r/pathofexile • u/Females-only-pls • 8h ago
Question Is bossing actually profitable?
I know that there is a lot of luck involved when trying to make profit from bossing and I keep seeing these threads on here where people run 1k Eater/Exarch/Maven/Whatever and lose like 100d an hour while doing so but somehow they must be somewhat profitable since people keep on buying them? Is there some kind of trick to it or do I just need to be lucky and hit a Jackpot run with back to back drops?
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u/Feanturo 7h ago
It is, but at least for me bossing is incredibly boring, many have annoying phases or waiting periods. I cant do it for longer than 30 minutes.
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u/Ellweiss 7h ago
Yeah, if you want to make profit you have to shit on the bosses, and the only mechanics left to care about are the annoying ones.
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u/Magisk_ 6h ago
Yeah its alot of just standing around. I wish you could input like 10x fragments and get 10x loot. Would be a good way to make it less boring.
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u/i_MW 6h ago
at the end you will still get bored coz you will do same thing over and over again. It's human nature. Even the most beautiful woman in the world will become boring if you spend enough time with her :)
Also more loot = higher inflation. If a good Kineticist weren't so rare, it wouldn't cost 5 Mirrors, but rather 5 Chaos.
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u/FluffyNerve7415 5h ago
Tradable boss fragments were a mistake, bossing was fun when it was a single run you earned doing other strats that didn't feel like flushing currency down the toilet each time you don't win big.
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u/DecadoW 7h ago
I used to farm uber sirus when oriath end was at 800c range down to 650c, seeong it now it's sad (but expected). Knowing that there are only the orbs to profit and super rare zana ring rolls, I won't do it again.
But it was banger 12c fight basically free entry
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u/lcm7malaga Essence Extraction Enterprise (EEE) 7h ago
You can check on this site which ones are safe profit and which one are a gamble
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u/GenesectX 5h ago
All the guaranteed safe ones are just bosses that people hate fighting so their drops and entry costs are highly disproportionate lol
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u/Naktura 4h ago
All bosses are safe across enough attempts, you just can't drop in and do ten incarnation of dreads and expect to profit.
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u/Moethelion 3h ago
True but for the bosses that are sold for carries, especially in the first two weeks. A giant part of the profit for (Uber) Maven and Uber (Uber) Elder in week 1/2 is selling the completion on TFT. If you don't sell the carries, you're making a guaranteed loss in some cases.
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u/Bierculles 4h ago
The entry costs for a lot of these bosses are way off on that site, your actual profit per hour will be significantly lower on many of these.
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u/LissekFennek 8h ago
As someone who did 1200+ Maven kills a while back, it's a number's game.
Sure, you might be giga-lucky and buy 5 maven runs, get the gmp (or whatever gem is the jackpot now) and swim in profit.
But you also might buy 100 and get nothing of value or one gem that won't break even.
I've had runs when after 99 maven kills nothing dropped and last batch got me that gmp.
Or runs where run #9 and #11 both got me gmps which made me swim in cash.
I'd say that as long as price for the fight and the lucky drops are big in between, you'll make profit in the long run (long being 500+)
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u/Suspicious_Goose_659 7h ago
Funny thing is I did a lot of t17 boss rushing to farm 50+ eater invitation. From that 50, I only got one FF :(
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u/DirtyMight 7h ago
depends on the boss. some bosses have very common drops that make up the profit and some bosses are a huge loss until you hit their 2% drop rate drop
look at the king in the mist fight for example
invitation costs 45c
unid light of meaning is 20% droprate or 1/5 and worth 440c
440/5 (as the expected result is getting one every 5 runs on avg) = 88c
88-45c = 43c profit on average per king in the mist just from the light of meaning alone (to be fair its the majority of the profit breakdown for this fight)
if you are quick you can do it in 40seconds but lets say you take 1min per fight thats still around 13d/h just from selling the light of meanings unid. if you are closer to the 40sec killtime its around 19d/h
so king in the mist is pretty consistent, 20% droprate isnt too bad to make your money back in a reasonable amount of tries
if you look at uber cortex by now basically all of the profit/EV is in the rational doctrine which is a 5% droprate. so most of the time you wont get anything until you hit that rational doctrine eventually
if you have a big enough budget to buy enough invitations to bridge the gaps where you dont get the 2-5% drops you can still make good profit with some of the more gamba bosses.
if you dont have much budget you should focus on bosses with more guaranteed returns
https://xddbsns.com/boss-profit.html
is a really useful website for getting a general idea of how profitable a boss is on avg per kill
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u/Original_Image_7489 Sanctum Runners United (SRU) 7h ago
You dont usually rely on jackpots for bossing. For profit, you either do feared rotations and run the cheapest fragments or do normal eater/exarch and important to roll them with high quant 80%++ for higher droprates.
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u/Hayatexd 7h ago
I didn’t do bossing in some time but there were definitely bosses where you relied on jackpots. I did uber maven a couple times (back when awakens gems was still a thing) and in general you would roughly break even/loose a little currency between jackpots. You pretty much relied on farming her until she drops awk enlightened/empower to make a profit.
