History ThatOneLevel / MMORPG

[[folder:City Of Heroes]]
* The whole of the Shadow Shard. Complex jumping puzzles, incredibly nasty enemies, and four of the longest task forces in the game. Oh, and if you should fall off the Floating Platforms that make up the entire area and into the void, you're teleported back to the entrance and, unless you can fly or teleport, have to go through those complex jumping puzzles and nasty enemies all over again. And almost every mission takes place in identical caves. And the enemies are some of the tougher in the game. And the zone had so much promise, too!
** The Shadow Shard was eventually made slightly more tolerable; a jetpack vendor was added to each zone, providing a way to circumvent the gravity geysers (or at least recover if you miss). The task forces still sucked, but they at least gave great numbers of reward merits for completion (except Augustine, which isn't that long).
** Word of God was that it was completely broken after the Fitness power pool was made an inherent power set on all characters. Due to the Hurdle power augmenting a character's baseline leaping. The geysers were, apparently, were tossing characters a set distance based on their baseline value.
* While The Hollows were visited earlier in the game. They involved mile-long runs long before characters earn their travel powers, and had level 5 missions in level 16 enemy areas. Several updates fixed these problems, including giving characters much earlier access to temporary travel powers and a slight revamp of the Hollows zone to include a hospital, a trainer, and a store, so you don't have to zone back into an adjacent zone every time you die or level. They also changed the mission spawn points so they showed up in areas with enemy spawns appropriate to the player's level.
** Also worth noting is that after a new hero finished all the missions from his introductory contact, the first mission from his second contact ''will'' be going to the Hollows, so every newbie player on the server is going through this and generally mucking things up.
* Perez Park was horror at low levels and misery at high levels. Most of the zone consisted of a huge, dark, confusing labyrinthine forest filled with large groups of enemies that are impossible to avoid. Even players with higher-level characters hate being sent back there due to the difficulty of navigating its maze. Travel powers weren't very useful in the park either - Flight and Super-Jump are useless in the forest with its thick, rooflike properties, it was too twisty and dark to use Teleport much, and Super-Speed is difficult to use on those twisty paths too, and won't help you much if you just kept getting lost.
** On top of that, there was a wall all around the main park, only one opening, it was not marked on the map, and the walls are too high to jump without Super Jump or Flight, so depending on which Security Gate you come in, you had to run around half the edge just to get in or out of the park, which is itself packed with low-level gangs which are either a bloody nuisance or a nightmare, depending on your level.
* Faultline was loathed for the deep, twisting canyon that was easy to fall into and hard to get out of - while it had Freight Lifts, they too could be tough to find and lead to places it's easy to fall from. There were missions IN the canyon in caves and sewers, and thanks to its winding nature some were difficult to find. Other missions occurred on the other side of the canyon, in a part of Faultline which was practically demolished, and was tough to run around thanks to cracked pavements, toppling buildings and mobs scattered all over the place. It was made even more noticeable by the way that about 1/4 of Faultline was almost normal.
** Many of these zones were part of a now-abandoned design philosophy from much earlier in the games history: they're Hazard Zones, regions of the city that were devastated by one or another catastrophe and essentially evacuated and abandoned. As such, they contained neither contacts to give quests or innocent civilians to rescue, only swarms of villains and monsters usually in groups too large for a single player to tackle alone. The only reason to ever go there was by being sent from another mission elsewhere, and then you try to run to the target as fast as possible. It's a shame because some of these zones have quite interesting stories as to how they got so bad, but the stories aren't explored no one lives there anymore.
* ''City of Heroes'' also has a Scrappy Tileset. The tileset for randomly generated cave missions has a penchant for putting the mission objective in a specific universally loathed 5-story-tall room with ample places to lose track of enemy [=NPCs=]. This wouldn't be so bad, except that one often needs to wipe out the enemies in the same room as the mission objective, for "Defeat <insert Boss name> and his Guards" and "Get the MacGuffin" missions alike.

* The City of Heroes Architect system, which allows user-generated content, has resulted in many users creating their very own scrappy levels, replete with abusively constructed enemies who put the game's worst excesses to shame. Some of the levels are meant to provide a challenge to jaded players, but most of the tough stuff is created by power-tripping adolescents with no conception of game balance.
** The worst AE Combination had to be the dreaded "Defeat All + Outdoor Map + Arbitrary Goal + Patrols (That Spawn After Said Arbitrary Goal)", otherwise known as a "Farm" Mission. To make it extra tough, make it a TimedMission too, just so the player can't go to the toilet after they've taken it. If you're just doing random missions and you get one of these, it's best to just drop it...
* One of the Council Base maps contained a three story room with a large pool of water in it (for some reason). While this wasn't as annoying as some of the other examples, it was still rather tricky to navigate which can make it frustrating.

[[folder:[=zOMG!=]]]
* There's a quest called The Gauntlet, which involves you traveling through an already hard area to a sublevel, touching a statue in the deepest part of the area, and then running back to the entrance while avoiding the huge swarms of nearly impossible-to-defeat enemies. If you die, your only options are to be revived by a crew member (who is probably too busy trying to survive to offer any help) or start the quest over. There have been a fair number of threads in the forums complaining about its difficulty, and people gloat about completing it without any other players helping. Anybody who has had the pleasure of doing this quest immediately realizes why people so often complain about the Otami Ruins area.
** Hell, Otami Ruins ''period''. There are Animated in there that are actually ''impossible'' to defeat. Plus swarms of annoying spammy Animated...
** Barton Lake can be really friggin' annoying at times. The Flying Giftbox monsters chase you farther than any other Animated and pretty much kill you instantly, there are elite, tough Grass puffs that follow around giant mommy Grass puffs, except the elite Grass puffs are exactly the same as their weaker counterparts. When you realize some stronger players simply kill the mother Grass puffs and leave the elites, then you're screwed if you mistake it for a normal puff when you're on a quest requiring you to kill a ton of them. Plus, the fact that you have to bang trash cans for a long time to '' maybe'' get a Carrion Flower puff to pop out, which immediately attacks you... And this isn't even talking about the ''two'' bosses on that level, both of whom are major pains in the ass.
* The P3s in the Old Aqueduct may seem harmless alone, but if you ever spot one alone, it'll usually notice you and go fetch some of its buddies SPECIFICALLY to go kick your ass. And don't even get me started on going into the depths of their territory just to take down their commander, which is surrounded by like, dozens of his buddies, a good number of them rank higher than the grunts and therefore even more difficult to kill. And may your deity of choice save you should the area specific event start up, where the monstrous killer space bugs start running around the area at random while you're trying to kill the P3s. Your deity helps you even more if you run into the black or red ones. Or the orangey ones that run up to specifically to suicide bomb you.

[[folder:EVE Online]]
* More of a Scrappy Star System, Jita. The system chat is flooded with scammers, {{Real Money Trade}}r bots and spam trades involving overpriced crappy rare drops. At any given moment, there are 1000+ people in the system resulting in bad lag, sometimes resulting in waits of up to five minutes just to get in or out, and often the shortest route going through Caldari space will pass through it. "[[Franchise/StarWars A wretched hive of scum and villainy]], inside a much larger wretched hive of scum and villainy".
