We are happy to report that this bug has finally been fixed. It really should have been addressed earlier but the problem was this bug was particularly nasty and had nothing to do with UI and so it was sitting in the wrong team’s bug-backlog!
We eventually boiled down the reproduction to something embarrassingly simple: just look away. When the Exploiter Orb climbs down there’s a cinematic event that hides your HUD and then a moment later there’s another event that fires to show the boss title card and then show your HUD again when that’s done. If the first event fires but you miss the second your HUD is lost forever:
The tricky part was figuring out why you weren’t getting that second event and the reason turned out to be quite bizarre: when the Exploiter Orb is climbing down the animation system classifies this behavior as “flying.”
In order to run massive open worlds with enemies spread all over the map t...