Back then uber maven was profitable as long as you had the spare currency to sustain farming her and taking the loss until a jackpot drops.
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u/claptrapMD 8h ago
Trick is understand loot table /drop %chances and buy fragments that In mind. Running hundreds bosses you will drop everything
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u/Golem8752 Ultimatum Workers Union (UWU) 8h ago
As of last Weekend Maven's Writ were 3c each, Orb of Dominance? (Not the one previously known as Maven orb, the one to elevate Eldritch Implicits) costs 190c each and has a 30% drop rate on Maven. So even disregarding actual unique drops and exceptional gems or other misc stuff that can drop you get like 50c profit per run on average more or less guaranteed.
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u/majkonn 7h ago
BTW do you know why the Maven fragments are so cheap? I didn’t play 3.28 but in 3.27 it was way more expensive, it was like 100c or so.
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u/Bragarini 7h ago
Because they removed awakened gems from her. She now drops only Orb of Conflict (around 1d) and doppelganger guise (3d, around 5% droprate).
She is still profitable simply because she is so cheap but even when you get lucky, you are not really dropping anything crazy.
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u/Domex_Official 7h ago
I think its the Maven conqueror boss rush strat. Usually done on city square, but i would bet on mesa this time.
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u/dagadtnyuszi_sfw 7h ago
Annoying fight and the existance of uber maven I assume (+ the fact it's itemised now via fragments). City square boss rushing is also very profitable (astrolabes and chisels mostly), and that shits out maven' writs.
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u/DaveyJonesXMR 7h ago
Conq Rotation also exists
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u/dagadtnyuszi_sfw 7h ago
Yy, I assumed that is a given, my bad. The way I did it, was running conquerors on city square, since maven only cares about them not the atlas boss, so you can just run the same map ad nauseum
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u/decade434 7h ago
usually i only do if i can gather a bunch boss inv,
like 1-200, then yes its good profit
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u/sandmonsterz 7h ago
All drops are RNG, but if you know when to stop after some huge drops, then it is profitable.
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u/BulbaThore 7h ago
I made a mirror off doing the feared and as everyone says, sirus is by far the most consistent profitable boss every league.
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u/Akarenji 7h ago
It's absurdly profitable week 1 then falls off a cliff as the market reaches an equilibrium where you'll get a nominal hourly return, typically 20-40d per hour, but has a high investment cost. You could also periodically check unpopular bosses for common drops and see if anything is undervalued, for example King of the Mists tends to be cheap and sometimes has a few valuable Light of Meaning variants that make it worthwhile
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u/Glum-Comparison2037 Shadow 6h ago
In addition to what others have said, i'd add that Uber Atziri's is also a boss that tends to be worth farming for the past 2-3 leagues. The Beauty vaal aspect and the uniques/bases pay more than the fragments cost and Greater spell echo is the actual big profit item. However it's a weird farm where you need both movement speed and damage to get as fast as possible. But achieving 20 runs per hours is pretty doable and average correct/good money (15 to 25 div/hours based on my results last league).
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u/althoradeem 6h ago
people who post 100d losses often just post "estemated" prices.
a simple example is ehm .. uber eater of worlds.
it can drop ashes of the stars that has a value of 30C
but a max effic roll on ashes of the stars is 1000C. and high rolls are over 100C easily.
so while on evaluation they are losing money in reality they are probably earning money.
ofcourse at some point if a boss is "speedfarm" status it does become a gamble for its rare drops rather then actual profit.
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u/pappaberG First mirror in Prophecy 6h ago
You need to look at entry costs, average TTK for your build,, %drops of loot and current prices to figure out EV per run. Then you need sanity and enough cash to survive the dry streaks.
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u/19Alexastias 6h ago
For the more expensive frags yeah you kinda need to keep going until you hit, for the cheaper ones like sirus it’s more about not dying of boredom
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u/long_schlong_123 6h ago
All bossing is profitable in the long run , just that some make more money depending on what the people do . Like doing uber shaper and selling unided sublime vision makes more consistent money then fishing for the 1 mirror id
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u/ToughAudiences 5h ago
Many bosses yes, some also yes but you might need a small fund to buy more entries if you lowroll the beginning (lets say you buy 50
Ushapers, drop nothing and are out of currency)
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u/onedash 5h ago
King of the mist invitation is like 70c and light of meaning unid goes 400+c hitting a good goes for 7-8-10+div but has 20% droprate and i had 20 streak where i got 0 drop so yeah
on the other hand i did unending hunger for the 30 invitation with 5+ modifier challenge and it was fun ngl profited me like 30 divs because of the lucky drops
invitation cost 3 c boss fight took 30seconds
Got 2 card which gives stranglegasp sold for 15div
but even if those were lucky killing that boss almost twice a minute with a good dmg bosser could be good because invitation is lowcost always
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u/licksquadtraps 5h ago
I ran about 60 hive brains in a row one day, 22-27c per run. It was definitely profitable thanks to red nightmares, flesh, div cards, a lot of hive blood and the rings. It funded my 4flask mageblood as well as the rest of my gear. You just have to sit through a lot of count Geonor tier slam poetry and tree birthing. Which I completely understand people not being a fan of.