** Jita is so bad, even the developers don't like it. Star systems are divided into groups of five to twenty called "nodes", and there are usually two nodes on every dual-CPU server blade that make up the Tranquility shard. Jita is so crowded it gets its own blade, and all attempts to get people to move out of the system have failed miserably. At this point, CCP has given up and now tests any new hardware they get by putting Jita on it and seeing how long it lasts.

[[folder:Guild Wars]]
* Plenty of players in the ExpansionPack, Eye of the North, hit a grinding halt in the storyline once they reach the Shards of Orr. You have to go through to complete a third of the main storyline, but the place is an underground dungeon swarming with high-level undead, including [[DemonicSpiders skeletal wizards]] who just LOVE blinding you, then running up and shocking you into knockdown with a close-range lightning spell. Later on, they throw in priests and clerics, who keep replenishing their allies' obscene amounts of health or form a frustrating challenge to the only viable method of dealing with most undead, i.e. smiting magic. There are also several poison-gas-spewing traps, and Resurrection Shrines tend to be located smack dab in the middle of the enemies you just died trying to eliminate. THEN you have to fight them immediately after [[ContinuingIsPainful with a 15% Death Penalty each time]].
* The black Moa quest in factions. It's not a particularly difficult quest, but it does involve having to talk ot four different people in four different areas, and as a result, takes a good amount of time longer than other quests in the area.
* Polymock, the favored pastime of Tyria's InsufferableGenius race, is much more difficult than ordinary gameplay and is considered a ThatOneLevel by itself; but the polymock questline has its own ThatOneLevel: Blarp. He's the third opponent, and ''should'' be fairly easy... but isn't. Many people give up on the questline altogether when they reach Blarp, or resort to buying a gold polymock piece from other players in order to get past him. Once one finally does beat him, however, the rest of the opponents are relative cakewalks.
* The first campaign had many of these, like Thunderhead keep, but most of them are fairly easy now due to new/updated skills, and mainly the introduction of Heroes.
* The Dunes of Despair bonus objective, especially on Hard mode, is very difficult, even with other players or heroes. You have to defend a single ghostly hero NPC (who does not even attack his aggressors) from increasingly difficult waves of mobs, and constant artillery fire from the siege wurms. You can kill those wurms, but they have a lot of armor and health, and except for maybe the first 2 you can't leave the ghostly hero alone that long. That's the normal mission. The bonus objective requires you to go and leave him and kill 3 bosses sitting together in a fortress with some other mobs. The professions of the bosses are completely random between the original six, with maximum 1 per profession, so if you get a monk boss, you'll have a hard time out damaging him. You still have to keep the Ghostly hero alive, so you'll probably split up with 2 or 3 defending him, and the remaining 4 or 3 going after the bosses (because at that point of the story line your party size is still limited to 6).
** It's possible with some gimmick tactics to kill the bosses before you trigger the assault on the ghostly hero, but it relies on luck even more so than hoping the enemy bosses don't have a monk amongst them. You basically lure one of the mobs outside of the arena you're into you (if one happens to wander into longbow range), kill it before it manages to run away (which it ''will'' do if you take too long), and then have one player with a ranged resurrection use a specific Necromancer skill to teleport to the dead mob outside the fortress. The remaining players then equip vampiric weapons that ''slowly'' kill them, and then the one that teleported over resurrects them outside the fortress as well. At this time ''all'' of the level's enemies are clustered around the bonus bosses, requiring multiple, careful pulls to avoid being overrun. If the party can manage this, it's just a matter of repeating the corpse-teleport-death-resurrection gambit ''again'' to get back to the mission. While an EasyLevelTrick, it is anything ''but'' easy or fast.
* Nahpui Quarter. The mission: Kill the 4 Celestial Creatures - the Kirin, the Turtle, the Dragon, and the Phoenix. Sounds simple, right? Except that every time you kill one, miniature versions of it start spawning around the mission, forcing you to fight them as well as the Star Tengu that were already there. Oh, and those celestial critters are non-fleshy, so they're immune to bleeding, poison, and disease, and they don't leave usable corpses. Any minion masters or other corpse-exploiting necromancers will have to compete with the mini-Turtles for the few Tengu corpses, as they'll be trying to use them for wells. And did I mention that to get the best reward, there's a 25-minute time limit?
* The Foundry of Failed Creations in the [[BrutalBonusLevel Realm of Anguish]] is the most difficult of the four sub-zones for a number of reasons. First, the area is separated into small rooms that allow little freedom of movement during battle. Second, mobs don't appear normally but spawn after being triggered which can wipe an unwary group. Third, the mobs themselves are some of the most hated in the campaign and [[AsteroidsMonster spawn new mobs as they are killed]]. And due to how the Realm of Anguish works, a party wipe means you are returned to the outpost and the entire instance resets. It is the region least likely to be completed and the tokens dropped from completing it tends to be higher priced than the tokens from other sub-zones.
* There are a few when it comes to [[VideoGame/GuildWars2 its sequel]] as well.
** Explorable path 4 of The Ruined City of Arah. Two words: [[Attackofthe50FootWhatever Giganticus Lupicus]].
** All of Orr, the three endgame zones, are considered this by many players. Hordes upon hordes of Risen, enormous amounts of events which spawn ''more'' Risen, waypoints that are few and far between and often contested due to the enormous amount of events, and the fact that's it's a very bleak place in general, in contrast to 90% of the rest of the game world, which is vibrant and colorful and a joy to explore.
** For story missions, A Light in the Darkness could count. At one point, the player, likely alone, must face around three-four Risen Giants, five-six Abominations, and a horde of lesser Risen, all at the same time. Some [=NPCs=] fight alongside you, but, being [=NPCs=], they die quickly.
** The Battle of Claw Island can also be this, particularly one part where you need to find a Lionguard commander and bring her back to a fortress that's under assault. Chances are, the Risen assaulting the fortress have already killed her, so you need to revive her, ''while she's in the middle of a horde of Risen''. And you can't fight back while you're reviving.

[[folder:Star Wars: The Old Republic]]
* Taris is loathed, particularly by the Republic players, who get to experience it at lower levels. Why you ask? [[TheUsualAdversaries Rakghouls,]] [[GoddamnedBats everywhere.]] ''[[DemonicSpiders Everywhere.]]'' To say nothing of how, if you had any pride in what you accomplished on Taris as a Republic player, as an Imperial player you get to reverse ''everything good'' you did on that planet. Almost literally, every mission you undertake as an Imperial is a direct counterpoint to the one you did as a Republic player. In short, as a Republic character, you dig a hole. As an Imperial player, you fill it. Republic players will also believe that they have completed all the quests on the planet when they discover they've opened a bonus quest strand in a new zone populated by more enemies.
* On Hoth the boredom of running vast distances from one quest to another is compounded by the lack of any scenery besides endless snow.
* Belsavis is often disliked due to [[MarathonLevel how incredibly long it is]], both in terms of size and mission design. The same can also be said of [[DoomedByCanon Alderaan]], which isn't quite as long a mission slog to get through, but is so sprawling takes roughly 3 minutes to load into even on high-end machines. Any class that has to infiltrate [[MarathonLevel House Rist]] on Alderaan will quickly learn to hate it, particularly the Inquisitor, whose fight at the end is rather challenging. And failure at any point means trekking all the way back through...
