Path of Exile: Atziri

The last Path of Exile expansion added an MMORPG style dungeon with a bunch of trash mobs and 3 scripted boss fights. They gave away some prizes to the first people to clear it out and there are some unique items that can only drop from the end boss of that dungeon. That boss (Atziri) is also on the list of unique bosses to kill for the challenge this time around so going in and killing her is a thing that has to be on my radar. You need to collect up a bunch of items to open a portal to this dungeon and they're worth a fair bit to sell to people (1 exalted for 3 sets of items) but if winning the fight is something I can do then just running it has to be better. (I already bought one of the Atziri drops for an exalted, for example.) I have farmed up 3 sets of the items from corrupted zones I've run across so I'm good to go...

We tried the zone once last week because Lino had a set of items and wanted to see what was going on in the dungeon. So we went in pretty blind with a party consisting of a bunch of underleveled or terrible characters... It didn't end well. We died on the first boss fight, though we did get through a good chunk of it so that's something! I didn't want to throw away an exalted worth of stuff learning the mechanics of the fights going forward though so I decided to look the dungeon up and at least see what was going on...

The first boss is two copies of the Vaal Oversoul boss. He gets 2 new abilities (a wide arc ball lightning spell and an ice damage rain of arrows spell) but is otherwise very similar to the regular boss fight. With his numbers all tuned up, of course! When you kill one of the Vaals the other one gets a big haste buff. This is actually where we died when we tried it the other day... We got the first one down and then the second one obliterated us. So you either need to be able to drastically outsurvive the damage from the second Vaal or you need to kill them both at the same time. The main source of damage from this guy is probably the ball lightnings so lightning resist and topaz flasks are probably the order of the day? He summons adds like normal so you can get your flask charges up. This means maybe you can outheal the damage with healing flasks instead of relying on life leech?

The second boss is a three boss fight. It works like the Iron Council boss fight from Ulduar in World of Warcraft. Killing one of the three bosses heals the other two to full and adds some extra stuff to the fight including making the remaining bosses more powerful. There are massive physical attacks, and massive chaos attacks, and some bleeds. So flasks that remove bleeding are important, and granite flasks are important, and being able to move out of the clouds of damage is important. Figuring out the order you want to kill the enemies is probably a good thing to do. Apparently the tentacle lady gets pretty scary if you let her damage get buffed by killing the other guys? And I think killing her causes adds to spawn which is possibly a good thing since it lets you refill flasks?

The third boss is a three phase fight. The first phase is where you can actually hurt the boss. She casts a wide arc of puncture spears, and she casts flame blasts, and she casts storm calls. Every now and then she also casts a set of three overlapping super flame blasts which seemed to hit for ~8000 damage or so (including the ignite) in the video I watched. She is immune to most effects (stun/shock/freeze/ignite) and reflects curses. The second phase she goes immune to everything and summons a bunch of adds from 4 spots in the room. The adds don't attack and just walk towards her. If they reach her, she heals for a ton. It's basically a damage check... Either you can kill the swarms of adds or you can't win the fight. The third phase gets triggered every time she loses 25% of her health. Atziri disappears and summons in 4 clones which carry around a specific weapon. One has a spear and uses her puncture ability. One has a fireball and uses her flame blast ability. One has a lightning thingy and uses her storm call ability. And the last one has a shield and reflects 100% of incoming damage. This phase ends when you kill off any of the clones. Super high damage builds need to avoid hitting the shield add or they die in one hit! So you need to be able to do tons of AE damage for the add phase, but to burn down a single add in this phase. Ruby flasks are probably important for the main phase since the huge flame blasts look like a big problem. You also need curse removal flasks if you're planning on cursing her.

My current character is running with the vaal pact passive so my life leech is instant. I'm hoping that is good enough to live through most of the dungeon... If I was good I could probably use lightning warp to avoid most of the flameblast damage in the last fight but I probably need to get enough health to live through one. I should be able to leech back to full when I get hit so the ignite isn't a big deal.

So mostly I need to build up the right flasks, level up more so I can get more health nodes from the tree, and probably get some better gear with more health on it too. And then it'll be about trying it out and seeing if I actually do enough damage and have the control to avoid the avoidable damage over and over and over again...