Toughest Bosses

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The Toughest Bosses In Games

Most video games include a fight against a boss character that will test your skills. However, there are a few bosses that stand out from the usual encounter. They are infamous because of the overall difficulty in combat, strange mechanics used to beat them, or number of players required to kill them. According to the Tom’s Hardware community, the following characters are some of the toughest bosses that the industry has to offer. Fighting them is courageous enough, but beating them to dust gives you bragging rights for all time.

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This massive robot’s only weakness is its single eye, which you have to hit with the Thunder Beam to inflict maximum damage. However, a single, well-placed shot means that Yellow Devil moves to the other side to the room by breaking off into smaller blocks that dart across the area. You have to work out its movement pattern in this state so you can avoid getting hit as his body parts zip across the screen. Repeat the process a few more times, and you’ll manage to take it down.

The fight against the Avatar of Water requires you and your party to fight through a series of foes. After killing the first target, the Guardian of Coirnav, you’ll have to deal with four waves of enemies. In addition to minor foes, each wave also contains a named mini-boss, with Coirnav appearing in the fourth and final wave. However, the hardest part of this encounter is the time limit. Once the Guardian of Coirnav is killed, you’ll have 14 minutes to fight through the four waves. You and the members of your raid group will need to work together to keep everyone alive while also continuing to take out enemies.

For a true test of your party’s power, you’ll have to journey to the bottom of sea. There lies one of the game’s secret bosses: the mighty Emerald Weapon. Even if your party members all had 9,999 life points, the boss could still take out a significant portion of your health with a few attacks. Depending on the amount of Materia (items that give you abilities) equipped for each character, it can deal even more damage with its Aire Tam Storm attack. Oh, and if you don’t have the Underwater Materia equipped, you only have 20 minutes to beat it.

One of your first encounters with the Gargantua shows it using its pincers to emit heat-based attacks on soldiers. You’ll need to call in airstrikes or use a massive electric charge to effectively take it down. However, it’s not an easy task to defeat Gargantua. It can move quickly and use a shockwave attack to deal damage. Keep moving or otherwise you’ll experience a quick and painful death.

Your quest to escape Columbia means that you’ll eventually have to face BioShock Infinite’s hardest foe. The Ghost of Lady Comstock is a tough boss because of her hard-hitting attacks coupled with her legions of undead soldiers that can quickly drain your health. This battle will require heavy use of your Vigor powers as well as conventional weapons. It’s a true test of the skills learned throughout the game, and once you beat it the rest of your journey will be slightly easier.

If you want to improve your relationship with Morrigan, you have to take on a quest that will eventually force you to confront her mother Flemeth. If you choose fight her, you’ll need to be prepared. Even though she looks like a human in most interactions, Flemeth’s true form is revealed in combat to be a high dragon. At first, melee attacks might seem to be the best course of action, but her own physical attacks can easily kill your party. As a dragon, she can also use multiple fire spells to damage you from afar. You’ll need to combine ranged attacks and use a sole tank-based character to keep her distracted long enough to deal enough damage and strike the killing blow.

The Mistress of Mirrors initially appears as a human, but her true form is a disgusting, multi-tentacled demon. From a distance, she can spit at you to decrease your health and movement speed. If you get close enough to her, she’ll continue to inflict damage by swiping at you with her tentacles. At some point, you’ll notice that some of her arms are missing, which means that another copy of the demon will appear. This only makes the fight even harder, so you need to deal as much damage as possible in a short amount of time if you want to escape with minimal injury.

As his name suggests, Psycho Mantis employs telekinetic abilities to attack you. He can hurl statues, chairs, and paintings to hurt you and impede your movement. His mental powers are also used to predict your movements, which allows him to dodge almost all of your attacks. If you played the original game on the PlayStation, you can easily combat his psychic powers by plugging your controller into the console’s second port. On PC, you can also bypass his abilities by using the keyboard instead of playing with a controller.