* Imperial Balmorra provokes a similar reaction. Particularly the bonus series, which is an unfortunate combination of lengthy and relatively challenging for its level. And the colicoids, dear Lord, the [[GoddamnedBats colicoids]]...
* Colicoid War Games, mainly because the turret and maze sections require coordination that pick-up groups are unlikely to have. Apparently, BW agreed because they've since nerfed this fight.
* The Space Combat mission called "Taspan Ambush". You have to escort a shuttle carrying a Republic defector from point A to Point B. Just like your very first space mission. Except for this time, aside from the dozens of starfighters, there are ten ''Republic frigates'' '''chasing''' this shuttle, not just engaged in a brawl with the Imperial fleet sent to recover it. You have scant seconds to disable all of the turrets (all 8 of them) in all of the frigates (all 10 of them) before they leave the shuttle too damaged to survive the massive ambush that awaits in the asteroid belt. What makes this so frustrating is that in most other space missions, success or failure depends solely on your ability to dodge enemy shots, and shoot accurately. But on here, ships ''ignore you'' completely, and focus exclusively on the shuttle. As if this wasn't enough, FRIENDLY FIRE IS ENABLED. That's right, if you don't aim carefully, your own blasters will reduce the health of the shuttle.
* Cha Raaba Assault (and its Republic mirror, Thanium Disruption), is considered the hardest Heroic Space Mission by far. Even with full upgrades, it's possible to die in seconds if you slip up. It doesn't help that the first two minutes of the mission is just shooting down two heavy fighters and dodging asteroids, with the fighters probably not taking up more than a minute of your time.
* Tatooine, for both factions, is very long and very boring. It's a little better since they lowered the level requirements for mounts, but it still takes several minutes to travel between encounters. Similarly, the planet of Corellia also takes a long time to travel from different areas.
* Many, many former Heroic 4 missions could qualify. Almost all of the mobs were elite, could kill in 2-3 hits, and at times it could be very hard to find a group of 4 in contrast to just one other person to run it with you. (To say nothing of how you could often solo Heroic 2s when they still gave their full experience reward if you and your NPC companion had good enough gear or were a couple of levels higher.) They got even harder if the group didn't have any healers, as they would have no way to heal without companions, who are of course dismissed once the group is full and had to rely on proper teamwork and dishing out more damage before the enemy mobs killed them.
* Among Flashpoints, Blood Hunt is universally hated; the most obvious fault is that it's an extreme strain on lower-end computers, but the main issue is the second boss, Jos and Valk Beroya, who also count as ThatOneBoss. Even on Tactical mode, the fight is ''long'', both fighters put out insane damage and [=CCs=], and they have a knockback they can use to easily one-shot you if you're near the edge of the arena. It's no better on Hard mode, where the ''first'' boss is a massive gear check.
* The Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular questlines contain Heroic 4 missions that haven't been scaled down post-4.0 so that they can be soloed, nor can they be shared. Because the questline is old (from 2013-ish), anyone who completed it did so years ago, meaning that the chances of you finding three other people for "Dark Design" and "Uprooting the Last Seed" are slim-to-none. You're better off simply never starting the quests.
* Chapter X of ''Fallen Empire'' is mostly hated by the player-base due to it being a MarathonLevel with lots of unskippable and repetitive [[GoddamnedBats Skytrooper encounters]] that are only there to make the [[{{FakeLongevity}} chapter longer.]] On Veteran or Master Mode, it is much worse when you encounter a DualBoss that dishes out ''insane'' amounts of damage to you and your companion. There are also several unavoidable encounters with [[DemonicSpiders Zakuul Knights]] that can deal heavy amounts of damage and could kill you in a few hits on Master Mode.
* Chapter II of ''Eternal Throne'' is one of the hardest chapters on Veteran and Master difficulty. The first boss you face is a group of Jungle Beasts that spawn a group of adds and one has an ability called "Go for the Throat" which will instantly kill you if you are below 30% health. The second boss can be really annoying for melee classes due to the probes that can slow you down while preventing you from leaping. In addition, there are droids that slowly cast strong attacks and the boss itself deals heavy damage and can use a stun-lock ability on you. The third boss is where you have to face the mercenary leader along with two elite guards. The guards like to stun and pull you around while the leader deals [=AOEs=] that could kill your companion if you are not careful.

[[folder:Final Fantasy XI]]
* Valkurm Dunes. It's generally where people first start forming full parties and requiring party roles/strategies, so there's a lot of inexperienced players around and a lot of people will screw things up. It has a tunnel with bats that will attack you and most likely kill you if you're alone that you'll probably have to go through if you came from Bastok. Pretty much everybody levels from around 10 to 20 there, so it's hard to really avoid going there unless you want to solo through all those levels (which has admittedly become easier with the addition of Field Manuals). And if you started out in Windurst? Expect a long trip to get there, during which you'll have to sneak through several areas full of enemies that can easily kill you, then wait for a boat to arrive to take you where you need to go.
** And there is a chance to have insanely strong mobs spawn on the ship during the ride.
** For a time Yhoator Jungle was worse. In addition to being a fairly early area to level in, with all of the newnesses that such a situation implies, all of the parties would be lined up in the trenches that made up the zone. If one group of the far end unwittingly aggro'ed a Goblin (often too hard to fight with a party at the level typically found in the zone), they'd run it to the zone line. At which point the Goblin would walk back to where it came from, almost certainly aggro'ing another party in the confined space along the way. This cycle could repeat itself all night. Finally, the dev team put out a patch that had mobs despawn and respawn back at their spawn point, solving the problem. Though it's still tedious to get to the zone and most of the inhabitants are still morons.
* The FanNickname Garbage Shittyhell for Garlaige Citadel should sum it up nicely. Once a popular leveling spot to fight bats and beetles, it suffered from the problem that the above mentioned Yhoator Jungle did. Though things were often worse because the camping spots were right beside the zone line, and it wasn't high-level goblins that were the problem but too large linked pulls. It would be very common for far too many bats to get pulled to the zone line and have multiple parties run screaming - yelling at whatever idiot made that pull. Made worse by the fact that each time a person tried to zone in the large group slowly moving away from the zone line would come surging back. People would have to remain dead inside and update their parties when it was finally safe to come back in and start raising. God help you if a new party showed up without dead inside. Of course, this was finally solved with the same despawn patch that fixed Yhoator.
* Pretty much every "dungeon" level of the Chains of Promathia expansion pack was That One Level. And every boss in the Expansion could be [[ThatOneBoss That One Boss]], but that's beside the point. The Promyvion zones below are CoP areas.
** The Phomiuna Aqueducts is a zone with small areas True Sight (can see if even if you're invisible) Tauri mobs in most every hallway, and those mobs can inflict Doom upon targets, which will instantly kill the target when the countdown reaches zero. There's the Cursna spell that is supposed to erase curses like Doom, but it's not guaranteed to work. In fact, it has a very sad rate of working, to the point, it's usually easier for the White Mage to let you die and Raise you.
