Lava Beast

Lava Beast
Information
Enemy Types	Boss
Lane Type	Free-Roaming
Appearances	Crystal Mine Expeditions 6th wave
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The Lava Beast is a giant mutated witherbeast boss only encountered in Crystal Mine within Expeditions gamemode.

Credits to this image from the Protobot Database for a good amount of info that this article uses.

Behavior and Mechanics

• Lava Beast is a free-roaming boss, meaning that the boss is free to travel or be lured to anywhere in the map as the fight will be mostly centered around surviving its abilities. The boss will always try to move towards the nearest player as they are the primary targets.
• The Lava Beast always spawns from "Ore Deposit" spawn point and will usually traverse through one specific path towards the core at the top level of the map unless aggroed otherwise.
• The Lava Beast's attack patterns mainly revolves around using 4 special abilities in random order while also trying to get closer to its target so it can use close-combat attacks.
• The Lava Beast has 46.835% damage resistance. However during its 7-seconds stun phase, it'll take additional 50% more damage.
• The Lava Beast is untargetable by towers but would still be vulnerable to defense damage. It is also unaffected by conventional crowd control effects.
• The Lava Beast's attacks are able to damage cores and towers or blockades.

Close-combat Attacks

The Lava Beast will perform these basic melee attacks randomly whenever a target is close enough. Each of these attacks is guaranteed to deal knockback that cannot be negated by Tenacity. Despite having three different styles of attack, there are no notable differences between them.

Left melee swipe.

Right melee swipe.

Headbutt attack.

Special Abilities

• Projectile attack mode - In this mode, the Lava Beast crouches, using the crystal spikes on its head to fire projectiles in a lobbed angle at its targets. The amount of projectiles fired at once will depend on the amount of heroes in the map. Reflect Beams will be unable to repel these projectiles (as they cannot be reflected or will go over the beam due their lobbed trajectory). This mode lasts for 10 seconds and has a firing rate of around about a second (more or less).

• Crystal Hammer attack - Similar to the Adept's tower of the same name, this attack sends a line of damaging crystal spikes which also travels quite a distance forward damaging anything in their path. If any heroes are near enough to the Lava Beast when caught in this attack, they will be stunned for 4 seconds (Can be negated by Tenacity).

• Death Burrow attack - The Lava Beast burrows underground, using two seconds to track a hero (1st second) and locking-in (2nd second) before striking. Any heroes or core caught in this attack will be faced with instant death. The reach of the strike may exceed the range of the targeting circle.

• Summoning Lava Bug minions - The Lava Beast burrows again but instead going underground, it starts summoning up to 9 or 10 special Lava Bug minions and then resuming its other attacks once the process is over. Unlike regular Lava Bugs, these ones mostly just hovers around and are more focuses on attacking nearby heroes than doing anything else. When all summoned lava bug minions are killed, the Lava Beast enters a stun phase where it stops doing anything for 7 seconds and will be able to take 50% more damage for that duration.

Projectile Attack Mode.

Crystal Hammer Attack.

Death Burrow Attack.

Summoning Lava Bug minions.

Strategy

It is recommended to use Hero Damage-based builds on the Lava Beast as they are more effective in consistent dps.
Using World Tree with World Tree Mcbufferson, Obelisk with Empowering Blasphemy or Flame/Water Aura with Empowering Aura shard will also help increase damage done to the boss. And furthermore, Lava Beast can also be affected by debuffs (which increases his damage taken) from;

• Sundering Blow shard.
• Blessing of Poisons locked mod (from Ring of Poison).
• Ignite elemental combo.
• Melting Point Shard (for Countess)
• Incendiary Rocket (for Engineer's Bunker Buster)
• Wither Bubble shard (For Adept's Arcane Bubble)
• Initiate's Crippling Chi Wave
• Gunwitch's Book Drop (The Gunwitch that used bookdrop needs to stay active on field).
• Attacks from a Mystic with 100% Appeasement.
• Dragolich's Ghost Wail.
• Jackalope's Curse.

History

• March 30th 2023 : Introduced.