Soooo. 1000+ hours in POE and I just now learned Tormented Spirits can possess Act Bosses.

Yup. Didn't actually know this was a thing that could happen.

Went into the Act 7 giant spider's boss room with my strange little Assassin build and went: "Oh. A tormented spirit. Wait. It can't... can it?... ohhhhhh, hell."

And I went from a single death (On Kitava, jumped into a slam and a chaos slug) to dying... maybe... 12 times in just that fight alone.

Yah, sure, only res-capped, horrible evasion, no armour, a single golem and some Purity fools... but I literally couldn't Elusive-run+Flame dash to the other side of the chamber fast enough to dodge webs/acid/chaos beams.

Was this always a thing that could happen, and I've just luckily never seen it before now? Or... is this literally the death of all hardcore and HC-speedruns?

I mean... I've seen some messed up modifiers on mobs at the start of this League... but this encounter tops the smoked/hasted/frost-strider spinning cage of death I'd encountered on a previous character.

Has always been a thing.

There's even a map mod that will auto-Spirit the map boss for you. :)

What's really fun is if you aren't paying attention and there's more than one boss in the map to boot, either because there's two of them from another map mod or because there are more than 1 for the map type.

Pro-tip: NEVER run Vaal Temple with this map mod, unless you feel like dying.

once upon a time you could possess Uber Elder with a prophecy

So... if there was a hardcore speedrun tourney, is that type of encounter actually disabled? 'Cause I cringe to think of what would happen to the top contenders were they to actually fall victim to such a random happenstance.