** Sacrarium is essentially the same zone, but at a higher level.
* The Promyvion dungeons may look pretty and have soothing music, but they are the very definition of hell. All of the mobs have true sight and are later on difficult enough to wipe out your party in minutes, especially the spider/strider that spawns from the deepest depths of hell, and all of the mobs are packed together. You have to do some tricky maneuvering to get around them sometimes, and if you attract one's attention (or more than one, more than likely), you're going to have to take one for the team and hope you die away from the path of the mob so you can safely reraise. You only have a prayer if you have a group of people you normally work with, or you managed to round up a rag tag group of competent party members. As for the dungeon layout itself, there are only a few levels to work your way through, but past floor one, there are several different places where the exit to the next level could be located. When you were lucky enough to find said exit, you had to beat up a mini-boss that spawns GoddamnBats and does throw-back [=AoE=] damage. Then there are the actual bosses at the end of the journey through hell. Fuck up, and you get to do this ALL OVER AGAIN. And this is only the BEGINNING of the incredibly long set of missions that will have you smashing your head through your monitor.
* The airship mission, before being nerfed, required several hundred thousand gil (the equivalent of several DOZEN hours of gil farming) and even to this day requires a few dozen thousand per person. To say nothing of the fact that if your setup is not absolutely perfect with exactly the right classes you are nearly guaranteed to fail before you've even begun. There was nothing quite like killing the omega weapon only to run out of liquids with the ultima weapon at less than 50% and wipe. There are several people on every server who have literally done this mission dozens of times and spent millions of gil without a single successful attempt. It's that bad.
* The "Jeuno Run" was this combined with GuideDangIt. For a long time, almost all leveling in the 20+ range happened around Jeuno, so you had to go there to get a party. Also, you had to go there to do the quest to be allowed to ride chocobos, so you don't get access to the easy way to move across most zones until after you have run to Jeuno around level 20.
** You had to cross several zones with mobs that could basically kill you instantly if they attacked you.
** At NA release, the deodorize/sneak/invisible potions, which make this fairly easy to do, were far too expensive for most players to purchase. It is possible, but very difficult and time-consuming, to do it without any of these buffs.
** If you got to Jeuno and didn't look up what items you need for the chocobo quest before hand, you better hope someone was selling them in the Jeuno auction house. Otherwise, you needed to run back to one of the starting areas. You needed four items from hares found in very specific areas that you have no other reason to fight (too annoying to fight for experience, no other quests require you to kill them, and they are non-aggressive so you don't need to fight them in self-defense).
* An expansion goes one better and introduced a reverse Jeuno Run by sending you into the past. This is even worse because the levels of enemies in these zones are basically arbitrary, so you can see a level 20 mob near a level 95+ mob. On top of that, most of the zones are zones found in the present, but there are little twists to the map. For example, the exit to the next zone is an area usually blocked off. A place that used to be a safe haven is now crawling with aggressive mobs. Paths are just flat out blocked in a few areas. On top of that, you are again not allowed to use Chocobos in this area until you complete another quest.
** And it was made worse by the fact that your first trip into the past dropped you at 1 of 3 random zones, and until you progressed a little further in the story and activated the other warps you could only use that particular warp. Not a problem for 2 of the warps, but the entrance for the 3rd in the present requires traveling through Garlaige Citadel - which has special switch activated doors that need multiple people to open. God help you if you random get dumped at that warp point on your first trip into the past and you die in the past (having to Home Point back to the present) before you're able to activate either of the more accessible warps.

[[folder:Final Fantasy XIV]] [[#FinalFantasyXIV]]
* Most of the areas in original version were not popular, due to being huge, mostly barren, and being full of CutAndPasteEnvironments, but at least they are open and not that hard to navigate. Black Shroud, on the other hand, was a massive eldrich abomination of a forest that is basically a maze of small identical passages, where it was ''incredibly'' easy to find yourself lost simply due to the fact that everything looks the same, and that everyone hated with passion. It's a small wonder that "A Realm Reborn" managed to actually make Black Shroud into an area that is not just bearable, but enjoyable.
* The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak tends to be this for a lot of people. Not that it's particularly hard, but that it's boring (the second boss, even down to the arena you fight it in, is an exact copy and paste of the first, differing only in that the second one spawns adds partway through; the last boss is more unique meanwhile, but if you like watching mid-dungeon cutscenes you'll be spending five minutes waiting for Lahabrea to stop [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment saying the same two things over and over again]] and just sic the boss on you), has a very intricate and confusing layout with several dead ends (which you need to visit to find photocells and power up generators to open the way) and a needlessly slow last third due to the dungeon being covered in sticky goo that slows you down, and its level cap is under 30, just before where your class advances into a job and your skills start getting more interesting and varied. This has been mitigated as of 6.1, making runs much faster by streamlining the dungeon, removing the photocells and the slowing effect, and cutting the encounter with Lahabrea from the final cutscene.
* Brayflox's Longstop is the point where the difficulty is kicked up a few notches and tests the players' ability to adapt to changing situations and knowing how to utilize their class properly. All three boss fights take place in pretty tight arenas that leave little room to maneuver around when a big AOE attack is coming.
** The first boss is pretty unremarkable and just poisons the party and summons a bunch of mooks every so often, as an early warmup of sorts. Nothing too stressful.
** The second boss is likewise unremarkable for a minute or so, until Brayflox runs in chased by a secondary boss with about as much health as the first. Once that's taken care of, Brayflox "thanks" you by goading the boss to use harder-hitting AOE attacks while standing next to the party so they'll get caught in those attacks. It used to be worse, as she used to also summon bombs that would damage you and the boss alike.
** The third boss traps a party member in a Queer Bubble that does damage over time and interferes with abilities in general. Not good if he traps the healer and your DPS isn't paying attention. Once he's almost dead, the final boss swoops in for a change of pace that lasts just a bit too long (certainly longer than it'd take to just finish the last of the original boss's HP yourself) before flying off again.
** The actual final boss fight spews poisonous AOE pools that will quickly overtake the battlefield, and leaving the boss on the pools will have its HP regenerate, forcing the tank to pull them around. Fortunately not as bad in more recent patches, as the frequency with which he uses the attack and how much health the pools restore have both been toned down; unless the party is heavy on melee DPS or Aiatar targets the tank regularly (which he usually doesn't, as "randomly" targeting the healer [[SpitefulAI usually takes priority]]), the pools are fairly evenly spread and don't provide too much regeneration.
** Outside of the bosses, one area that stands out is the swamp between the second and third bosses, for being incredibly wide-open and filled with enemies, where your choices are to take the most direct path and fight several enemies, or take a more roundabout path that can still easily result in you getting swarmed by several patrolling groups.
* The Sunken Temple of Qarn is one for several reasons.
** You must pick up certain items and use them to tip scales in the last leg of the dungeon. The only hint you're given is to the final door, in that a stone slab at the beginning tells you the answer. Also, which doors is opened by which items are always the same combinations. However, because the reward for opening these doors is either more enemies (which provide nothing) or some gear that has been rendered worthless because of PowerCreep, few players bother. Most players skip the optional doors entirely and intentionally get the last one wrong, because doing so only spawns three weak enemies and opens the door anyway.
