DOSE Bosses and the Boss Board, Explained

You've been out in the wasteland for a while. Your dose meter is climbing, your bags are full, and the beacon is right there. You light the flare. The ground shakes, a name card slides onto the screen, and something the size of a building wakes up next to the extraction point. That's an extraction boss, and until it's dead, nobody is going home.

Bosses are the part of DOSE we've rebuilt the most. Here's how they work, and how the Boss Board scores every kill.

Two kinds of boss

Extraction bosses guard the beacons. There are 15 of them right now, from the Behemoth out on the Ash Flats to Kingclaw on the flooded highway. They wake up when the crew lights the extraction flare, and the flare waits until the boss is dead. The fight happens in a ring around the beacon, and the ring won't let you leave. Extraction bosses drop no items. They pay out in rank points on the Boss Board, and the boss itself is worth a big chunk of dose (the Behemoth is worth 300) that banks once you extract.

Dungeon bosses wait at the bottom of the dungeons. There are 20 of them, five for each dungeon type (vaults, sewers, subway tunnels and bunkers), spread over two depths. These are the loot bosses. A depth 1 boss drops three or four items, all at least rare, with a 40% chance at a legendary. At depth 2 it's four or five items and a 60% chance.

Under both sit 32 mini-bosses in the open world, tougher elites with one simple trick each.

How a fight is built

Every extraction boss has four phases, split at 75%, 50% and 25% health. Each phase brings its own mechanics, and the boss cycles through them on timers. At each threshold it does a phase shift: it goes untargetable for a few seconds while the arena changes around it and adds pour in from the edges.

Take the Behemoth, the Crown of Chains. Phase 1 is slams and a charge the crew stacks up on to share. At 75% it tears its chains free and starts dropping anchors, and each anchor circle needs two people standing in it. By 50% it's throwing shrapnel you have to spread out for, and it tries to call its brood, which you need to interrupt. At 25% the crown breaks and it uses nearly everything at once.

Mother Lode, the Glass Queen, plays very differently. Her Prism Beam hits everyone she can see, so you hide behind the crystals she raises. Later she splits the floor into amber and cyan light, and each survivor has to stand in their own colour. In her last phase she adds Mirror Nova: get inside a shadow ring before the fill completes, or lose 60% of your max health.

Kingclaw, the Overpass Tyrant, hides behind its Shell Bastion, and you have to crack the shell before it heals. In the last phase the shell breaks for good and it starts spilling Acid Tide pools you have to drag away from the crew.

Dungeon bosses are simpler on purpose, with exactly one signature mechanic each. Dr. Halvard Venn in the Vault Lab channels an Unstable Serum for four seconds, and if you don't knock 5% off his health in that window, he heals. The Cryo Matron freezes someone in a pod, and the crew has nine seconds to break them out before it costs them half their health. The Reactor Thing, deep in a bunker, is a pure damage check: a full crew has 75 seconds to kill it before the core melts down.

Reading the tells

We hold every mechanic to one rule: you have to be able to read it from the pulled-out boss camera, and it can't rely on colour alone. Every telegraph lasts at least 1.2 seconds. Every mechanic gets a ground marking with a shape and some motion, plus its own warning sound and a callout under the boss's health bar.

The callouts are blunt on purpose ("STACK", "SPREAD OUT", "INTERRUPT"), and when the boss picks out one survivor, that player's callout gets a pulsing gold rim.

Phases warn you too. About 6% of health before a threshold, the game says a new phase is coming and plays a rising sound. At the threshold a banner goes up and the music steps up a notch.

There's also an enrage timer on the HUD. If the fight drags, the boss gains 10% damage every 10 seconds, and if it drags much longer it goes berserk and hits the whole crew every two seconds until everyone is down. The timer stretches for smaller crews, so a solo player isn't held to a four-player pace.

Poise and the stagger window

Every boss has a poise bar, and damage drains it. At zero the boss is staggered. It's stunned and Exposed, so crits land, and any attack it was winding up gets cancelled. Then poise refills, and it also creeps back if nobody hits the boss for four seconds.

Extraction bosses have 900 poise and stay staggered for 3.5 seconds. Dungeon bosses have 420 poise and three seconds, and mini-bosses have 160. A stagger during a channel counts as an interrupt, so a crew that saves its big hits for the Behemoth's brood call can shut it down cleanly.

What a stagger won't do is cancel a raid mechanic that's already on the floor. If Mirror Nova is filling and you stagger Mother Lode, you still need to be in a shadow ring when it lands. That's on purpose. If a stagger wiped the floor clean, the best plan in every fight would be to hoard damage and ignore the mechanics, and the mechanics are the fight.

How a crew learns a fight

Expect to wipe the first time you meet a new extraction boss. It gets easier, because the fights reuse a small set of jobs. You stack on a marked player or spread apart. You hide behind cover, step through the gap in a moving wall, kill the adds that heal or shield the boss, and break a frozen teammate out of the ice. When the boss piles a debuff on whoever is holding it, someone else steps in at three stacks. Once you've learned "two under each circle" on the Behemoth's anchors, you already know it when Kingclaw drops its Falling Spans.

Classes matter here. The Medic's stuns and the Scavver's armour-piercing shots both help with poise and interrupts, and the Scavver turns every stunned target into a guaranteed crit. Bots play the mechanics too. They move to the stack point and hide behind pillars like you would. They're not as sharp as a good human crew, but they do play the fight. Solo is covered as well: if you get frozen alone, you mash a key 14 times to break out.

The codex helps a lot. Every boss you run into gets a page under the Bosses tab. The page shows the model, the class skills that counter it, its signature move and the full phase list with health thresholds, and after your first kill it shows what the boss is weak to. The Behemoth's signature, Chained Rampage, is three charges in a row that bounce off the arena walls. Bait it into a pillar and it's stunned for three seconds.

How the Boss Board scores a kill

Every extraction boss kill earns rank points and a letter grade. The points come from two speeds:

• Kill speed (60% of the score): the boss's par time divided by how long your fight took.
• Route speed (40%): how fast you got from the start of the run to lighting the flare. In a quick run par is eight minutes. In an expedition it's tied to how fast the storm closes in.

Each speed is capped between 0.3x and 2x. Then the multipliers kick in:

• Each zone tier above 1 adds 25%, and each dungeon depth whose boss you killed that run adds 10%.
• A solo player gets 15% extra, a duo 5%.
• Each death in the run costs 25% and each down in the boss arena costs 5%, never dropping below 40%.
• A wipe scores nothing.

The grade only looks at kill speed against par, and par is stretched for smaller crews: 2.2x the time for a solo player, 1.4x for two, 1.13x for three. S is 1.8x par speed or better, A is 1.35x, B is right on par, C is 0.7x and D is anything slower.

We had to fix one thing along the way. When the raid mechanics went in, every stack, hide and intermission became time spent not hitting the boss, and the old par times got much harder. Now each boss's par is stretched by how much hitting time its mechanics take away, so a crew that plays the mechanics properly lands around a B instead of getting punished for doing them.

The Boss Board keeps the top 20 runs for each boss, split by crew size, plus an overall board.

Come argue about par times

We're still tuning bosses, and any number in this post can change before the game comes out in 2027. If you think a par is unfair, come tell us on the DOSE Discord. For more on building a crew for these fights, read the classes and co-op post, and for what happens after the boss falls, see how extraction works in DOSE.