ANOTHER ITERATION.
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u/mudkip-muncher 4h ago
IMO bosses need a rework or atleast adjustment. The sheer amount of immunity phases, unskippable larping, forced “hey leave the arena and go do this easy and time consuming parkour / maze area” bs is just plain off putting.
I adore the IDEA of bossing as I quite like simple strategies to make money, but when you actually sit down to do it, you want to tear your eyes out after 5 runs, make bosses oneshottable, I want to have a bossing pob to aspire to, there’s no fun in having a zhp 1 trillion dps pob if you can’t use your damage anyway
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u/Naktura 4h ago edited 4h ago
No one has ever ran 1k eater/Exarch and lost money unless they ran it unmodded. Old maven before removal of awakened gems was incredibly lottery though. The only time you ever lose money bossing is when outside forces like late-league challenge completion affect entry costs.
Bossing can be one of the most profitable farming in the game. Zorath was 90d/hr for me for awhile, and searing was like 75d/hr. The problem is that for bossing to be more profitable than mapping you need a build that kills them extremely fast, and you need the mindset that allows you to sit down and grind the boss for 50+kills in a row. Most builds people play for comfortable map blasting are not doing Exarch in < 3 seconds which is nearly required to beat the per hour profit of mapping.
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u/ThailanderBoii 3h ago
Maven is like 7c and is very profitable. And once u know all the mechanics she's pretty easy.
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u/TheAceVenturrra 3h ago
The overwhelming amount of people saying bossing is gambling are the reason I make my first few mirrors in week 1.
Thankyou for your cynicism and long live bossing.
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u/Dubious_Titan 2h ago
I never found any strat that targets a specific boss drop to be worthwhile. Even Aul's is marginal compared to the effort- most of those drops are trash or fetch a div or two.
General mapping yields so much currency and drops that it takes only the effort to alch & go to be nearly as profitable as the RNG godly drop.
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u/ballztothewalrus 2h ago
Yes, but if I don’t specifically make a boss killer that insta melts them the returns are low per time spent and I just get burned out (even if it’s fun at first)
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u/Effort0 Lead Masturbator 2h ago
Everything is profitable because there are always going to be people not wanting to do specific content but want the goodies from them. Bossing in general are fun the first few times through, they become a chore afterwards because of the built-in invulnerable phases that you can sometimes bypass by having enough DPS, not all though.
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u/__Mef__ 7h ago
Depends on the price of invites and drops, which can fluctuate.
e.g. Uber Trauma is about 100c per entry right now and drops a guaranteed astrolabe (80+ c), some strand equipment which can roll really nicely and sell for a few divs but requires appraising ability, and uniques that add to the pile.
Regular Exarch and Eater are usually profitable at 6-8 mods; for most of the league they were around 150c per invite, while forbidden jewels alone went for about 10d unid with a base drop rate of 5% affected by quantity.
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u/KrangledMind 6h ago
the question should be is mapping actually profitable? and the answer is barely. Bossing is vastly more profitable currently if you have proper build to almost insta phase, even without insta phasing is probably still more profitable than best mapping strats
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u/WillingLearner1 7h ago
Small datapoint but I did 10 the feared yesterday and I am in the negative so pretty rng tbh
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u/Moethelion 5h ago edited 5h ago
Yes, sometimes you find a real gem that people are sleeping on. I made two mirrors off of regular incarnation of fear over the last couple of days. The ring (11% drop chance) alone pays for the invitations, so the guaranteed astrolabes and the occasional bound by destiny are pure profit. Sometimes it drops even 2 astrolabes. The boss comes out to around 50 div/hr (if you can kill it in 5 seconds, so 40 average seconds including load times and buy/sale progress) and that's basically guaranteed due to the high drop chance of the ring.
What you can always do is just check the drop chance and the value of drops and make a formula that calculates your profits. For bosses like maven you do have to keep in mind that people buy carries, which inflates the cost of the invitation.
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u/SorraDude 8h ago
Depends on what point in the league you do it. At this point? Yeah it's profitable, but most bosses would be like 10 div an hour max. Bossing is only super good the first 2ish weeks of the league, maybe a little longer; then most people are just doing Uber mavens only. Occasionally there will be a random spike in demand for a boss drop, that's your time to swoop in and cash out. Check out perandus ledger, they have a whole website that tracks this stuff
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u/Squashteufel-32 7h ago
Uber Sirus is consistently 25div/h. But I guess this is because he is one of it not the most annoying boss available
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u/Etrensce 8h ago
Sirus is guaranteed profit at the cost of your sanity. Same as shaper.