** Certain doors can only be opened by killing an Avoirdupuis over a glowing sigil on the floor. Each Avoirdupuis is weak, and it respawns until it's killed on the sigil, but it always seems to be ''just'' off enough that it's going to take a few tries to maneuver the damn thing into place. Even veterans of this dungeon have trouble with it.
** The first boss has an attack that inflicts Doom (a timed debuff that is a OneHitKill if it hits zero) on people and it can only be ''safely'' removed by standing on platforms when they are glowing -- worse, the boss also summons bees that have their ''own'' almost-one-hit-kill attack (it always deals ~90% of the target's max HP). Good luck trying to either figure this out or explain what to do in just a few seconds before you die.
** The second boss not only has another monster that must be killed before damaging it (and can be re-summoned multiple times, basically a miniboss version of Titan with the Heart stage on repeat) but tends to ignore standard aggro mechanics and targets whoever it wants. And, while its companion monster is up, it constantly unleashes ridiculous attacks that take off at ''least'' half your health, from a single-target punch that throws you halfway across the room and stuns you as a setup to another attack, to one [=AoE=] that targets ''the entire arena'' that he'll spam in higher numbers as the fight drags on, and several others with fixed cones that are basically guaranteed death.
** The last boss has Mythril Verges, ankh-like things that shoot [[EnergyWeapon Frickin' Laser Beams]] everywhere. Whilst there's only one at a time early on and they're not as powerful as they were in previous builds, they are replaced more frequently as the boss' health decreases, getting close causes them to erect a barrier that prevents you from getting away until it's dead, and eventually, the boss summons four at once to [[BeamSpam just fire in patterns over the area]]. It can get pretty hectic.
** Last but not least, killing an assortment of dungeon-specific mooks '''and''' either the first or second boss is ''mandatory'' for completing your Rank 2 Maelstrom or Twin Adder GC Hunting Logs respectively, which is, in turn, mandatory if you wish to ascend to the rank of Second Lieutenant with your Grand Company - woe to non-tank players who don't end up throwing at least one attack at every enemy in a pull and end up having to do the dungeon twice to get all the kills.
* Two-thirds of the dungeon of Cutter's Cry is composed of near-identical drab brown rooms filled with the same enemies over and over, with randomly occurring (and irritatingly frequent) environmental ground [=AOEs=]. The first boss is a boring tank-and-spank with adds, while the second is a sandworm that repeatedly vanishes during the fight, returning with a bursting, untelegraphed column AOE, combined with damage-over-time effects from other attacks that ''will'' kill your healer if they're not optimally geared. The dungeon's sole saving grace is its Chimera final boss, but even she has ThatOneAttack: an AOE that either fries everyone in melee range or fries everyone who's ''not'' in melee range, the distinction given by a coded message (its eyes glow violet for the ranged attack or blue for the melee one). In any pick-up-group, there will always be ''someone'' who forgets the code under pressure and runs the wrong way, or runs back and forth on the spot unable to make up their mind. Other than that, the dungeon isn't hard -- it's just so damn ugly and boring.
* Aurum Vale tends to elicit groans from players any time it comes up in a roulette, for a multitude of reasons.
** The first room, all by itself, is easily the hardest part of the dungeon. It has mobs so close to one another that you can and will find yourself fending off half the room at once, whether you wanted to or not. It's not uncommon for Tanks to pull multiple packs (intentionally or otherwise), only for more enemies to join the fray than the party can handle, causing a TotalPartyKill. At least dying here is only a few seconds of progress lost, but the alternative is to go very slowly and very carefully, taking each mob one at a time, which takes just about as long as trying to brute-force your way.
** The bosses are very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat Marlboro Fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you, and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many hard-hitting swings that can one shot a Tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Marlboros, the DemonicSpiders of the ''Final Fantasy'' series, along with their multi-status-effect Bad Breath. And they can come in packs. And the last boss is one of them. Also, most of the dungeon -- including the arenas for the first and third boss, already noted for their gimmicky mechanics -- is filled with pools that do damage over time if you step in them. There's also Marlboro pods, which will spawn Marlboro Seedlings if not defeated before they hatch. Each seedling is pretty weak, but [[ZergRush they come in multiple pairs]], and usually along with fully-grown Marlboros breathing down your neck at the same time.
** Of particular note, a lot of people run this dungeon for the first time with some of their class's artifact armor, which is suitable for the start of ''ARR''[='=]s end-game. Except if you run this as an any of the ''Heavensward'' classes before level 50, you're in for a world of hurt, since they don't get artifact armor by then and need a lot of grinding for tomestones to get comparable Ironworks {{magitek}} gear.
** Another reason the dungeon is so difficult is because of bad timing -- it comes right around the point where White Mage players learn Holy, which hits multiple enemies and inflicts Stun for a few seconds. If they've only played Conjurer and White Mage, this is probably their first time having an ability that stuns enemies, but the game makes it clear all too late that [[DiminishingReturnsForBalance status effects like Stun grant diminishing returns until the enemy isn't affected anymore]]. Anyone who plays White Mage will eventually figure this out, but this dungeon is where they're probably going to have to learn the hard way.
* As of Patch 4.2, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium became this, at least past the first run, for making the cutscenes unskippable. This was due to [[AntiFrustrationFeatures complaints that new players were forced to skip them in order to keep up with everyone else]], usually those just grinding the dungeon for the daily bonus and wanting to get through it as fast as possible. This means for either, the time spent in the dungeon practically doubled or tripled. Castrum Meridianum in particular was often singled out, since it used to be hated when compared to Praetorium due to the length making running it less practical for players who had already done it, and people would often leave if they got Castrum, preventing newer plays from doing the dungeon. The developers eventually reworked these dungeons in Patch 6.1 -- both dungeons were shortened, the fights were reworked to make the FourStarBadass characters feel like more of a threat, and the Ultima Weapon was moved to its own dedicated fight instead of being part of the Praetorium, much to the delight of players.
* Stone Vigil (Hard) contains lots of monsters that attack in large packs and there's one type of dragon that will spam area of effect attacks to damage the whole party at once. The final boss of the dungeon defies standard MMO logic of tanks distracting enemies by attacking ''anyone'' at random, regardless of current aggro. Not only does the final boss have an annoying status effect that reduces the effectiveness of healing magic (and said effect applies whenever you simply get hit by ''any'' of the boss' attacks), all of the boss' attacks don't use the standard aggro hologram lines/circles that would telegraph its attacks. On top of this, once you get the boss' health below half, [[DualBoss it summons a clone of itself]] and it uses the exact same attacks and mechanics as the original enemy. While a player who pays attention can easily avoid most of the attacks, sometimes it's not possible to avoid certain attacks right away and it gets even more difficult to keep track of two bosses that can attack just about anyone.
