How to beat Viper Napuatzi in Path of Exile 2

Viper Napuatzi is a boss in Path of Exile 2’s third act. Located in Utzaal, Napuatzi deploys a variety of poison attacks in an extremely small arena, forcing you into a claustrophobic fight.

Viper Napuatzi may not be as complex or overwhelming as some of the other fights in Act 2 or Act 3, but the limited size of the arena and the power of poison makes her extremely deadly. This is especially true when she uses a number of core moves in quick succession to cover the arena in poison or pin you in a corner. 

Our Path of Exile 2 guide covers how to beat Viper Napuatzi, including how to prepare for the boss fight and how best to handle the onslaught of attacks you’ll face. 

Viper Napuatzi weaknesses and how to prepare

When you reach the Viper Naputazi boss fight, you’ll want to be around level 43-45, if not higher. Unfortunately, Viper Napuatzi is resistant to almost every type of elemental damage, including fire, frost, and lightning. She is also resistant to physical damage. Therefore, you want to use chaos damage if you have it available to you at this point or try to break her armor as much as possible. 

This makes some classes significantly more effective against her, like the Warrior, thanks to its slam attacks, or the Witch, if you have managed to spec into a chaos build at this point. The Ranger with poison or chaos attacks is also effective. Other classes will have a tougher time, such as the Monk or Sorceress, which is why you want to stack up your gear and defense with chaos resistance (poison damage is counted as chaos damage). 

The main way to do so is through farming gear with chaos resistance stats throughout Act 3. Additionally, you can use the Passive Skill Tree highways to purchase chaos resistance nodes that may be far out from where you started on the tree.

You can also use a chaos resistance ring, which can be found throughout Act 3 as a random drop or purchased from one of the vendors in Act 2 or Act 3. 

Finally, if you defeat Ignagduk (which you might’ve done so when grinding for spirit) and complete the Tribal Vengeance quest, you can select the Blooming Antidote Charm. This grants you immunity to poison when you become poisoned. If you didn’t choose it, your only hope is to find it randomly when farming enemies. 

How to beat Viper Napuatzi in Path of Exile 2

Viper Napuatzi is a challenging fight in a small arena, with a lot going on visually. Throughout the fight, she’ll progressively add more attacks, rather than switch between distinct phases. Therefore, she becomes more unpredictable as the fight goes on. In this guide, we’ll break down each attack, roughly in the order they show up.

The basic range of attacks Viper Napuatzi has are a number of spear attacks. This includes a lunge, which can be dodged to the side, as well as a standard three-hit combo. The first two hits will hit at close range, and then she will leap forward and slam the spear into the ground for a more powerful third attack. These can be dodged by rolling away from her for the first two attacks and then avoiding the slam by rolling to the side.

In another attack, she slowly walks forward while swirling a spear. She will then jump forward and spin the spear, dealing poison damage. To avoid the attack, dodge away from her. Almost all of her attacks will deal poison chaos damage too, so once you get hit, you will continuously take some damage while infected by the poison. That is why chaos damage resistance is so important if you can get some.

She can also dash toward you to close the gap between you. When Napuatzi holds the spear by her right side and charges it, you will see poison concentrate in the tip. (There will also be a loud thump audio cue.) This is a ranged charged attack that will send out two snakes in front of her. It has quite a wide reach across the arena, so you want to back off and dodge it as she releases the charged attack. She will also yell while charging this attack. As soon as she stops, get ready to dodge.

She can also do a quick backstep followed by tossing poison in front of her, at which point you want to dodge backward. Additionally, she can throw lightning knives that bounce off the sides of the arena. You can dodge these by rolling through the attack to the side.

Overall, between all of these attacks, you’ll want ot use any auto-targeting single-target abilities, area-of-effect abilities, and projectiles like walls and orbs to deal damage in between dodges. Don’t stick too close to her either. Instead, slowly guide her around the arena from a distance, maintaining a medium-range distance. This will allow you to avoid most of her melee attacks with good dodges and not have to worry about projectiles.

If you’re playing as a Warrior or a melee-focused class, focusing on abilities like totems and shockwaves is key. If you go too long without damaging Napuatzi, her energy shield will return.

Once Napuatzi’s drops to about 85%, she will place her spear in the ground and create a poison pool around it. She will also levitate in the air and launch fire bombardments that hit the arena from above. These are marked by circles on the ground, and the trick to dodging them is to just slowly walk around the arena. Don’t roll. Just move around to spaces where the bombardments haven’t hit (or have just hit).

She’ll follow this up with chaos bombardments that work in the exact same way. The area of effect for these is much greater, though, so you’ll want to roll to dodge them. Luckily, there are fewer bombardments at once compared to the fire bombardments. But, you will still need to walk around empty areas of the arena, or areas where the bombardments have just hit.

When Napuatzi lands back on the ground, she’ll begin firing poison projectile balls at you that deal substantial damage. These poison balls come either as fast and relentless streams of poison, or as a shotgun blast of five or so projectiles in front of her. She will consistently switch between the two formations, and the only real way to damage her here is through area-of-effect attacks, because you won’t have the time to cast long spells or perform melee swings.

The shotgun blast has to be dodged by rolling through the attack, but you can run around Napuatzi to avoid the stream of poison projectiles. She will quickly change directions to catch up to you, so try to keep an eye on her. If you are lucky and she lands by her spear after the bombardments, she may pick it up and go back to using melee attacks instead of these projectiles.

Napuatzi can also charge a slow-moving poison projectiles attack that you can initially dodge by staying behind her. However, once she starts attacking again, these projectiles will remain in the arena for a few seconds.

If she jumps into the air and screams while this is happening, dodge away from her, as she is about to perform a slam attack. If Napuatzi crouches down, she is preparing to unleash one of her most devastating moves. Alongside firing small, slow-moving poison projectiles every now and then, she will duck into the ground briefly before bursting out, firing spears from the minions that act as a wall around the arena. 

These minions will randomly fire spears back and forth, but will glow bright green just before they attack, which allows you to dodge or stand in an area where they aren’t attacking. You do need to keep an eye on the left and right sides of the arena, though, as the minions will attack from both sides.

The best strategy here is to stick to a small section of the arena away from Napuatzi and zigzag back and forth depending on where the minions are attacking. When Napuatzi finishes the attack, she will return to using the rest of the moves detailed above. Additionally, each time she finishes this attack, the arena will get slightly smaller — the minions will close in. 

This makes the fight even more stressful, as once she finishes this spear attack for the first time, she doesn’t get any new moves. However, she will continue to use every move you’ve dealt with thus far, including the melee attacks, lightning knives, fire and chaos bombardments, and poison projectiles. 

Dodging becomes even more important here, as she will not stop running toward you or letting you stay at a distance. Try to keep as much room between you and her with your abilities as you can. Making one wrong dodge could corner you in a tight area suffering a barrage of attacks, effectively forcing you to heal through it and use one of your flasks. (You want to hold onto those for the final 5% of her health, when the arena becomes so small it is hard to dodge certain attacks.)

There is no set order to these attacks. She can use several bombardments consecutively, spam melee attacks relentlessly, or switch between both. You just need to get familiar with the movements that telegraph each attack. She’ll perform the spear attack (the one where she hovers) after she drops to about at 30% health. 

Once she drops down to 5% health, she will perform the spear attack more consistently. However, the arena won’t get any smaller, which is a slight silver lining. You can’t damage her during this attack, though, so you are forced to wait it out until she starts fighting on the ground again — at which point you can resume dealing damage.

After defeating Viper Naputazi, you will be able to move on to Cruel difficulty, and the endgame.