Legendary Island and you can not convince me otherwise (Yahyabot is cheating). I have never been a fan of the charge+pull spam just trying to make the player take fall damage, but now it has an explosion that it will pull you into while flying around. With a well timed movement spell outside of escape, it is possible to avoid this, but it just feels like a way to get in some cheap chip damage like the fall damage. If I had to choose between having one or the other, I would personally prefer dealing with being flung 20 blocks high as opposed to the explosion. Again, both are obnoxious to me, but that would be the lesser of the two evils since you'd have to overhaul the entire design of this phase otherwise.

Phase 5 is solid as well. The heavy charges are heavily telegraphed, so there should be no reason you are getting hit by it unless you are purposefully trying to interrupt it or tick damage decides to ruin your day.

Phase 6's arrow storm is fine. Pretty easy to avoid by just circle strafing despite the push into a wall prior, but there's not much else to the phase besides that. Maybe giving it more movement options would make the arrow storm a bit less predictable.

Phase 7 is fine now that the heal has been removed, which was my entire problem with the original seventh phase. Now, it's just a mildly annoying teleport spammer, but I don't mind it that much since you have to actively be letting it live for it to start going absolutely berserk with the teleport spamming.

Phase 8's sole purpose is to ruin your day by applying debuffs prior to phase 9, so it's pretty meh overall since it relies on phase 9 to do the dirty work for them.

With that in mind, phase 9 would theoretically be the hardest phase for classes that can not properly deal with these debuffs. With slowness active, it will be pretty much be impossible to outrun the movement speed of phase 9, which is why phase 9 does not have CCI. Because of that, its just another phase that is fine, albeit somewhat terrifying.

The baby is still hysterical and poses no real threat except for rainbow weapons. It is meant to be a joke phase and it still is.

Thus, Matrojan Idol overall is pretty good. Most of its actual difficulty will still come from the possibility of being walled by elemental defenses, but otherwise I don't have much of an issue with it other than the phases I mentioned. I certainly don't consider it to be better than any of the other bosses in Legendary Island, excluding almost all of Yahyabot, but that doesn't make it an abomination of nature. It just exists and it's whatever."

This still applies, except the damage on the explosion for phase 4 has indeed been nerfed to the point where you can ignore it (thank you Selvut, very cool). I don't really mind the pull+fall damage mechanic too much anymore, either, so it's whatever as a phase. I also moved into a tier higher than Matryoshka Idol simply because I enjoy that Matrojan is more fast paced.

Spoiler: warm_fleris

The new fleris is a massive upgrade in comparison to the original fight, now having devastating charge->explode/meteor combos with flamethrower tacked on as well. While the first phase is quite slow and predictable, the phases gradually speed up, along with the addition of the upcoming attacks to force you to move around constantly to dodge it. I don't really like the final phase though, because it is effectively melt or be melted. If it's alive for more than about 10 seconds, it will just start spamming the ever loving bovine out of arrow storm and will not stop, effectively making it a DPS check. Still, the phases prior are enjoyable regardless.

That being said though, I could not blame you for moving this into the "whatever" tier, because it gets absolutely destroyed by spell spam or the like. Seriously, it took me like three minutes to fight it with at level melee in comparison to at level spell spam, where it took like 30-40 seconds. I know spell spam in general will surpass melee past the early game, but god damn it's usually not that huge of a difference. I suppose this could be in part due to spell spam weapons inherently being water orientated (or at least partially) for most of the classes at this point, which the boss is weak to, but man. I could see a health buff being justified, though I would tone down the damage a bit if that were to happen.

Spoiler: Your Reflection?

MIRROR MAN 2.0. has a decent amount of combos it can utilize in its fight. It can utilize close ranged attacks like the Vanish boost into triple Multihit combo, or more projectile based combos like the teleporting Arrow Storm. All of these combos are distinctly telegraphed and can be reacted to accordingly, and have enough variety for the fight to not feel mundane. It also fits the themeing of being able to utilize all class abilities since it is "Your Reflection?", after all. The only issue I have with it is that the Teleport->Meteor combo just seems to be nonexistent for some reason (I have legit only seen it once), though that may just be spell combo RNG being funny. Otherwise, it's a pretty good boss overall now.

Spoiler: C Tier

Spoiler: Death

My problem with Death has remained the exact same: he has way too much health (and sometimes elemental defenses as well) for effectively a level 75 boss. For crying out loud, he only has 20,000 less hp than Adamastor (520,000 vs. 500,000), a boss twenty levels higher than him. Long bosses are fine in concept, but you still have to make them engaging for that duration of time, which Death doesn't really do.

Otherwise, Death is fine, I guess. The minions not spawning in immediately makes the fight pretty RNG reliant, though, especially when he pulls out the arrow storm and you have nothing to body block it with.