* Come 3.0 and Heavensward, there's now Neverreap. In the first segment, you have to deal with the annoyance of twisters that patrol the area, knocking up anyone who gets sucked into them, messing up combos, cast times, aggro and more. Easy enough though, the tank just pulls the mobs out of the twister's paths. The first boss here isn't too bad, and the second area and boss are quite easy too. But then the third area of the level forces you to fight enemies along a path with randomly spawning geysers, which deal damage over time and completely obscure your vision whether you're in them or not. And then there's the [[ThatOneBoss last boss]] of the level. The twisters that messed with players in the first area? They spawn regularly throughout the fight. And then the boss will frequently spit out a Mist Sprite onto a player, distracting DPS players as it will deal an [=AoE=] if not dealt with quickly. And then after spawning a couple of those, a number of Wind Sprites will spawn, and the boss will be covered in a barrier of wind that inflicts heavy damage to anyone that gets at all close. And it will begin wandering around the small arena until all the adds are dealt with. And the twisters are still knocking players up during all this. And to top it all off, once the adds are dealt with, the boss will charge and release a powerful knock-back blast which can easily kill players by knocking them off the edge of the arena.
* A lot of healers hate the ''Stormblood'' dungeon Bardam's Meddle due to the difficulty of keeping up with healing on trash mob pulls. Up until this point, a lot of tanks would simply pull to the wall, but doing that in the first section is certain to cause a TotalPartyKill. Even dumping healing on the Tank isn't going to be enough to save them, yet some Tanks still try it anyways out of ignorance (it's their first time, so they can't be blamed for not knowing it was going to be that hard) or stubbornness (this is the way they play a Tank, and they're not changing it even on a particularly brutal pull). The only upside to the dungeon is it contains one of the more well-liked boss battles in the form of a PuzzleBoss where you can only dodge.
* The second dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'', Dohn Mheg, is widely seen as the hardest dungeon in the expansion as a result of incredibly bulky and hard-hitting trash mobs and frustrating boss mechanics. The trash pulls simply do too much damage to do the normal "wall to wall" pulls and yet have high enough HP that it can take several minutes just to kill one small group. The first boss, Aenc Thon, has an annoying mechanic where you need to move between non-bubbling water puddles to avoid being knocked up, but the window of time is only a few seconds, while the second boss has a tether mechanic that can be a wipe if the boss gets more than one tether when they appear. The final boss has unusual mechanics, including a very tricky section where you have to navigate a thin bridge to reach the boss and interrupt an attack that would otherwise be a TotalPartyKill. ''Final Fantasy XIV'' is absolutely not a game built for precise platforming controls, and falling makes you go back to start to try again, in a situation where you have no choice but to hurry. Compared to the dungeon before and after, Dohn Mheg's DifficultySpike seems out of place and unusual, leaving it one of the hardest dungeons in the game.
* Some dungeons have simply become ThatOneLevel not because of difficulty, but frequency. The Crystal Tower 24-player raid, the Alexander 8-player raids, and the Antitower dungeon tend to show up all the time when doing roulettes. They are not seen as "bad" levels - players just get tired of them from how often they show up. Plus, these are all level 50 and 60 challenges, and players just want to use their level 70+ toolkits. This is especially true for {{Red Mage}}s, who don't get Vercure until level 54 and don't get Verraise until level 66, leaving them without two of their most crucial assist tools. This is mitigated slightly with the Limited Leveling Roulette option, which ensures the lowest level content you can get is whoever is the lowest level in the party. Too bad it only works in Leveling Roulette and with a complete 4-man party; if you want a high-level raid of any kind, it's all down to luck.
** Due to the stat squish from 6.0 on, the ''VideoGame/NierAutomata'' 24-man raids started to become this because they now take at least 35-40 minutes to complete even when everyone knows how to do them. Before the stat squish, people could normally run through them in about 30 minutes or less.
* The ''Endwalker'' quest "In From the Cold" is a lesson in how powerful the Warrior of Light is, but it's also a test of patience. First off, you're playing as a mook-level Garlean soldier with none of the superhuman feats the Warrior has. Not only are you incredibly weak with limited moves, you lack HP regeneration, resorting to scavenging for medical kits to heal yourself. Second, you're on a 25-minute timer to get to Camp Broken Glass, making you race against the clock before you fail the duty. Third, there's enemies everywhere, requiring some level of stealthy maneuvering to avoid getting targeted. Fighting even one enemy takes precious time and health, fighting more than one will likely spell your end, and getting caught by an EliteMook is essentially a GameOver the moment you're spotted. At the end, a great explosion knocks you out, which leads to a difficult Action Time Maneuver to cling on your mortal coil and crawl your way back. All this makes for a stressful experience that underlines how insanely strong your character is compared to a normal foot soldier, but one that's likely going to take a few tries to get through.
* The slog that is Elpis during the MSQ in ''Endwalker''. The trip to the zone is 90% exposition dump with a ''lot'' of cutscenes with only some minor combat, a solo duty, and the level 87 dungeon to break up the monotony. While the lengthy exposition dumps bring a lot to the table in terms of the story, it can be quite a chore to slog through all at once. Likewise, the story around level 89 has you running all over the lower half of Labyrinthos doing fetch quests and enduring in lore dumps with very little combat involved until you unlock the level 89 dungeon. And this is all while a climatic music plays in the lower half of Labyrinthos nonstop until you progress farther into the story.
* The Dead Ends is the last of the main story dungeons in 6.0, and it is one of the hardest in ''Endwalker''. The entire dungeon is a healer's nightmare, since the dungeon also has an item-level sync, and the enemies all deal so much damage that a healer is liable to be unable to do anything beyond dumping healing on the tank. And even then, it might not be enough. Beyond that, the first boss has some rather unclear mechanics, and the ability to inflict a debuff that will cause instant death if not healed in time. The second boss has attacks that have very small safe zones to avoid their AOE attacks, along with hitting like a truck. The final boss also has several very hard-hitting moves, along with the ability to inflict a Doom debuff that can't be dispelled; if you're hit with it, you've got a few seconds to kiss your butt goodbye before you go down. The whole time, you've got to listen to the StrawNihilist BigBad talking about the meaninglessness of life and trying to justify wanting to cause TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, which can just get annoying since there's no chance to offer a rebuttal. At least the FinalBoss trial that comes after this one is a highlight, but the slog through the Dead Ends to get there is a huge headache.
