History Main / IncrediblyDurableEnemies

* ''VideoGame/TheDivision'' had this when it first launched in spades. It was a massive point of criticism before the enemies got a time-to-kill adjustment. It still applies to some difficulties, such as Heroic, where every single enemy becomes an EliteMook.

Related to KungFuProofMook. Compare InvincibleMinorMinion for when they're outright invincible to your attacks. If ''everyone'' is durable, see PaddedSumoGameplay.

* There are enemies in the penultimate level of ''VideoGame/EvilDeadAFistfulOfBoomstick'' that are freaking bullet ''sponges'', meaning you'll be heading into the last level with virtually no ammunition - [[GuideDangIt unless you thought to try the flamethrower on them]], which kills them in a second or two (and considering the [[VideogameFlamethrowersSuck videogame flamethrower's typical effectiveness]], you probably didn't).

* The skags in ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands}}'' are this in the early game.

* ''VideoGame/{{Unreal|I}}'': The enemies in Na Pali are at the very least reasonably though. Mantas and Horseflies, some of the weakest nuisances in the game, will take at least 5 dispersion pistol or Automag shots to die, or one Eightball rocket. The weakest [[HumanoidAliens Skaarj]] takes almost 15 Automag bullets before it goes down. The Titan, Warlord, and Queen can all take more Eightball rockets than [[PlayerCharacter Prisoner 849]] can carry (though they have a 30% [[DamageReduction resistance]] to explosives). Even the SniperRifle, powerful as it is, can't one-shot anything beyond a [[GoddamnedBats Pupae]]. The only attack that reliably kills up to mid-tier enemies is a fully ChargedAttack with the [[DifficultButAwesome GES Bio-Rifle]]. Fortunately, most weapons fire decently fast and ammo is everywhere.

* When you crank up the difficulty in the ''Franchise/DevilMayCry'' games, this trope is in full effect. In most of the games in the series, it's done to an acceptable degree and the worst of it can be avoided with skillful playing, but ''3'' makes fighting most of the enemies in their SuperMode mandatory and strategically attempting to avoid what triggers them to transform (number of enemies killed, ie. weakening all the enemies next to no health before killing off any of them so you can finish them off quicker when they do transform) only helps to fix the situation to a very minor degree, causing the game to crossover from legimately challenging to this trope in its worst form.

* ''VideoGame/{{Unreal}}'': The enemies in Na Pali are at the very least reasonably though. Mantas and Horseflies, some of the weakest nuisances in the game, will take at least 5 dispersion pistol or Automag shots to die. The weakest [[HumanoidAliens Skaarj]] takes almost 20 Automag bullets before it goes down. The Titan, Warlord, and Queen can all take more Eightball rockets than [[PlayerCharacter Prisoner 849]] can carry. Even the SniperRifle, powerful as it is, can't one-shot anything. The only attack that reliably kills up to mid-tier enemies is a fully ChargedAttack with the [[DifficultButAwesome GES Bio-Rifle]]. Fortunately, most weapons fire decently fast and ammo is everywhere.

* ''VideoGame/{{Unreal}}'': The enemies in Na Pali are at the very least reasonably though. Mantas and Horseflies, some of the weakest nuisances in the game, will take at least 5 dispersion pistol or Automag shots to die. The weakest [[HumanoidAliens Skaarj]] takes almost 20 Automag bullets before it goes down. The Titan, Warlord, and Queen can all take more Eightball rockets than [[PlayerCharacter Prisoner 849]] can carry. Even the SniperRifle, powerful as it is, can't one-shot anything. The only attack that reliably kills up to mid-tier enemies is a fully ChargedAttack with te [[DifficultButAwesome GES Bio-Rifle]]. Fortunately, most weapons fire decently fast and ammo is everywhere.

* ''VideoGame/{{Unreal}}'': Even the weakest [[HumanoidAliens skaarj]] takes a full 50-round clip from the combat assault rifle before it goes down. The Titan, Warlord, and Queen can all take more eightball rockets than [[PlayerCharacter Prisoner 849]] can carry.
* A lot of {{MMORPG}}s fall into this, but none are half so bad as ''VideoGame/DungeonsAndDragonsOnline''. At the early levels, you're trained to think that bad guys will die after 3-5 hits. At the highest levels, it's a whole different mess. Without the best and rarest equipment, it can take 15 to 30 hits just to take a minion down.
** More like 15 to 30 hits WITH the best and rarest equipment. And that's for the easier minions. The harder ones have over 9,000 HP. [[ReadingsAreOffTheScale Literally.]]
** ''Dungeons and Dragons'' itself does this, but [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards only to the players]] and not to nearly the same extent. (In fact, it's kind of infamous for [[RocketTagGameplay the exact opposite trope]], though largely due to being tagged with a status effect effectively being instant death.)

* ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar'': The basic Locust will tear you apart if you're not in cover. (And even IF you're in cover. You might run out of damn ammo.) It takes almost a full magazine of assault rifle fire to kill just ''one'' of these guys. On Insane, you had to shoot enemies in the head in order to avoid running out of ammunition entirely.
** [[SequelDifficultyDrop This became much less the case with time]] as the developers admitted the incredibly tough enemies in the first game was a mistake. In Gear of War 1, fighting without using the cover system, even if you were just walking behind the pillar to avoid fire, was suicidal even on the lowest difficulty. By the time ''Gears of War 3'' came around, on normal mode, you had a good chance of survival even if you made liberal usage of [[BayonetYa bayonet charges.]]

** By the time of ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands 2}}'', pretty much all of your enemies become enormous bullet sponges once you enter the True Vault Hunter and Ultimate Vault Hunter Modes. For instance, a Hyperion Surveyor, a small flying MookMedic that doubles as a generic AttackDrone, can be taken down with a few shots from a pistol by a player of the same level in Normal Mode. In True Vault Hunter and Ultimate Vault Hunter Modes, a Surveyor can demand as many as five consecutive hits from a sniper rifle to bring down, even by players that outlevel it.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'', a normal person can expect to survive two or three head shots from a submachine gun without flinching. However, stronger weapons can subvert this -- getting in close with a Combat Shotgun and landing a headshot usually causes LudicrousGibs. Any good headshot on a normal Ghoul, meanwhile, will usually be enough to bring them down. Super Mutants and Deathclaws are justified cases; the former were specifically designed to be superhumanly resilient, and the latter are the apex predators of the Wasteland.
** The DLC ''Point Lookout'' and ''Broken Steel'' added several new and stronger enemies to the game to add extra challenge. ''Point Lookout'' has the Swampfolk, inbred mutants who worship Ug-Qualtoth, Point Lookout Tribals, mostly comprised children of said inbred mutants who "lack the marks", and the Feral Ghoul Reavers who can launch chunks of their bodies like grenades and see you even when you use [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Stealth Boys or the Chinese Stealth Suit.]] ''Broken Steel'' adds Super Mutant Overlords, gigantic mutants that are on their way to becoming Behemoths, Enclave Hellfire Troops, the EliteMooks of the Enclave equipped with Heavy incinerators, and Albino Radscorpions that can take as much as they can deal [[FromBadToWorse and heal in sunlight.]] The Swampfolk, Tribals, and Overlords get even harder to kill because their weapons add additional damage when they ''and only they'' use them.

** ''VideoGame/Halo5Guardians'' has the base-breaking Warzone Firefight mode, where even [[CannonFodder Grunts]] and [[FragileSpeedster Jackals]] take at least half a magazine to take down. And then there's [[MadeOfIron every single Promethean enemy...]]

* The [=PS2=] FPS ''VideoGame/{{Black}}'' had enemies that took so many rounds to kill that learning to headshot was mandatory ''on the easiest setting''. Perhaps this is the reason all your guns hold [[BottomlessMagazines ridiculous amounts of bullets.]]

* ''GearsOfWar'': The basic Locust will tear you apart if you're not in cover. (And even IF you're in cover. You might run out of damn ammo.) It takes almost a full magazine of assault rifle fire to kill just ''one'' of these guys. On Insane, you had to shoot enemies in the head in order to avoid running out of ammunition entirely.
** [[SequelDifficultyDrop This became much less the case with time]] as the developers admitted the incredibly tough enemies in the first game was a mistake. In Gear of War 1, fighting without using the cover system, even if you were just walking behind the pillar to avoid fire, was suicidal even on the lowest difficulty. By the time Gears of War 3 came around, on normal mode, you had a good chance of survival even if you made liberal usage of [[BayonetYa bayonet charges.]]

* Quite a number of mooks in ''VideoGame/DungeonOfTheEndless'' have a lot of health, especially the [[EliteMook elite variants]] fought on later floors. Also justified- you're supposed to use your [[TowerDefense turrets and modules]] to soften them up for your heroes to kill.

In some games, it takes an absurd amount of firepower to take down a basic enemy, whether due to monsters simply having massive numbers of HitPoints, weapons being PVPBalanced, or a combination of both. Maybe its only when the game's difficulty is cranked up to [[IdiosyncraticDifficultyLevels "Make It Hurt!"]]. Rats take multiple pistol rounds, HumanoidAliens take repeated shotgun blasts to the face, and even with a rocket launcher there are still some guys that are going to go through a DeathOfAThousandCuts. This concept can apply to magic and melee weapons as well.

These opponents aren't GoddamnedBats, much less DemonicSpiders: the monsters aren't MadeOfIron (or at least they aren't supposed to be) and if they were [[DamageSpongeBoss Boss-level opponents]] there might be some excuse. But no, these are just the average, every day, run-of-the-mill {{Mooks}}. And it takes an entire arsenal to put them down.