Spoiler: Tribal Sanctuary

Being the most bare bones altar in the game, it's nothing particularly memorable. As an introduction to altars, it's pretty decent with needing to control and kill the healers if you want to do any real damage to the boss and the boss itself it's like a train, but otherwise it's just kind of there. The boss only has multi-hit, the easiest to predict spell in the game when not used with other spells, and charge, which is also one of the easiest to predict spells when not spammed.

Spoiler: Witherhead

For what Witherhead is intended to be, i.e. a tutorial boss, I believe it does that job well. She teaches the player the importance of strafing (strafing her melees at base walkspeed), the importance of learning and reacting to spell telegraphs (activating the walls or getting some distance when she preps the arrow storm), and the importance of splitting attention between multiple enemies at once (dealing with the silverfish ads). She's quite a good tutorial boss when we consider this.

But she doesn't have much going for her outside of that, hence why she is in C tier. I kind of wanted to move her up to B tier, but whatever this list makes no sense anyways.

Spoiler: Hashr

The first and second phases may as well be the exact same, just one uses charge more. You can backpedal to outrun both of them and they are incredibly easy to predict since the only setup they have is charge followed by multi-hit (second phase can pull you, but it does nothing outside of that).

The third phase can be fun sometimes, though. In particular, utilizing the charge AI to make Hashr pass by you or dealing with the charge+vanish combo and trying to locate him is pretty fun.

To be honest, I much preferred the OG Hashr's second phase. It was effectively the current second and third phases combined (the walkspeed and aggression of the third phase with the normal AI of the second phase, with both of their spell combos being merged together to a degree) to make a wonderfully fast paced fight for the early game that also kicked my ass on my first playthrough. Maybe it's just nostalgia clouding my vision, but who knows.

Spoiler: Corpus Accipientis

So uh, y'all remember the Corpus Accipientis?
You know, the boss Corkus Accipientis is based off of and the boss in General's Orders?
No? Neither do I. I think it only has the elf and villager phases except slower or something.

…Aight cool we can move on now.

Spoiler: Greggr

I don't know who decided that Greggr of all bosses needed to ramped up to a comical degree, but I can appreciate it. My man has a fully fledged cutscene and two spell combos to go with it. One of them is just flamethrower and the other is charge into explode. Minions still are pretty much irrelevant though, since they die almost instantly and walk towards you otherwise.

If I'm not mistaken, Greggr is also the first non-boss altar boss to have CCI. Why? Well, the answer is quite simple: you think I know?

Spoiler: Mummy

It's a punching bag that occasionally teleports somewhere.

Spoiler: Arakadicus

Can someone explain why the wall mechanic got swapped to this weird spider idol thing? No? Neither can I.

Instead of having a somewhat clever way of removing the strong minions from the fight via the walls you could spawn, we now have a mechanic that spams a bunch of tiny mobs that die pretty much instantly instead. The idol has around half the health of Arakadicus to, so unless you deliberately lead Arakadicus over to the idol you will not have time to kill it, either. Really though, there's pretty much no reason to kill it outside of Archer, because the mobs are just that irrelevant outside of Archer due to a lack of AoE at this level.

Other than that, she just walks towards you and sometimes uses a web/pull spell to act menacing. Not much else to say about her.

Spoiler: Corrupted Arakadicus

"Can someone explain why the wall mechanic got swapped to this weird spider idol thing? No? Neither can I.

Instead of having a somewhat clever way of removing the strong minions from the fight via the walls you could spawn, we now have a mechanic that spams a bunch of tiny mobs that die pretty much instantly instead. The idol has around 2/5s the health of Arakadicus to, so unless you deliberately lead Arakadicus over to the idol you will not have time to kill it, either. Really though, there's pretty much no reason to kill it outside of Archer, because the mobs are just that irrelevant outside of Archer due to a lack of AoE at this level.

Other than that, she just walks towards you and sometimes uses a web/pull spell to act menacing. Not much else to say about her."

This still applies, although it becomes irrelevant for Archer as well because they now have an AoE. They at least tried to spice up the fight by giving her charge, but the fight remains the same otherwise.

Spoiler: Bigfoot

They finally managed to fix Bigfoot's hitbox so it's not legit cancer to hit him any more, least from my experience that is. Otherwise, he still remains a very large punching bag, though they did give him a new explode combo to make him more formidable. If he pushes you, he'll follow it up with said explode spam combo. He can dish out a surprising amount of damage too, but he's not very memorable as an encounter outside "wow a giant zombie!" otherwise.

Spoiler: Arena of the Legends

Sadly, Grand Magus is quite uninteresting as a boss altar up until its last phase. For all intents and purposes, it simply feels like a standard projectile enemy that happens to use teleport and meteor every once and a while. It also has a high chance to fully wall your elemental damage in that respective elemental phase, which is always a grand ol' time. The exception is using air, because an air phase does not exist in the fight.

The fifth phase is pretty fun though, because its combos speed up much faster in comparison to the other phases. This encourages an aggressive approach to the fight and makes it much more fast paced than just another brawl with a standard ranged enemy. Along with this, the elemental walling is almost never an issue in this phase due to being slight defense to everything (except, once again, air). Overall, not much to discuss or like about the fight outside of that final phase.

