PoE 2 Act 2 Boss Guide: Jamanra, the Abomination

Encounter

This is the boss of Act 2, and in Early Access, is also the boss of Act 5.

Notable Loot

Drops random loot only, but because he has 14700% increased item rarity, this is heavily biased toward good stuff for the level. This loot becomes miles better if the player has some ‘Increased Item Rarity’ on gear.

Difficulty

This boss fight typically takes 5 minutes to complete on an at-level character, and does not require flawless execution, but isn’t forgiving either. He’s arguably the hardest of the three act bosses, as there is more unavoidable damage than in most fights.

Jamanra poses little one-shot risk, although there are three highly telegraphed skills that can kill a player inside two seconds. Failed attempts don’t usually look like a player going from 100% to 0 as a result of one mistake. Instead, the player is at 30% life for a full second, either unable to use their life flask or unaware of the danger, and the player gets taken out from 30% by one hit. Abilities that can kill a player quickly are mentioned.

Recommended

Have at least 700hp, and some lightning resistance (50-75% is ideal). Have a Colossal Life Flask with full charges, and at least 10 life regenerated per second. Life regen is available on the passive tree, and also on boots, body armors and helmets.

For your life flask, I advise increased maximum charges or “gains 0.15-0.2 charges per second”. You don’t need fast or instant recovery. Slow recovery is fine, if one of the boss’s bigger hits lands on you, you will have time to recover life.

Jamanra the Abomination is a fight with two major phases, one cutscene-style intermission and one minor phase. The final phase is the most difficult.

The boss has about 141000 health (much more – about 5x as much - in Cruel), and changes phases as follows:

• After reaching about 85% health, he gains a deadly new ability that conjures a 15 second sandstorm. Jamanra has to channel this ability, but will spawn monsters during it.
• After reaching about 65% health, the fight changes entirely and moves to a new arena.
• After reaching about 20% health, the boss gains a new ability that tightly restricts the player’s freedom to move safely around the arena. I have never seen this ability used more than twice in the fight.

Note On Life Sustain

The last phase will place your life flask under severe pressure. You will want to reach it with at least 3, ideally 5 uses left.

Note On Voice Cues

Jamanra has a number of voice cues he will utter during the fight. These aren’t reliable ways to identify most of his skills, as he can use multiple unrelated voice cues for each ability.

For instance, from 85% to 65% HP he has the Sandstorm ability, this can be accompanied by a cry of “Vastiri Vengeance”, “Doom of the Desert!” or “By the Sands!” and possibly more. Watch his actions instead.

There are two exceptions. “Ten Thousand Spears” and “Overhead Sword Slam”, and these will be mentioned.

Damage/Danger

Everything he does is physical damage, lightning damage or a mixture of the two.

Jamanra attacks slowly, and all of his genuinely dangerous attacks have considerable cooldowns. But this fight is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Getting hit by one of them won’t put you under pressure, but if you aren’t dodging at least most of them, you’ll be out of life flasks soon.

Spear Throw

Jamanra throws a spear at the player. There’s a small windup (about 0.8 seconds). It is possible, but difficult, to dodge this skill by dodge rolling to the side. This appears to hit three times, once on one frame, twice on the next, dealing chip damage. Mostly physical, some lightning. Jamanra takes time to recover after firing this, the entire action ties him up for about 1.5 seconds.

Twin Pillars

Jamanra spends 1.5 seconds conjuring two pillars in the air and moving them to different battlefield locations. These are usually about 4 metres from the boss, but offset 30 degrees from the way he is facing. Imagine Jamanra is at the center of a clock facing the ‘12’ – one goes to ‘1’, the other to ‘11’.

Over the next 1.0 seconds, the pillars fall to the ground, dealing significant damage. Mostly physical, some lightning.

Lightning Arc

Jamanra spends 2.5 seconds channelling a lightning beam from each hand. They start out both pointing forward from Jamanra’s perspective, remain there for 0.5 seconds, and over the next 2.0 seconds they rotate until they have moved 90 degrees.

This deals damage over time – chip damage if you just get ‘nicked’ by it, significant if you are in front of Jamanra and don’t get out of the way.

All Phase 1 abilities plus…

Channeled Storm and King’s Attendants

While this ability is reasonably easily handled, it’s a sure kill if you don’t act to get into the safe spot.

Jamanra conjures a storm that covers the entire arena, dealing damage over time. This is chip damage at first (~30 damage per second through typical defenses), but escalates to deadly damage (~500 per second) once the storm is well established. There is only one safe spot – behind a shield conjured by your ally, the Sekhma.

WARNING: The Sekhma can be offscreen, but she’s always in the top-left or bottom-left of the arena, or at least close to one of those spots.

This storm persists for 15 seconds, during which Jamanra can only take two actions – conjure weak minions with a negligible-to-chip damage melee attack named King’s Attendants, and corpse explode King’s Attendants dealing chip lightning damage.

DANGER: The corpse explosions can and often will inflict shock. This can be bad news if you step out into the storm.

King’s Attendants can be very hard to spot as the screen is so chaotic.

After using this skill, it takes Jamanra several seconds to regain his composure. This is a safe window to deal damage.

Dealing with it: You need to break off from Jamanra as soon as you recognize the skill, quickly identify the Sekhma and stand about one meter behind her. The safe zone is both narrower and longer than it looks. If you take damage it is from a King’s Attendant you cannot see, use a close range damaging skill that doesn’t require a target.

