Will end-game be for me? (Hardcore attempt - kinda)

Long story short, I'm playing with friends through campaign, having a blast. I have a personal side goal to try and hardcore it (pseudo-hardcore, my friends don't care about dying.) So it's not formal in anyway. What drives me is building towards bosses and getting defences up to near immortality (it's my thing lol). I'm playing an aura-bot witch for my group.

Now if I do play end game, my goal would be survive the pinnacle bosses. From what I can tell, reliably tanking ubers requires extremely expensive builds (mageblood, bugged armor, petrified blood, full damage conversion shenanigans ect).

...What about normal pinnacle bosses..i presume they do a lot less damage? And so I could pull it off with cheaper builds? I'm patient and don't mind working at a goal, but I'll get depressed to no-life my to something that is kinda impossible for most players. I'm playing on standard as well.

Sorry for the rant - hard to articulate this. :P

Yeah its a pretty big difference. I'm not very familiar with group play bossing, but it's not that difficult to get a build going that can beat the regular version of the bosses, albeit harder if you want to do them deathless. If you builds can handle t16 maps comfortably its probably not a stretch to do the bosses, if you can learn the fights.

Ubers are another story though, its a big step up in difficulty.

There are some intermediate bosses as well. Catarina is a pretty good starter boss while levelling and fairly easy to access/learn. Just watch out for the slam skill when she's teleporting on top of you. You have to dodge it a the right time or she keeps teleporting. Shaper is another good one.

Most bosses difficulty is somewhat build dependent. If you are wanting not to die you probably want to know the mechanics. Some fights like infinite hunger are pretty frustrating if you don't know the mechanics. I wouldn't want to learn most of the fights blind on HC. Build wise I'm sure you can work towards completing mostly everything up until t17/ubers where its a jump in difficulty.

If your build is really tanky it should be able to tank most things up until then except maybe maven memory game, which is tankable, but requires quite a bit of mitigation.

Elder is definitely the easiest (if he counts as a pinnacle)

Shaper is a good starting point as he definitely has abilities that hit hard, especially if you're trying to survive bullet hell without zana's shield (dunno if uber shaper is still a thing).

I lost count of the deaths I had to Sirus's death beam, yet I've also killed him deathless multiple times.

Uber Elder(with shaper) has some very hard hitting abilities.

Everything added with Maven (including their sub-bosses) do heavy damage with most of their abilities and mechanics.

I hate Maven, dealing with degen against ubers is bad enough, doing it in a smaller area with a memory game no thanks.

Oh I forgot -- the bosses that drop fragments that lead to the pinnacles difficulty (ie purifier or redeemer) is much more based on the map mods than the actual boss fight, though you do want to be mindful of certain mechanics.