The towering demon is featured not once, but twice in Blizzard’s popular massive multiplayer online game. In the “Battle of Mount Hyjal” raid, you have to be wary of his heavy-damage Doomfire attack and the Air Burst move, which allows him to throw you into the air. The death of one player during the fight usually means that the entire team “wipes” and starts the encounter again. He appears again in the “Hellfire Citadel” raid where powerful players who use ranged weapons have the best chance of taking him down. Other participants have to keep him moving and distracted in order to keep casualties low and deal enough damage to kill him. If the fight goes past a specific amount of time he enters an enraged state where he can easily kill all players, which means the group has to redo the entire encounter until he is defeated.

If you own the “Dragonborn” expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you’ll encounter the mysterious warrior after your character reaches level 80. The armor-clad figure wants to go to Sovngarde, and the only way to do so is by beating you. The fight against the Ebony Warrior is tough because he has weapons, armor, and perks that provide multiple bonuses and elemental resistances. In addition to traditional weapons, the Ebony Warrior can also cast spells and use Dragon Shouts to keep you at the edge of your seat. It’s one of the toughest challenges in the game, but if you manage to defeat the warrior, you’ll get his powerful equipment.

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Rexly Peñaflorida is a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering topics such as computer hardware, video games, and general technology news.

27 Comments Comment from the forums

coolitic

Honestly. every time Toms does a top-ten-anything for video games, the lists are always garbage and feel more like attempts at fan service.
Reply
exroofer

Sorry but if you put any from WoW in, Vaelestrazz ( the guildbreaker! ) from Vanilla has to be there.
And C'thun pre-nerf.

Dark Souls just straight up hated you....
Reply
delaro

Diablo of ('Diablo III') hard? He is one of the easiest bosses in the game.
Reply
delaro

Honestly Path of Exile bosses make Diablo III look like childsplay. Whoever wrote this should have given that game a go, D3 boss mechanics don't matter all that much but in POE one slip and your dead on quite a few fights.
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deepblue08

In fact, I would bet to say that Diablo in Diablo2 is tougher than Diablo3 version.
Reply
escapextacy

Ghost of Lady Comstock was easy. Diablo in D3 was really pathetic on every difficulty level and Ebony warrior is only the second hardest enemy in skyrim (and that's only you if you don't use certain shout) ,
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LORD_ORION

The problem with saying RPG bosses are tough is that they become super easy when out leveled.

eg: Smough and Ornstein are super easy with a giant dad build because the Zweihander can knock them out of their move sets, and also because of the armor/health you have.
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J_E_D_70

Coirnav was just hellish. We beat that one exactly once with a full 72-person raid for the boss/adds and a separate 24-person raid to crowd control the three minis.
Reply
Twoboxer

Without speaking to where this fight should rank, Kil'jaeden in Tomb of Sargeras is much tougher than Archimonde. Regardless of whether the fights are Normal, Heroic, or Mythic.
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Dugimodo

People have short memories, many boss fights are incredibly difficult the first few attempts but become pretty easy as gear and experience improves and everyone learns the fight.

Any time someone dares to suggest a boss might be hard you get flooded by comments by how easy it is and how you must be a noob. That's just noise to me and I ignore it.

A couple I remember from Wow, we were a pretty casual guild and not serious raiders so we often struggled with things others had long since cleared. Deathwing and the Lich King come to mind, both easy fights with an experienced, geared, coordinated raid group but absolute nightmares for a bunch of amateurs learning for the first time.

The safety dance in Naxx was all but impossible for us as well - but not becasue of it's difficulty. Try timing things like that when everybodys latency is in the 200-300ms range, we are an Aussie/ Kiwi guild and that was normal back then. Certainly added an extra level of difficulty.
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Toughest Bosses

The Toughest Bosses In Games

15: Yellow Devil ('Mega Man')

14: Coirnav the Avatar of Water ('Everquest: Planes of Power Expansion')

13: Emerald Weapon ('Final Fantasy VII')

12: The Gargantua ('Half-Life')

11: Ghost of Lady Comstock ('BioShock: Infinite')

10: Flemeth ('Dragon Age: Origins')

9: Ming Xiao ('Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines')

8: Psycho Mantis ('Metal Gear Solid')

7: Archimonde ('World of Warcraft:' 'Burning Crusade' and 'Warlords of Draenor' Expansion)

6: Ebony Warrior ('The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim' 'Dragonborn' Expansion)