Spoiler: Grootslang

NOTE: I have never managed to get a full group of level 54-70s together to fight the boss, though I have managed to do so for 70-80. Maybe the mechanics matter at these lower levels, but they are still mostly irrelevant at 70-80 or above (or lower levels being carried by higher levels, obviously).

The best way I can describe this boss is a runaway freight train. It's quite funny seeing him just zoom everywhere, but that's pretty much all he does. Unless the boss gets lucky and manages to get out of the stunlocking when it spawns in and target some random person in the back, it just dies as well. Also, the fight lasts way too long and feels underwhelming compared to the Grootslang we fought in The Worm Holes.

My main complaint, however, is that it does not actually require teamwork. There are no mechanics that truly reward players for working together other than "moar dps/healing", where the only actual mechanic that could possibly matter for team content is that weird slime trap thing (which I'm pretty sure you can break out of by yourself even if you do get hit by it). It is a solo boss that happens to have a multiplayer requirement. Hell, with the proper gear and raid buffs you could probably solo this boss at level, although it would take a long time.

This was what I feared would happen to raid bosses in general when they were announced, i.e. they would still feel like a solo boss just with multiplayer tacked on. That is exactly what the Grootslang is, so I can only hope more mechanics like crystallization (which is a good team content mechanic) get added in the future.

Spoiler: Krolton

As an atmospheric fight, Krolton is actually pretty good. Fittingly, his movement is janky and erratic, as he has high walkspeed but a "crawl AI" (pauses briefly before moving again). They also added these fancy Krolton decoys, which will scream and charge towards you when you get near them, applying blindness and nausea for ~10 seconds. It's not much, since Krolton actually doesn't do a whole lot, but it is enough to lose track of Krolton easily because of the aforementioned AI. Finally, it's nice that the game rewards the player for being observant of their surroundings, i.e. using the lava around the arena or (ironically) the ability to oneshot Krolton with the pillar in the center of the arena, which is especially true if the player notices Krolton's large amount of health for a boss at this level (300,000).

However, I just wish Krolton was a more mechanically challenging fight. His actual spells don't do a whole lot other than the ultimate, which his heavy charge will 99% of the time oneshot you because of how stupid high it's multiplier is. Even then, he more often than not just flies off to some corner of the room to jumpscare you again. Otherwise, he just kind of sits there.

Spoiler: Matryoshka Idol

"Even as different as each phase of Idol may be, though, there's only so much you can do in a fight with that many phases to make it enjoyable for that long.

Phase 1 falls under the more obnoxious side of it. I don't have a problem with needing to position Idol properly so you can stand at the opposite end of the arena to avoid its flamethrower. I have a problem with Idol being able to pull you into the flamethrower itself. While yes, it usually will use the pull to either setup the flamethrower or just as the aftermath of the flamethrower, Idol will pull you into the flamethrower itself as a part of its spell combo (the second time it pulls you, generally). For anyone except Assassin, this is pretty much unavoidable damage unless you get lucky, because the tracking and then hitstun of flamethrower will prevent you from being able to get out of its range unscathed. Just remove the ability for it to pull mid-flamethrower and I have no issue with this phase.

Phase 2 is fine. You get pulled way in advance to the meteor coming out and have plenty of time to avoid it.

Phase 3 I find quite enjoyable because jumping over the multi-hits after you get pulled towards Idol is quite satisfying to do, especially if you manage to do it while Idol is vanish. Yeah, it's not very hard to do as a result of just multi-hit inherently not being that dangerous if you know its there and it doesn't have good setup, but its still satisfying to time your jump over it regardless.

Phase 4 is the worst boss phase in all of Legendary Island and you can not convince me otherwise (Yahyabot is cheating). I have never been a fan of the charge+pull spam just trying to make the player take fall damage, but now it has an explosion that it will pull you into while flying around. With a well timed movement spell outside of escape, it is possible to avoid this, but it just feels like a way to get in some cheap chip damage like the fall damage. If I had to choose between having one or the other, I would personally prefer dealing with being flung 20 blocks high as opposed to the explosion. Again, both are obnoxious to me, but that would be the lesser of the two evils since you'd have to overhaul the entire design of this phase otherwise.

Phase 5 is solid as well. The heavy charges are heavily telegraphed, so there should be no reason you are getting hit by it unless you are purposefully trying to interrupt it or tick damage decides to ruin your day.

Phase 6's arrow storm is fine. Pretty easy to avoid by just circle strafing despite the push into a wall prior, but there's not much else to the phase besides that. Maybe giving it more movement options would make the arrow storm a bit less predictable.

Phase 7 is fine now that the heal has been removed, which was my entire problem with the original seventh phase. Now, it's just a mildly annoying teleport spammer, but I don't mind it that much since you have to actively be letting it live for it to start going absolutely berserk with the teleport spamming.

