How is a tank supposed to beat the Oversoul?

Don't get me wrong, I love the design of this guy, he takes some actual thought, strategy and sheer learning to complete. There's just one significant issue with his design.

Almost all of his abilities stop you from hitting him. Gotta run from the laser, gotta run from the explosion thing, gotta run around to kill adds. You're only allowed to DPS the boss when all the adds (or at least the ranged ones) are dead, and when he's busy casting cave-ins or frost patches.

For most builds, that's not an issue. For TANKS, it's a HUGE issue.

I'm level 49, I'm in Ruthless, I've invested purely in survivability. High health, good armor, good block chance, high regeneration, high resistances. I reach 70% resistance to both fire and lightning with my endurance charges.

I still have to run from the laser, run from the explosion, and kill all the adds. This means that for more than half the battle, I can't even hit the boss. For the other less-than-half that I can hit him, I enjoy a 200 DPS Ground Slam. IT DOESN'T WORK.

You can tell me to find a party for him, but I'm in Ruthless. Who do you think is gonna party with me? People who already beat him are in Merciless now. People who haven't beaten him aren't at that stage in Act 2 yet. I'm forced to WAIT for someone to get to this point.


TL;DR: Tanks rely on outgearing bosses to kill them. It works fine on Merveil. The Vaal Oversoul cannot be outgeared, both his laser and his explosion are ALWAYS lethal. Because of this, it's impossible for a pure tank build to kill him.

Mh, my Eva/Armor shadow could (barely) survive his explosion on ruthless last night (level 46/47 at this moment iirc) so I am almost sure that you need to upgrade your gear, especially considering that my shadows lifepool should be way lower than yours.

And you may want to try a singletarget skill for more dps?

I couldn't test this yet but I think as a tank you should be able to survive at least one of his lasershots with sufficient lightning resistance.

I don't think you can survive his melee slams-> you can't fight him in melee :/
Gotta poke at him with a wand/bow, I guess.

What's high heath and high armor for you?

Have you tried using a ranged skill like Lightning Strike?

My singletarget skill of choice is 300 DPS, it doesn't help much.

For more accurate numbers, my health is 1185, regeneration 40/s, armor reduction estimated 70% with 4 endurance charges. Sadly the block chance and resistance, which I've invested the most in, are completely useless on this guy.



After a tedious 30 minutes and the use of the totally overpowered Totem of Summon Skeletons, I eventually managed to Ground Slam him to death. I'm not saying that this is impossible. I'm saying it takes soooo freaking long for any lower DPS melee build because you're constantly running around.

you have so many tools at your disposal, just try them out
1) if you're using a shield then you should definately use shield charge to kill him.. the guaranteed hit and stun on each interrupts his abilities (with practice you can prevent him from casting all the lightning beams by weaving away from him and charging back in). You need fast movement speed for this to be efficient (you can't stay in his melee range holding shield charge, you need to back off a bit for each)
2) since this patch you can swap weapons with one key - get some caster item with (if possible) 4L 3 blue 1 red sockets, and if you have the following, put summon skeletons, increased movement speed/ increased minion damage, increased minion health, totem in them.. voila, totem summoning hordes of skeletons over and over
3) if you can't get the items for 2), get atleast distracting totem and use it vigorously.. when levelled up, it helps and is decently durable
4) if you can afford it, max your LR (lightning resistance) on 75 or more.. it's his most dangerous attack that can twoshot you if you dont pay attention closely enough
5) to repeat the statement above - he is not immune to stuns.. make use of it with heavy strike and fast attack speed with some increased stun duration items if you have access to them, you can augment the heavy strike with stun support gem that further reduces the threshold for landing a stun.. decently usable with blood frenzy (charge it up on his summons)
6) if you are agile or fast attacking enough, you can wither him with levelled up viper strike (put it in some item with +1 to melee skills, poison scales best with skill gem levels)
7) if your main problem is survivability, use enfeeble as a curse on the boss instead of some curses that amplify your damage output, if you need help with avoiding his abilities, use temporal chains (slows down his castspeed so you can dodge his abilities easier)

hope any of this helps

1185 HP for a tank is pretty low. I'd suggest investing in better flat HP items.

It's not easy finding great gear in lower difficulties. It's moronic to BALANCE around great gear in lower difficulties. This isn't level 70 Merciless I'm talking about.

From my understanding the devs's intention is to not hold hand of players when it comes to the choices they can make and subsequently gimp their characters. Sorry for the following pedantic ramble but here goes:

You should think about the options you have when facing different challenges. The game is throwing varying forms of those challenges at you and it's only your choices in the game up to that point how you can handle them. This is why you should always think about the items you find in terms of 'can this be useful to me in any way in the future?' and not throw them away or discard them straight away. This applies especially to support gems, multiple linked socketed items even with bad mods and stats and lastly skill gems themselves.

Keep your options open and you can come up with a combination of those options to overcome pretty much everything that the game tries to throw at you.

Lastly, make sure that you don't make a 'jack of all trades' build. The passive skills stacks and add/multiply and having a bunch of different ones does not trigger this synergistic effect.

Each ecounter should be beatable with each playstyle and skill setup (minus ones that are obviously broken and not compatible - not in case here i think). Period.
Changing skills or whole gear (minus changeing some iece for extra res or smth) or even whole playstyle (going ranged as meele tank) for one ecounter is bad design. Period.

My 2 cents.