Bosses and Vaal skills

I've noticed that the adds summoned by bosses won't give any souls for Vaal skills. This means that it's only possible to use each Vaal skill once per bossfight, or sometimes not at all (Izaro, maybe others). Is this intentional? It seems strange that the most powerful skills in the game have very limited usefulness against the most powerful enemies in the game.

I would guess that this is intentional and not strange at all. The Vaal skills need a utility cap imo otherwise they are simply too strong.

Yeah it's definitely intended (I can find the dev quote from waaaaaay back in 1.1 era if you want). Specifically, you only get souls from mobs that give xp. Many Vaal skills are already strong bosskillers, and being able to get unlimited souls during boss fights would be overkill.

For some bosses that really want multiple vaal skill uses, it's nice to charge up a bunch of vaal skill gems in advance that you can swap out (charges will be saved per-map even after you remove the skill gem) during a spare moment.

For example, I use 1 green and 1 blue gem slot on my SRS character to cache 2 vaal hastes, 2 vaal disciplines, and 1 vaal summon skeletons for uber atziri.

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viperesque a écrit :

Yeah it's definitely intended (I can find the dev quote from waaaaaay back in 1.1 era if you want). Specifically, you only get souls from mobs that give xp. Many Vaal skills are already strong bosskillers, and being able to get unlimited souls during boss fights would be overkill.

I can agree with that, but then some bossfights *coughIzarocough* don't even let you stock up on souls beforehand. That's just not cool.

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suszterpatt a écrit :

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viperesque a écrit :

Yeah it's definitely intended (I can find the dev quote from waaaaaay back in 1.1 era if you want). Specifically, you only get souls from mobs that give xp. Many Vaal skills are already strong bosskillers, and being able to get unlimited souls during boss fights would be overkill.

I can agree with that, but then some bossfights *coughIzarocough* don't even let you stock up on souls beforehand. That's just not cool.

I'm pretty sure Izaro is the only one, right?

Nowadays.
There's some boss Arenas with a distinct name on the entrance that are still part of the same map.
Malachai f.Ex. is still part of the Harvest.
Izaro might not be due to the inability to go back? I dunno.
It certainly is annoying, especially with single target Vaal skills like Double Strike.
I mean, where else are you supposed to use them?

Not exactly on topic, but related:

Boss summons won't give souls to Catarina feed missions either.

We were running a Zana mission, and it was to complete another master's quest. We were clearing Jungle Valley as we were moving along looking for the master. We happened on Catarina standing right outside the boss room. She gave us the quest to feed 50 souls to the minion, but there were only 6 /remaining in the zone. We got the bright idea of bringing the minion into the boss fight to collect on the endless adds, but it didn't gain us any souls. We eventually abandoned the mission.

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UnDeaD_CyBorG a écrit :

Izaro might not be due to the inability to go back? I dunno.
It certainly is annoying, especially with single target Vaal skills like Double Strike.
I mean, where else are you supposed to use them?

I think it's more about how the labyrinth is structured. Each area is separate as far as Vaal skills go. Izaro is probably part of the aspirant's trial area, but the lobby is empty so there's nothing to farm souls from.

In my case I'd love to throw my vaal skeletons at him. Every other boss gets destroyed by them but Izaro hides behind game mechanics like a coward.

For most regular game areas, boss rooms/areas are designed as part of the same overall area to eliminate the ability to just leave their room and then turn around and reset their instance, thereby enabling mass boss farming without needing to run through a zone to get to them first.

I suppose this wouldn't be required in maps since you can't reset map zones, but it's still how it's set up.


Perhaps somehow Izaro gets around this? Maybe the multi-phase boss fight flips some different programming switches that makes his fight non-repeatable/non-exploitable?



edit: maybe we are overthinking this, and the reason he has a separate area is because the labyrinth map would end up looking kind of dumb? Plus, with there being multiple paths through the lab, how would they decide which path got Izaro? Maybe having his own zone just acts as a hub for all other paths to converge to.