Phase 8's sole purpose is to ruin your day by applying debuffs prior to phase 9, so it's pretty meh overall since it relies on phase 9 to do the dirty work for them.

With that in mind, phase 9 would theoretically be the hardest phase for classes that can not properly deal with these debuffs. With slowness active, it will be pretty much be impossible to outrun the movement speed of phase 9, which is why phase 9 does not have CCI. Because of that, its just another phase that is fine, albeit somewhat terrifying.

The baby is still hysterical and poses no real threat except for rainbow weapons. It is meant to be a joke phase and it still is.

Thus, Matrojan Idol overall is still just alright. Most of its actual difficulty will still come from the possibility of being walled by elemental defenses, but otherwise I don't have much of an issue with it other than the phases I mentioned. I certainly don't consider it to be better than any of the other bosses in Legendary Island, excluding almost all of Yahyabot, but that doesn't make it an abomination of nature. It just exists and it's whatever."

Ignoring the Legendary Island bits and the phase 4 explosion (it got nerfed), this still applies to Matryoshka Idol. It feels the exact same as the Legendary Island fight at level, albeit slightly slower.

Spoiler: Phoenix Prince

In all honesty, the only reason Phoenix Prince was even included was because I like the lore that the Lost Avos City provides. It showcases in more detail how poorly the Corkus citizens treated the majority of the Avos, although that can go both ways after seeing how the Avos think of humans in The Feather's Fly. Otherwise, his actual fight is just there. He uses flamethrower or meteor occasionally but otherwise he doesn't do anything, really.

Spoiler: Amadel

The first form of Amadel is irritating. The crystal core just spams pull while Amadel pummels you with rapid ranged projectiles, leading to some real funny scenarios of just not being able to avoid anything until one dies. It is heavily in favor of builds that can just obliterate him in nanoseconds rather than being an actual challenge.

The second form is whatever. I like the concept of having multiple decoys with only one true boss, except what actually ends up happening is you locate the real Shadow Amadel immediately and have him just run off and hug a wall for the entire rest of the fight. Thus, it's not a threat at all and the decoy mechanic largely becomes irrelevant since you can just use an AoE and find him immediately.

The first phase of the third form is the only one I'd say is good. It's melee AI with the pull->meteor combo and the explode->push->charge stack combo are fun to avoid. The second phase is still just whatever though, since it just kind of sits there shooting projectiles outside of the occasional flamethrower or teleport here and there. The third phase is a joke DPS test, because it more or less insta-kills you with its spell combo if you take to long. The elemental blooms spawnrate has also been nerfed into oblivion, so they really just don't matter anymore (not like a particularly liked them anyways).

Spoiler: Yahya

Spoiler: Colossal Rat

The build up to the fight is hysterical. It acts like this meatball is the absolute end of the world.

Mechanics wise though, this boss has way too much health. It has ~11k hp across its two phases, which for reference is 1,000 more health than Haros. You know, A BOSS ALTAR ONLY THREE LEVELS LOWER? Admittedly it's not anywhere near as dangerous as Haros (and Haros can heal for that matter), but holyshit. I get that it's supposed to be a funny hahahahahahhahahahahahah boss but this drastic health increase from the previous iteration can make the fight quite a chore to get through.

Spoiler: D Tier

Spoiler: Quartron

The new Quartron is a disappointment. I was really hoping they expanded upon the idea of gradually attacking the weak parts of Quartron to destroy it, but instead the exact opposite occurred. You now ONLY attack the cores in its feet and that's all. At least when I had to parkour up to the robot's arms I felt like I was actively engaging in combat with it, not fighting two rapid fire burst enemies with some quartz statue in the background.

Quartron's new fight still plays out in a similar manner to the original fight as well, despite the actual changes made to it. The two cores have very similar spell combos. They both start with using three meteors, followed by a wave a bit afterwards. The combo slightly varies, the left core (Quartron's right) using arrow storm after the wave, and the right core (Quartron's left) using flamethrower, before they both finish their combo with an explosion spam. The timing is slightly different between both cores so one can be using spells while the other is on cooldown.

The issue is the mobs that were added behind Quartron, i.e. the Sentries. Their sole existence is to stop you from going behind Quartron by push spamming you as soon as you get within their aggro range. They also heal spam and respawn more or less instantly if you do somehow kill them at level, rendering them immortal. If you even extend ever so slightly towards Quartron while near the cores, you are going to be smacked back to the middle of the room.

In case it wasn't obvious, that makes this an incredibly annoying boss for any melee setup (and hybrid, to a lesser extent). Sound familiar? It should, because the old Quartron was pretty much the exact same! Even if I enjoyed the concept of parkouring up to the robot, it was infinitely easier to exploit ranged options because the cores spammed flamethrower while making your way up to them.

This problem of being overly rewarding to ranged playstyles to the point where the attacks do not matter and being overly punishing to melee because they can not actively punish the cooldowns on attacks in the fight has remained the same. It is boring and anti-climactic to fight Quartron with the former and infuriating to fight Quartron with the latter.