Electric Fence

I don’t have footage of Janamra using this ability in Phase 1, but he might be capable of doing so.

Jamanra conjures two electrically charged posts which last for 10 seconds. An electric arc appears between them. Sometimes these posts chase the player around aggressively, sometimes they move in slow, sweeping circles around the boss. Being caught between the posts deals damage over time, and can get dangerous very quickly.

Dealing with it

In the first two phases, life flask charges are for two things. Undoing your mistakes… and dealing with this horrible skill. If Jamanra uses the ‘chase the player’ version of this skill, you are likely to suffer hundreds of damage if you do your best to dodge the fence, and a thousand damage or more if you attempt to stand in place and endure it.

Even if you start at full and use a life flask charge, the latter is risky, so try to dodge this and endure it only when you make mistakes. This is not generally a good window to do DPS.

Here, Jamanra has entirely new abilities and some of his most deadly abilities have voice cues. He uses a sword, an axe and a whip in this phase but it’s hard to tell them apart in the chaos of battle. He can also conjure electric fences as Phase 2, but these do not move and so are easily handled.

Arena Hazards

During Phase 3 very well telegraphed arena hazards will appear that deal chip lightning damage.

Sand Tornado

Jamanra starts the phase by summoning a tornado that moves slowly and deals significant damage over time. This isn’t hard to dodge, and while it hurts, it doesn’t shred you so badly that you can’t dodge through it if you have to. Run around if you can, through if you must.

Overhead Sword Slam

This hits for significant damage and (rarely) crits for deadly damage.

There’s a big windup for this move, but it’s often hard to tell.

This is the only ability with an important voice cue. If Jamanra utters “FORGE OF HATE” or “TAKE OUR HATE” or “OUR GIFT TO YOU”, he’s already started the backswing, and he’ll perform this move within 0.75 seconds of starting the final word.

The most common mistake here is dodging it too soon. Jamanra locks in the targeting direction quite late. If you hear one of the trigger words, or see him winding this ability up, maintain a set distance from the boss and start walking around him in a circular pattern. If you will dodge roll, do it a quarter to a third of a second later than feels natural.

Axe Arc Sweep

This deals significant damage and is a very different attack pattern to the Overhead Sword Slam but is easily confused for it from Jamanra’s windup move. This is usually unleashed without vocalization and while it is possible to dodge, it’s very hard to do so.

Dodging this requires immediately repositioning behind Jamanra, while dodging the Overhead Sword Slam instead requires a last second reposition instead.

This attack can be endured, it is one of the reasons you wanted to get to phase 3 close to full life flasks.

Ten Thousand Spears

This is a dodge-or-die attack that is very slow and very forgiving. After a three second delay, about seven spears rain from the sky targeting where you were standing about two seconds into the cast. The spears take about a second to fall (first impact 3 seconds after he starts the voice line, seventh about 4 seconds after), and getting hit by all seven will deal deadly damage.

Jamanra has two voice lines for this skill. “We will blot out the sun” or “Ten thousand spears”. The 3-4 second death timer starts at the first syllable of this call, but they will target your position later.

There’s no need to start moving quickly, but you do need to move at full speed toward the end of his voice cue, and keep moving until you are confident almost all seven have landed. Anywhere will do, just don’t stand where you were when the voice call for this skill went off.

All Phase 3 abilities plus one new one. Jamanra can conjure Machinegun Portals. They appear to have a cooldown of 17 seconds and last for 30 seconds, so two can and usually will be active all the time.

Machinegun Portal

This spawns a portal that projectiles fly out of across the entire arena. One goes northwest-to-southeast, the other will cross it. Note that when one portal expires, Jamanra can recreate it in a new position. These split the arena into four safe spots, typically one large, one tiny and two medium. If possible, be in the large one, as you still need to dodge the Overhead Sword Slam.

It’s no longer worth even attempting to dodge the Axe Arc Sweep. Endure it, let the life flask save you.

Standing inside the line of fire and fighting is not an option. Crossing will typically cost you about 400 health, so don’t do it lightly, but if you have to… well, this is why you need life flasks at the end.

The fight becomes much harder after both portals are active. You’ll need to balance – the faster you burn Jamanra down the less time you need to spend in this messy phase, but the more reckless you are the greater the risk of getting squishified by his other attacks.

Phases 1 and 2

Conserve resources, most notably life flask charges. It’s better to be slow and steady, methodically dodging what you can… except for the electric fences. Those will probably require a life flask charge to endure, if you get the ones that chase you.

Phase 3

Dodge the overhead sword slam and arena hazards. Endure the rest. When the boss hits 20% be ready to run immediately if the Machinegun Portal opens in a spot with line of fire to you.

Phase 4

Stay in the large quadrant where possible and the medium sized ones when necessary. Ruthlessly avoid the small one. You are pretty safe while you have life flask charges left… but they won’t last forever, so apply damage whenever safe.

• Negligible Damage: Small hits that are no threat even in numbers.
• Chip Damage: Small hits that pose no individual threat, but can add up
• Significant Damage: Won’t one-shot most characters, but will take a chunk of the player’s life unless they are unusually defensively built
• Deadly Damage: Deals sufficient damage to pose a one-shot risk to some characters
• Devastating Damage: Will one-shot almost all characters.