* For the Frontlines [=PVP=] mode, there is The Borderland Ruins (Secure). Frontlines is a 72-player melee with three teams of 24 players, and it's designed to be a bit chaotic. What makes the Borderland Ruins so frustrating to play on is that much of this chaotic nature is taken away. There are six stations at fixed points around the map. These bases are always active instead of spawning at random, with the station in the middle spawning nodes at set intervals which players can destroy for large point boosts. Three of these stations are each team's home base, so that leaves only three targets to realistically fight over. The dominant strategy involves going to a target, capturing a base, fighting the opposition if necessary, and leaving to go to the other base nearest your home base. Break that up once in a while with heading for the middle to destroy the high-point nodes, and it's just plain boring. But more than that, it's frustrating because of the midpoint's elevation. It's all too easy for one team to just [[ZergRush gang up on another team on the bridges that lead upwards]], since the three bridges are the only way up. And even if a team gets to the top, [[NotTheFallThatKillsYou the high elevation means lethal falling damage is in play]]. A Monk or a Machinist can push you off the edge, a Warrior can pull you off, or a Reaper can make you run off. And if that happens, there's nothing you can do but fall to your death, [[GameBreaker making it a nearly-counterless strategy]]. While other Frontlines maps feature elevation changes, Borderland Ruins is one of only two where falling damage might kill you, and the other map which has it -- The Fields of Glory (Shatter) -- only has it come into play in a few spots. It's telling that when the Borderland Ruins was announced to be temporarily unavailable after the release of patch 6.4, the immediate reaction of the playerbase was cheering that it was gone.[[invoked]]

[[folder:Everquest]]
* Plane of Sky, the third of the three original planes. To even enter the Plane of Sky required a wizard to teleport each group individually, which consumed a very expensive reagent with each cast. To introduce you to the level of obnoxious difficulty you were about to encounter, all buffs were stripped upon entering the plane. All the boss mobs would disappear if not killed within 80 minutes of spawning them, and each was required to progress to the next island. However, if you went too quickly, Sirran (your 'guide', for lack of a better term) would not respawn correctly and you could also get stuck and fail that way. Conversing with Sirran could also break the progression or cause him to kill you. Area effect spells on the first island would aggro a room full of [=NPCs=] from an island below. Some islands had instant aggro the moment you arrived; others had wildly pathing mobs; others had mobs that split when you killed them; the difficulty of all mobs started at very hard and got worse from there. On the 8th and final island, the boss "The Eye of Veeshan" had a Death Touch capability, which meant he called a player's name every 30 seconds and they dropped dead, in a game where penalties for death were notoriously brutal. To top it all off, all the island bosses were on a 7-day respawn timer, so if you failed to make it to the top you had to wait a full week before being able to try again.
** In addition, the company did not allow customer service to respond to issues in the three original planes, because they were supposed to be difficult. This meant if there was a glitch and you got stuck in a wall, you were stuck.
* Chardok (Kunark). This zone starts with a zone-in trap; the zone-out is a modest distance away, but with wandering mobs in between. Absolutely terrible pathing could result in huge swarms of sarnaks and mean little dog creatures appearing from nowhere in an instant. Deep inside were required parts for epic weapons for three classes, past hidden trap doors, all in close quarters with terrible pathing. And then there was the Queen, an absolute nightmare for the unprepared.
* Uqua, the Ocean God Chantry. It was released in Gates of Discord, an expansion seemingly tuned around being higher level than you actually could reach. You enter the zone, and you get hit with a zone-wide debuff that decreased all of your stats by 250 points(intelligence/wisdom by 350). Step a few feet in, and traps of between 2 and 6 monsters spawn and attack. Raid wipes were common on even the first trap, due to the ghost adds that spawned upon player death, causing chain reactions and overwhelming numbers, wiping out your 54 man raid force. In addition to these hazards, there is a room made solely for killing the raid: the gas chamber. It is a room with keys on a table, and only 1 key will open the door. the room will send a message to someone in the raid as to which key will unlock the door. but taking too long will release the gas. Select the wrong key, gas. Could be "Key A or Key B" in the message? It's a trick, more gas! Once finally out of the murderbox, you are forced to split your raid force in half to fight 2 monsters in opposite rooms. The "twins" as they're known, will often send players into the opposite room, resulting in possible failure due to a tank or healer being stolen from your half of the raid. After the twins are dead, you reach....another gas chamber. Finally, after a room that swarms you with ghosts and beating up a big golem, you reach the boss, Vrex Barxt Qurat. In addition to the normal threat of being killed, if you do things in the incorrect order, you fail the raid, wasting a 5 hour raid day. Between this zone and the rest of the expansion, many players left to greener pastures of ''VideoGame/EverQuestII'' and ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft''.
* Meldrath's Majestic Mansion, the penultimate raid destination in Secrets of Faydwer, was reviled when it was current content due to the ludicrous amount of trash mobs in the zone, as well as ambushes from powerful mobs that would randomly occur whenever doors were opened.

* ''VideoGame/LordOfTheRingsOnline'':

** [[BlatantLies "One Small Favor."]] A FetchQuest and a ChainOfDeals, rolled together. The player character lampshade it themselves.

** Also worth noting is that after a new hero finished all the missions from his introductory contact, the first mission from his second contact ''will'' be going to the Hollows, so every newby player on the server is going through this and generally mucking things up.

* Faultline was loathed for the deep, twisting canyon that was easy to fall into and hard to get out of - while it had Freight Lifts, they too could be tough to find and lead to places it's easy to fall from. There were missions IN the canyon in caves and sewers, and thanks to its winding nature some were difficult to find. Other missions occured on the other side of the canyon, in a part of Faultline which was practically demolished, and was tough to run around thanks to cracked pavements, toppling buildings and mobs scattered all over the place. It was made even more noticeable by the way that about 1/4 of Faultline was almost normal.

[[folder:World of Warcraft]]
* In the classic game, Gnomeregan was badly regarded for its confusing layout, quests that required several runs, and the two-level corridor leading to the last boss where aggroing a mob on the other floor could result in them running down the corridor and back up to the players, pulling every other mob along the way.
* For leveling zones, Stranglethorn Vale. On paper it sounds like a formula for the BestLevelEver - loads and ''loads'' of quests, long level range (30-40+), a beautiful tropical jungle with a beautifully designed neutral town (Booty Bay), ferries leading players to multiple areas of the world making it somewhat of a hub, the introduction of Hemet Nesingwary (Giving a good chain of quests spanning the entire zone) and {{Pirate}}s. So what went wrong? It was a ''massive'' bottleneck. Most other zones intended in that level range were either out of the way and/or didn't have enough quests compared to Stranglethorn Vale (Such as Desolace and Thousand Needles). But if you were on a [=PvP=] server? You were easy prey for people who enjoyed making your lives hell - earning it the nickname of "Stranglepwn Vale" or "Ganklethorn Hell". People could easily harass you in Booty Bay by [[LoopholeAbuse attacking you and then doing something to remove aggro - making the guards kill YOU instead]]. People used to consider ''avoiding'' Stranglethorn Vale while leveling up was actually a ''SelfImposedChallenge''.
* Alterac Mountains for the fact that the zone had no settlements. Thus no flightpaths or areas for allowing quests. It was essentially one big waste of space. Blizzard agreed - as this is one of the very few zones ''removed from the game'' due to its emptiness and merged into Hillsbrad Foothills.
* Uldaman as well. [[WhatCouldHaveBeen It was intended to be a winged dungeon]] similar to Scarlet Monastery, but unfortunately it didn't pan out. What resulted was a large web of caves full of twist and turns with a large pre-instance area and a pretty ''big'' level curve. (You could easily enter in the high 30s-low 40s, the final boss was ''47''.) Sure, Archaedas was considered the BestBossEver but getting to him would take over two hours even ''with'' a competent group. Also, if you were an enchanter, you'd have to go in since the enchantment trainer around this level was hiding out in Uldaman.
* The Temple of Atal'Hakkar / Sunken Temple simply due to how ''long'' it was. What's worse, before you are able to get to all the quests that take place here (as well as the bosses that drop items you can use), you must clear the top half: Which is full of nothing but EliteMooks and minibosses that seem to do nothing but waste your time. It caught a lot of players loading it up in Classic by surprise - since ''Cataclysm'' changed it so that you ''start'' in the basement and during ''Burning Crusade'' and ''Wrath'', players largely skipped Sunken Temple due to how far out of the way it was. (Alliance players also had to fly to another zone and risked running right through a Horde guard)
* The first proper raid in the game, Molten Core, became known as Molten Chore or Molten Bore for bosses that were little more than damage sponges. They were immune to fire so mages could not use their normal fireball attack, and one forced melee players to stay at range. And since the final boss dropped more powerful gear than the rest, guilds had to keep running the raid when the rest was of little interest to them.