Spoiler: Altar of Sanctification

I will acknowledge that an effort was made to make Skiens more enjoyable as a fight. They increased his health so each phase didn't go by in a flash and made his spell combos more consistent. You can effectively think of him as a faster paced, albeit less diverse, version of Matryoshka/Matrojan Idol.

However, these changes do not change the core problem with Skien's fight, i.e. the reliance on that stupid hpr gimmick. So long as that hpr exists, you have only one of two options for fighting Skiens: grab a build that is so tanky you have no fear of death but the fight will take 20 minutes or grab a build that will melt the boss in an instant. Yes, that option exists for every boss, but those are effectively the only two options here. There are very few ways I can make it where I actively dodge, punish, etc. to appreciate these mechanics.

Please just get rid of the hpr gimmick. The only phase I could reasonably justify having the hpr in place after the health buff is the last phase, but that's more a problem of the last phase being melt or be melted (the dude spams spells like no tomorrow). I promise you the boss will become infinitely more fun when I can actually use more challenging playstyle to fight him with without having to worry about dealing a set amount of DPS to even beat the boss.

Spoiler: Antikythera

I like the idea of having to progress up to the boss. Really, I do. In practice though, it just feels like another token grinding room, and it may as well be referred to as Fallen Factory's fourth token room. The same enemies are all just lumped into one room, making it kill or be killed, and RNG can make it take forever to progress to the minibosses. Along with this, neither of the minibosses are particularly interesting. One uses push+arrow storm and the other uses tp+flamethrower, which is fine but they aren't memorable (outside of the former's dialogue, which is pretty funny).

But man, Antikythera is a pain in the ass. The bugger won't sit still for more than a second before spazzing out and making it impossible to predict what they're going to do. Sure, stuff like the explosion spam doesn't do a whole lot of damage, but it is quite obnoxious just being tossed around like a ragdoll over and over again. Oh, and that's not mentioning that this boss ALSO now has slow immune! Good luck trying to hit a Meteor on this boss or even use Assassin AT ALL in it for that matter.

I am aware that you can kill the minions to mitigate this issue due to Antikythera having a healbot AI, but the problem is the minions spawn back so fast it doesn't even matter (especially for builds that can't just crank AoEs out the wazoo, i.e. melee). Even for fights like Psychomancer or Warden of Wisdom, which these spam movement spells, there is a very clear time for when you can or can't attack and they are predictable (to a degree). No such concept exists in this fight: you mash the attack button and pray it ends up hitting the boss before they hit you back.

Spoiler: Garoth

Garoth's "fight" is the fourth token room in Lost Sanctuary. Instead of random enemies being spammed in the room, however, we have flamethrower spam instead! It's still easy to avoid by just...walking backwards, but that doesn't change that the whole fight relies on the creeper's spawning in and that's it. There's no real threat or challenging mechanics at all, and it is a waste of time. Oh, and don't even get me started on how the token collector can bug out and result in an instant fail!

As a side note, Garoth is also one of the least interesting villains in the entire game. Like, his work studying the corrupted was cool and all, but the instant he became corrupted himself he just said "alright time to go kill off an entire population of passive creatures that need to kill themselves to fight back anyways". Some impressive stuff right there gotta be honest.

Spoiler: Corrupted Garoth

"Garoth's "fight" is the fourth token room in Lost Sanctuary. Instead of random enemies being spammed in the room, however, we have flamethrower spam instead! It's still easy to avoid by just...walking backwards, but that doesn't change that the whole fight relies on the creeper's spawning in and that's it. There's no real threat or challenging mechanics at all, and it is a waste of time. Oh, and don't even get me started on how the token collector can bug out and result in an instant fail!"

This still applies. Someone on the CT had a bad day, though, because they gave him the ability to spam charge to fly into the air. This means he can easily get out of the lava pool if RNG decides it's time to do so. Fun times!

Spoiler: Yahyabot

6 HOURS AND 24 MINUTES OF JUST YAHYABOT TO GET LI MEDALLION.

Ignoring that no phase in Yahyabot is mechanically challenging (bar sometimes the meteor phase), the main issue with Yahyabot is simply where he is put in the game. Legendary Island is something you are meant to fight multiple times for the accessories, especially the bracelet/necklace since they require two runs. As a result, having 6 minutes of doing nothing in a boss blitz challenge is quite contradictory to that ideology, don't you think?

As I mentioned earlier, the only phase I think is genuinely fun is the meteor phase. Timing the jumps over Yahyabot's charges can be difficult, especially when we account for the minions possibly hitstunning you. All the other phases may as well not exist because you can practically afk in them (which takes up 3/4s of the fight), though I will acknowledge it can help out with your insomnia. I am aware that nothing much will change for Yahyabot until the entire design gets reworked, which I doubt is anywhere high up on the priority list, but it will continue to be a slog until that occurs.

