can bosses be inflicted with status effects?

was looking for it in the wiki, but couldn't find it. basically just wondering if bosses can be chilled, frozen, or shocked.

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nealn wrote:

was looking for it in the wiki, but couldn't find it. basically just wondering if bosses can be chilled, frozen, or shocked.

yes

There are two conditions that have to be met in order to inflict Chill, Freeze, or Shock on an enemy in Path of Exile. Maybe 3 if we want to be pedantic.

1) Pass the Chance Test. You can do this by having Chance to X stat and having some of your Hits randomly pass the test. Or, Critical Strikes have 100% Chance to X. All Hits have 100% Chance to Chill.
2) Pass the Minimum Duration Test. The duration of Chill, Freeze, and Shock are based on the size of the respective Element in the Hit compared to the maximum Life of the enemy (by default). The base duration is 60 milliseconds for every 1% of max Life. These Statuses don't apply unless their duration is at least 300 ms, which means that if you do not get duration increases, you need to deal 5% of the enemy's max Life in a single Cold or Lightning Hit in order to Freeze, Chill, or Shock.
3) For pedants: Enemy isn't immune. (Well, duh.)

the 2nd requirement is what causes many bosses to be resistant to status effects: If you're only building a little bit of Cold or a little bit of Lightning, you can't Chill, Freeze, or Shock those bosses because they have much higher maximum Life than white monsters.

Otherwise, as long as an enemy or Map Modifier doesn't explicitly say "Immune to Elemental Status Effects," (or, for pedants, the specific status effect), then you just need to worry about having a big enough Hit, or perhaps increased Shock/Freeze/Chill duration where possible.

99.9% of builds are unable to shock/freeze high HP bosses directly, because their hits have no chance to pass the minimum shock/freeze duration due to high boss HP

Elemental proliferation enables shock/freeze indirectly, as long as there are weak monsters around (note that shock can be proliferated even from corpses, unlike freeze)

there are also ground effects. Chilled ground (or vortex) can be created many ways.. Shocked ground comes from vaal lightning trap, which is very universal skill that can help map boss fights

yeah i always think this is interesting. really the only time you need shock or freeze is vs those higher hp rares and bosses, but its also where its most inefficient and difficult to get.

i have a bow build based around freeze. problem is its almost guaranteed to suck ass vs shaper and such because i can't hit for 900,000 cold damage in a single hit, and thus won't be able to freeze anything with such high HP. hurray.

its pretty stupid, if you ask me

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xMustard wrote:

yeah i always think this is interesting. really the only time you need shock or freeze is vs those higher hp rares and bosses, but its also where its most inefficient and difficult to get.

i have a bow build based around freeze. problem is its almost guaranteed to suck ass vs shaper and such because i can't hit for 900,000 cold damage in a single hit, and thus won't be able to freeze anything with such high HP. hurray.

its pretty stupid, if you ask me

if you ask me, it is a problem of game design, where one specific boss fight was made the ultimate goal. This leads to "I cant do shaper/atziri -> my build sucks" type of thinking, although 99% of the endgame is mapping..

you can have countless interesting and fun builds that work well in maps, but how many of them can do the ultimate mapping objective? these days, when people ask here about endgame viable builds, they almost always mean viable = can do shaper. How does this help build diversity, GGG?

but yeah, if you instakill the packs anyways there is no reason to bother with shock/freeze, unless you want to shatter to get the souls or similar stuff.. edit: and also, trivializing boss fights with easy freeze/shock would be another big step towards these days AAA games "difficulty"

Stun builds can actually stun most endgame bosses though.

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Ludvator wrote:

if you ask me, it is a problem of game design, where one specific boss fight was made the ultimate goal. This leads to "I cant do shaper/atziri -> my build sucks" type of thinking, although 99% of the endgame is mapping..

you can have countless interesting and fun builds that work well in maps, but how many of them can do the ultimate mapping objective? these days, when people ask here about endgame viable builds, they almost always mean viable = can do shaper. How does this help build diversity, GGG?

but yeah, if you instakill the packs anyways there is no reason to bother with shock/freeze, unless you want to shatter to get the souls or similar stuff.. edit: and also, trivializing boss fights with easy freeze/shock would be another big step towards these days AAA games "difficulty"

well this is where im left, essentially. most of my builds are not setup for specifically farming uber lab/atziri or shaper, and probably couldn't even do them, in fact.
however my current ice shot build is crazy powerful with freeze. i can freeze lock almost any boss i've faced so far (upwards of t12 so far) but come the other bosses, well we'll see.

it makes me feel like shit. i thought of these builds myself and they perform amazingly well in 95% of the game, but all the content added in the past 2 years i won't be able to do, lol

thx for the thorough answer, adghar. hrm, i really didnt think about using ground effects to inflict status, ludvator--good point. this gives me a combo idea for my build...

ground effects are the most reliable way because it isn't related to damage.

this is one glaring problem with this game, in my opinion, is on hit effects. all on hit effects are based on initial damage. be it DoT, poison, ignite, status effect etc. the power (either damage or duration) is all based on initial hit damage.

the issue is that in order to get the best on hit effect you need the highest initial hit damage. this can in turn make on hit effects completely useless. if you're scaling your initial hit damage to a point where on hit effects are actually noteworthy then by all means your initial hit damage is high enough to essentially one shot anything in the game, meaning your on hit effects don't actually have an effect. at least not an effective effect, anyway, haha.

this is the most annoying thing about this game bar none.

Any build that manages to stun or freeze a boss tends to get immediately nerfed. GGG is absolutely terrified about the idea of players trivializing end game boss fight.