* ''VideoGame/{{Unreal}}'': Even the weakest [[HumanoidAliens skaarj]] takes a full, 50-round, clip from the combat assault rifle before it goes down. The Titan, Warlord, and Queen can all take more eightball rockets than [[PlayerCharacter Prisoner 849]] can carry.

** ''Dungeons and Dragons'' itself does this, but [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards only to the players]] and not to nearly the same extent.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' a normal person can expect to survive two or three head shots from a submachine gun without flinching. However, stronger weapons can subvert this - getting in close with a Combat Shotgun and landing a headshot usually causes LudicrousGibs. Any good headshot on a normal Ghoul, meanwhile, will usually be enough to bring them down. Super Mutants and Deathclaws are justified cases; the former were specifically designed to be superhumanly resilient, and the latter are the apex predators of the Wasteland.

* When you crank up the difficulty in the ''Franchise/DevilMayCry'' games, this trope is in full effect. In most of the games in the series it's done to an acceptable degree and the worst of it can be avoided with skillful playing, but 3 makes fighting most of the enemies in their SuperMode mandatory and strategically attempting to avoid what triggers them to transform (number of enemies killed, ie. weakening all the enemies next to no health before killing off any of them so you can finish them off quicker when they do transform) only helps to fix the situation to a very minor degree, causing the game to crossover from legimately challenging to this trope in its worst form.

Related to KungFuProofMook. If ''everyone'' is durable, see PaddedSumoGameplay.

* It varies based on where in the series it takes place, but in the course of the ''MechWarrior'' series you'll end up fighting a lot of enemies, sometimes of a vehicular nature (especially in 3 and 4), but most often you'll end up facing enemy 'Mechs. Even the smallest ones seem to be uncannily tough, with even spindly lightweights like the ''Owens'' or ''Osiris'' taking quite a while to bring down by the time the 4th installment comes around.

* ''VideoGame/MaxPayne'': Some [[BossInMookClothing plot-significant enemies]] take several point-blank shots to drop. The first example [[JustifiedTrope makes some sort of sense]], as when you fight Jack Lupino he's tripping balls on Valkyrie, but the others have no such excuse.

* When ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' is set on [[HarderThanHard legendary]], elites and brutes can take an unholy amount of damage before their shields burst, and almost as much again to kill them unless you go for the head with a suitable weapon. It is possible to run through dual wielded SMG clips even when they are fully on target against a red elite, not even an EliteMook, and still have them survive a melee attack.

** The DLC ''Point Lookout'' and ''Broken Steel'' added several new and stronger enemies to the game to add extra challenge. ''Point Lookout'' has the Swampfolk, inbred mutants who worship Ug-Qualtoth, Point Lookout Tribals, mostly comprised children of said inbred mutants who "lack the marks"[[note: marks seem to be the visible signs of mutations], and the Feral Ghoul Reavers who can launch chunks of their bodies like grenades and see you even when you use [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Stealth Boys or the Chinese Stealth Suit.]] ''Broken Steel'' adds Super Mutant Overlords, gigantic mutants that are on their way to becoming Behemoths, Enclave Hellfire Troops, the EliteMooks of the Enclave equipped with Heavy incinerators, and Albino Radscorpions that can take as much as they can deal [[FromBadToWorse and heal in sunlight.]] The Swampfolk, Tribals, and Overlords get even harder to kill because their weapons add additional damage when they ''and only they'' use them.

** The DLC ''Point Lookout'' and ''Broken Steel'' added several new and stronger enemies to the game to add extra challenge. ''Point Lookout'' has the Swampfolk, inbred mutants who worship Ug-Qualtoth, and the Feral Ghoul Reavers who can launch chunks of their bodies like grenades and see you even when you use [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard Stealth Boys or the Chinese Stealth Suit.]] ''Broken Steel'' adds Super Mutant Overlords, gigantic mutants that are on their way to becoming Behemoths, Enclave Hellfire Troops, the EliteMooks of the Enclave equipped with Heavy incinerators, and Albino Radscorpions that can take as much as they can deal [[FromBadToWorse and heal in sunlight.]] The Swampfolk and Overlords get even harder to kill because their weapons add additional damage when they ''and only they'' use them.

* The PS2 FPS ''VideoGame/{{Black}}'' had enemies that took so many rounds to kill that learning to headshot was mandatory ''on the easiest setting''. Perhaps this is the reason all your guns hold [[BottomlessMagazines ridiculous amounts of bullets.]]

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Diablo}} Diablo II]]'': Unless you have nice equipment, don't expect enemies to drop from a single cast of Meteor, Armageddon, or Fist of the Heavens.

-->-- '''WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd''' on ''TheTerminator'' for the UsefulNotes/SegaCD