Spoiler: Corrupted Charon

Corrupted Charon's fight is garbage. It's just a token grinding room with minions that spam explosion while Corrupted Charon spam pulls you in the background. It's either you melt them or have fun getting tossed around everywhere from the explosion kb with Charon pull.

The spawnrates for the minions that drop the bones also varies from fine to please help I have been in here for the past five minutes. The lighting being wacky as hell in this fight also doesn't help because I can not tell which minions is which 99% of the time. I suppose I'll take this over not being able to beat the dungeon, but Corrupted Charon is at best a funny joke and at worst gives me a massive headache by the end of it.

Spoiler: Garaheth or however you spell it

Generally speaking, I don't mind this one in regards to the actual fight. I like the parkour, but the rest of it is just whatever.

However, I still put it in D tier because it's disappointing as the climax of the questline and there's a lot of potential that could've been explored here. Instead of just walking into its mouth, it would have been a lot cooler if we first had to weaken it to a point where we would be able to do so, attacking various parts of its body to get it to expose its mouth. While I understand this probably would not have been possible at the time the fight was even made, it would also be cool if we got to have custom spells added to said hypothetical fight or inside while fighting the organs. At least this would be much more engaging than right click three times and the last time you need to fight random miniboss #3078.

Again, you could realistically swap this into C tier and it would not make much of a difference, but I still just feel disappointed by this fight every time I do it.

Spoiler: F Tier

Spoiler: Redbeard

Redbeard is a gimmick boss, and a horrendous one at that.

First off, Redbeard has 750,000 health and takes a decent amount of knockback. Keeping in mind that this is around level 63, this effectively makes it impossible to kill Redbeard by normal means. This is where the cannonball gimmick comes into play, where the allied cannon ball mob that spawns in will deal ~50,000 damage a hit to Redbeard. This means that Redbeard will need to take at least 15 cannonball hits before death, assuming the player does not intervene with damaging Redbeard to a high degree.

On paper, this is all fine and dandy. But then let's factor every single other part of the boss fight into this, shall we?

Redbeard has a shotgun projectile as his primary attack. It fires off at a rate of approximately once every ~4 seconds. Like most boss shotgun attacks, it tends to be a oneshot at close range and deals significant chip damage otherwise. However, this on its own is mostly fine.

However, that's only scratching the surface. The cannonballs take ~3-4 seconds to charge up and spawn in (it says 6 seconds, but it takes less time in the actual fight). Notice a problem with that number? It takes almost the same amount of time to charge up a cannonball as it does Redbeard to fire off an attack. The window to charge up a cannon safely when this accounted for is incredibly low, usually resulting in taking eons to charge one up safely or just settling for the chip damage.

But ok, sure, it's just chip damage. It's not that bad because his burst fire damage is relatively low. He can also use Heavy Charge AND Wave while you charge up a cannonball. You can avoid Wave by standing far enough away from him and still being able to charge a cannonball at the same time, but this leaves you almost in perfect range to be sniped by the Heavy Charge. If Redbeard is too close to a specific cannon, the Wave spam also completely walls them off from usage.

To make matters worse, the cannonballs, for whatever reason, can be hit and killed by Redbeard's projectiles. Where is Redbeard going to be while charging a cannonball? Glaring back at you while spamming his shotgun, obviously. Even if we assume you use a movement spell afterwards to turn the direction Redbeard is facing, the cannonballs do enough knockback to Redbeard to knock him into a position where he can hit them with the entire shotgun.

The cannonballs also will prioritize whatever is closest to them most of the time, i.e. the minions in the fight can and will screw you over on occasion. This gives Redbeard more time to kill them before they can even reach him. The cannonballs also will self-destruct after a certain period of time (it seems to be around 10 seconds, but it is inconsistent), and them targeting the minions before Redbeard can mean that they will destroy themselves before reaching him. Admittedly, it happens less often than Redbeard killing them, but it still can happen. Consider yourself lucky if the cannonballs even manage to hit Redbeard more than two-three times.

Fine. Let's assume you consider this all ok in some ascended plain of existence I will never understand. The cannonballs can be summoned after about 25-30 seconds when you use them. If we assume that each of the three cannonballs gets in at least two hits before dying, that means it will take at least two minutes to kill Redbeard when accounting for charge time as well. That isn't a whole lot of time, but that assumes that this perfect scenario of the cannonballs getting two hits and the player not being interrupted while summoning the cannonballs, which almost never happens. A more realistic expectation is for the fight to take roughly 3-4 minutes. 3-4 minutes of repeating the same monotonous, irritating task over and over and over again.

Want to know the one saving grace of this fight? It's easy to cheese Redbeard's aggro. His initial aggro range is low, and you can push him/lead him over to a corner and go to the opposite side of the room to break the aggro. You are free to summon 1-2 cannons to get infinite hits on him afterwards. The cannonballs will also not self-destruct if this occurs, because self-destruct does not occur when you are outside of something's aggro range.
However, the fact that I even considered doing this to begin with should be a pretty big red flag.

