Back to the boss fight!
While operating under fundamentally the same mechanics as regular strife, strife against a session boss operates in a vastly different manner:

- Each player has a value called focus. This represents the percentage of the boss's attention that player has, specifically the amount of their total power devoted to strifing with that player. That player's regular attack must overcome this amount of power in order to do damage, and the boss's attack against them will possess that level of power. However, more focus also means you treat the boss as having higher maximum and current health! You can only damage the boss by a percentage of his current health equal to your focus in any given round, and you treat the boss as having a percentage of his maximum health and maximum power equal to his focus for the purposes of massive damage resistance and power reduction resistance. So more focus means more danger, but also more opportunity to deal damage. Finally, Seers can use their normally non-combat only Seer powers while fighting a boss, but only if their focus is sufficiently low.

- The strife will have a leader, whose role is to press a button to resolve the current strife round once everyone has taken all the actions they want to and has the commands they want to use locked in. Consumables, roletechs, fraymotifs, and so forth are all usable in the same way they are used in regular strife, so the leader should make sure everyone has done what they want to before proceeding. Regular actions are locked in and the actions that are currently in place will be used when the round is executed. The leader also governs the boss's AI to a degree: If they are obviously immune or resistant to a particular special attack, the boss will be less likely to use it. Leadership may be passed to another player by the current leader at any time, even if said leader has been KOed (in fact, if this happens it must be passed for the strife to continue!)

- Anything you can't do during strife you similarly cannot do while involved in a boss fight, with the exception of the Seer example above. However, it is also impossible to use the Alchemiter or flee once you start the fight, which means that barring shenanigans it is not possible to bring new items into the fight unless you weren't participating before. Oh, also you can't recover from being down until either your session or the boss is defeated, so watch it! Additionally, players will regain 10% Aspect Vial per round (15% if you have Aspect Connection) to better facilitate the use of their patterns.

- Finally, status effects must succeed multiple times before they have any effect. You will see a message indicating the status effect was applied, but currently has no lasting effect (e.g. 'BOSS stops for a moment, but quickly recovers' for the Time Stop status ailment). When application has occurred enough times, a different message will appear and the status will be visible on the session boss page.