Redbeard is the only boss that I consider to be 100% bullshit in this game. Redbeard is a poorly designed gimmick fight designed solely to piss the player off and/or waste their time.

Congrats, I suppose. At least you can hold the title of being the worst boss in this entire game, arguably the worst boss I have ever fought for that matter.

In brutal honesty, almost everything I said to justify the ranking is irrelevant. Almost all boss mechanics can be completely ignored in the game. This isn't because the bosses are poorly designed or that they are forgettable, although that is indeed true in some cases. It is because of Wynn centering itself around its build system.

No matter how you design a boss, the option to use a setup that can and will clown on it will exist. And this isn't some big secret, either; it's mostly just spell spam meta early-late game ish and then a plethora of effective playstyles in the endgame to ignore these mechanics. Hell, sometimes it's just Archer being Archer or Assassin vanish cheesing the entire game. Even if we assume that the player is not using consumables, this ideology still applies. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it's just how it is.

I am aware I am stating the obvious, but I feel the need to clarify that every single time I talk about boss design in ANY game with a build system. At the end of the day, this whole list is pointless so long as that option exists, and I do not expect or want that core ideology to change. If I didn't have the choice between these two general options, I probably wouldn't even still be playing this funny block game, after all.

But ranting aside, I'm just some random loser on the internet that feels the need to say their opinion. I hope this opens up some form of discussion, and hey, maybe I even helped you learn a thing or two. I will update my own ranking whenever I feel like it when new updates drop.

P.S. There'll probably be a lot of grammatical errors because of how long some of these explanations are. I did proofread a few times though, so I hope it's not a big issue lmao.

 

Link the tiermaker template or I WILL call you smelly.

Edit: I am BLIND I found it

 

The amount of mental and physical stress this has put on me will take five weeks to recover from I am going to sleep good night.

 

...dude... what the fuck?

 

spirit of gale in b tier standing for bet you are going to get jump pulled to your death

 

You putting Red Beard at the absolute bottom of F tier has made my day, thank you good sir.

 

Fuck you
Skien: S tier

 

HOLY FRICKING :b:rap that is a lot of text and explanation.

 

Excuse me?? Shots. This tierlist is amazing. But WHY isn't Corrupted Theorick in F tier. CIB being broken is no excuse. He SUCKS :(

Jokes aside though... (Wall of text rant incoming)

Spoiler: Corrupted Theorick

I find this possibly the most annoying boss in the game. Now, I only have experience fighting the max level Theorick, so I might be giving the rest of the forms an unfair reputation, but I am completely complaining about the max level form here. Basically, it is non-stop putting pressure on the player, which isn't exactly a bad thing, but Corrupted Theorick himself is just infuriating to deal with.

The boss has two phases, and I don't remember how much HP each one has. I think it might be 300k in first phase and 200k in second phase, making it have 500k HP total. Phase one is ranged, while the second is burst ranged. Somewhat annoying although weak minions exist in the arena, and are the only salvation of hope if you dare to play as mana steal against this eldritch horror spawned from the darkest minds of mana steal haters. The specters are melee have a large amount of HP, and explode into large amounts of weaker minions that can self-destruct and are a threat if you leave them alive. Good thing the weaker minions die instantly if your breath blows in their general direction! Each specter is actually different, but the only notable difference I have noticed is that they have different AIs, and one runs away if you hit it. The other two I believe have crawl AI and the generic melee AI. Oh yeah, the specters occasionally vanish too.

You probably want to hear about the actual boss now though, don't you?

Well, first to mention, a lot of the floor is built out of ice. This is fine in the context of a melee boss or a slow ranged boss. However, since the boss is ranged and fires at a decent rate, you are forced to circle strafe, and the ice really doesn't help with such. The ice can make circle strafing without jumping much slower, and dodging Theorick's projectiles can become very difficult.

The first phase is just ranged AI, and his projectiles would be fine if you weren't auditioning for ice skating with Theorick. The first phase's spell combos are extremely confusing, but do have somewhat of a pattern. They can be a nightmare to even learn and I still don't know exactly how they work. They often end with heavy arrow storms, but sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes it does! There are times in the first phase where it can get really confusing as to what Theorick is actually doing, but it's manageable. From what I've seen, it seems to often do teleports and pushes into heavy arrow storm, or maybe normal arrow storm. Its spells give you a decent time to react in the first phase, and a decent time to go in for damage. Also, you can use the minions to block projectiles. As for his other combos, I have no idea, as they have such little cooldowns that I do not know when they start or end. Basically, the first phase isn't too threatening unless you do not have sufficient movement speed, where you will eventually succumb to his basic attack. His spell combos are predictable and give you chances of dealing damage if you know what he's doing. If you're hoping for the fight to get better in the second phase, it doesn't. At all.

I hate the second phase. It combines my least favourite mob AI, burst ranged, with slippery ice and non-stop spell combos that seemingly never end and deal huge damage. First, I wanna address the basic attack. Unlike Death Metal, whose burst ranged is merciful if you are circle strafing, Corrupted Theorick's burst ranged deals ridiculous damage. Each projectile does about 1k damage, and does at least 10k damage if you get hit with all of the projectiles. While getting hit bullseye with his burst attack sounds unrealistic, he can and will telefrag you with teleport and destroy you with his burst ranged or pull you in with a perfectly timed pull. He can also chip you down with his burst ranged easily due to the ice making it very difficult to dodge the burst's outer projectiles. You can try to use the minions as shields, but his constant casting, which I am about to rant about, makes it too risky.

As for second phase spell combos, I have no clue what this form's spell combos are. I know for a fact he actually has spell combos, because I asked Selvut and he told me he did (not the exact combos though). They consist of teleports, pushes, pulls, arrow storm, heavy arrow storm, and that's about it. They are very fast, confusing, and seemingly random. Unlike the first phase, he will often not stop after arrow storms and continue teleporting around the arena, eventually into a corner, where it becomes impossible to circle strafe him. At this point, you have to wait until he teleports out of the corner or risk getting hit by burst ranged while trying to strafe. His pushes and pulls are sometimes spammed and can get really annoying very fast due to the ice sliding you to the other side of the arena, making it very hard to get back to him and possibly pulling you into his attacks. I know this because I have been pulled into his arrow storm before and nearly died! He can also pull you when he's in a corner, and you can kiss-your-life-good-bye because unless you use a movement spell to get out in time, he is going to smash you in the face with a prompt burst of death ice. When he pushes you, by the time you manage to get back to him he is likely casting another spell, and maybe even starting a new spell combo and leaving you crying with the knowledge that you had the chance of dealing damage to him! That's it for this phase. I cannot say much about it, but the phase still remains very annoying. It's fast-paced, but also quite irritating with its spell combos, combined with the arena made almost entirely of ice, and it can end up in some really stupid things happening, such as him telefragging you or pulling you into arrow storm or burst ranged. Along with that, the fight can drag on longer than it needs to despite his low health due to his rapid spell casting that distances you from the boss in the process.

In conclusion, the boss can be somewhat annoying in the first phase but is manageable and a fair challenge, but becomes an absolute nightmare in the second phase. First phase can be predictable and goes smoothly, but goes downhill in second phase when he can get very cheap damage in and is constantly pushing you away from him or teleporting around, quickly becoming irritating. Oh yeah, you have to fight the boss with ice physics 90% of the time too, which is not fun in the context of the fight. If I had to rank this boss on a tierlist, it would either be in really low D tier or F tier, but I feel like F tier would be too harsh given the competition would be the infamous REDBEARD or Yahyabot.

SORRY I NEEDED TO RANT ABOUT CORRUPTED THEORICK

 

YOOOOOOOO B TIER

add fleris pet

also the amount of effort put into this thread is really high wtf I should like read it

 

HEY IDIOT. DO VULCOR ADRENOPHAGE NOW. YOU ARE NEVER FREE FROM REVIEWING BOSSES.

 

ok but 5 man nol is AWESOME

 

strongly disagree with the clusterfuck that is orphion being in A (which is unfortunate because i like oprhion's design)

strongly agree with redbeard's placement

 

Is there actually a new boss

 

Yeah. I haven't fought it myself yet, but it's a level 60 boss altar in Volcanic Isles.

 

Oh ok thanks

 

FINALLY somebody points out how bad the Redbeard fight is

I absolutely despise that fight, I remember grinding GG for levels on like 2 classes and both times I absolutely hated doing Redbeard. I never want to do this dungeon because of the boss alone

I think Galleons Graveyard will probably be reworked next update along with its corrupted version, so let's hope that whoever works on it completely redesigns the boss (and the parkour, for that matter)

 

in all seriousness though your analysis of the bosses is incredible and you've managed to find very interesting trivia about the way they work

kinda hard to do when everyone just sees surface level hate of displacement spells and wants to blow through every boss (I mean, I still am biased against push/pull)

 

Ohmagerd Shots u forgot Vulcor Adrenophage!!1!

Haven't done it at-level yet, but I have done it on my 105 Mage, so here is what I think of it:

Spoiler: Vulcor Adrenophage

This virus-thingy Charges till the day it dies. Would also say it has the potential to do massive damage to the player at level, and really punishes you for not taking care of the minions. It is a good idea to socially distance from this boss, as it also has Flamethrower and Explode for added difficulty.

Minions are pretty obnoxious, as they always surround the boss, which is great for longer-ranged AOE classes like Shaman, Archer, or even Mage if you count Meteor, but really punishes Assassins and Warriors that lack Crowd Control spells.

The walls of the arena are also made of lava, so there is no corner that you can spell-spam in.

Overall, would say it is B-C Tier. Keeps you on your feet, but sometimes the minions can become obnoxious.