* The Oculus was the most hated dungeon in the ''Wrath of the Lich King'' expansion due to the dragon-riding segment at the end, which replaced all the player's abilities with new controls which many people had no idea how to use. And then comes Malygos, raid boss of the location, featuring final phase with the whole raid riding on dragons (''with different abilities'' from the Oculus ones just in case plays were getting too comfortable) while he blasts you harder than the dungeon boss ever did.
* Trial of the Crusader has only six bosses and no trash mobs. The latter would seem like a welcome change of pace, considering that some raids get criticism for long, boring or [[BossInMookClothing difficult]] trash, but it means that there's no world drops or normal encounters to break up the boss fights, and makes the raid even shorter, making it hardly worthy of a raid tier on its own. While some of the less popular raids have their fan bases, almost no one likes [=TotC=].
* Vashj'ir in ''Cataclysm''. Many claim the zone is boring, but the zone is actually quite diverse, with seaweed forests, massive palaces, deep ravines, underwater caves, and enormous sea creatures. Its status as a ScrappyLevel seems to come mostly from the fact that people just don't like underwater levels - especially since here, you had a 360 degree aggro radius so [[ParanoiaFuel mobs could suddenly appear from where you wren't looking]]. Also when first released it was incredibly buggy, preventing some people from even progressing through it (you can still get screwed on the final quest if you're unlucky), and secondly, the whole theme of the zone was a build-up to a confrontation with underwater [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch abominations]] which [[AbortedArc never happened,]] making the whole thing feel pointless.
** That arc ended up finishing up -- FOUR EXPANSIONS LATER with the release of the 8.2 Rise of Azshara patch that opened Nazjatar and The Eternal Palace (and, in a way, 8.3 Visions of N'zoth).
* Again in ''Cataclysm'': The Dragon Soul raid which was the grand finale, with some going as far to call it the worst raid ever. Completely recycled locations, featuring bosses with completely recycled models. Even the trailer which preceded the raid's release was half-assed. Fortunately, the final two bosses were seen as amazing.
* The ''Mists of Pandaria'' scenario A Little Patience was universally reviled due to both Varian and Tyrande uttering the same lines over and over again, and that the entire point of the instance is to [[CharacterShilling shill]] Varian as some amazing tactician.[[note]]Said tactics amount to laying traps then calling the Orc commander a coward so his entire army charges headfirst into said traps[[/note]]
* The [=PvP=] zone of Ashran in ''Warlords of Draenor'' is a base breaker; those who don't like it mention the thin premise for the fighting, questionable design, the difficulty of getting forty players to coordinate to any extent and drawing [=PvP=] participation away from battlegrounds and arenas, which were not given any new maps.
* Suramar has become this for a lot of players in ''Legion'', despite otherwise being popular for its SceneryPorn and detailed, interesting lore. It's a nice idea for a one-off scenario, but it rapidly becomes a massive nuisance to navigate the multi-level designed-by-insane-people city with a stealth-like mechanic[[note]]Unless you want to get attacked by groups of enemies that are too strong to feasibly defeat, use your Masquerade extra UI button, and run out of range of any enemy with the ability to see through your disguise before they finish casting a spell that will strip away your disguise[[/note]] when you just want to get someplace. The enforced stealth-oriented gameplay within the city proper is the biggest source of frustration for players, but having much of that content (including two entire dungeons) gated behind the glacially slow Nightfallen rep grind doesn't help.
* Speaking of Suramar, "Sick of the Sycophants" is one of the least popular world quests. You have to kill twenty Loyalist Sycophants, and while Occuleth encourages you to use the item he gives you to summon Withered to kill them, the Withered do practically no damage. Breaking disguise and attacking the Sycophants will draw you into a difficult battle, one that gets even more difficult if the patrolling enemies spot you. All this is on top of having to avoid the aforementioned enemies with the ability to remove your disguise.
** Really the entire Court of Stars sub-region of Suramar is this in comparison to the rest of the city. While most of the city is relatively easy to travel through and patrolling mobs are sparse, this region is densely populated with both detectors and elite mobs. Just getting inside while stuck on foot is dangerous and once inside being revealed will almost certainly end in death. And of course, you would hear "Who goes there?" and "An illusion? What are you hiding?" all the time - so much that Nightborne racial jokes and even Blizzard's web page ''literally make fun of this''.
* Also from ''Legion'', Highmountain. The main hub zone is not fun to navigate, elevators are slow, the hall at the bottom and the outer area of it are quite empty. The quests are considered quite bad, ESPECIALLY the escort quests (of which there were a few): either the NPC just stops following or they are slow as molasses, the one with the old Tauren mom was just infuriatingly slow. The terrain is incredibly difficult to navigate (especially considering you aren't allowed to fly when you first play there): it must have been a real challenge to put a boulder, a stick, or a blade of grass one cannot pass over into every single nook and cranny so there is only one possible path. Also, a lot of the quests didn't even correctly mark where the items and such were supposed to be, and even when they did, you couldn't tell if the quest giver was on top of the mountain or inside a cave. Finally, there are some points where it's ''obvious'' Blizzard wanted to troll players. A quest involves following a Tauren [[spoiler:(actually a black dragon)]] inside a cave, and said Tauren eventually jumps off a cliff to a pool of water. Since SoftWater applies in this game, a player would think of doing the same... only it's a smaller target than it appears. There's also a mob called "Gornoth the Lost" that's been compared to the Fel Reaver from ''Burning Crusade'', only worse because he patrols around a very, very enclosed quest zone with trees and the like blocking your view (at least the Fel Reaver patrolled the entire zone so you'd be unlikely to see him for another half hour or so after he passed, and if you were paying attention you could SEE him), can spot you from nearly 40 yards away, never loses aggro even if you get far from him, and to boot he serves no purpose in that quest zone. None. He is there to piss the player off.
* The Val'sharah Invasion in ''Legion'' is the most disliked among the mini-events. Where the other invasions have only one boss and standard enemies, this one has ''three'' bosses, three [[BossInMookClothing mini-bosses]], and a high mob density with ''respawning'' mobs. That many of said mobs can see through stealth doesn't help. Many players have simply given up on fighting through the mobs and just suicide rush to objectives. The second boss is especially frustrating because he is fought on a narrow ledge and uses attacks that can one-shot many players if not quickly dodged.
* Seat of the Triumvirate is considered the most frustrating 5-man dungeon from Legion, in part because three of the four bosses qualify as ThatOneBoss for various reasons (see [[ThatOneBoss/WorldOfWarcraft this page]] for more details).
* While only a city, Dazar'alor earns an impressive amount of hatred due to both its sheer size and layout. Half of the city is a {{Mayincatec}} pyramid with most commodities spread out across the various levels and the only way to ascend is to take winding staircases that take forever to ascend. The other half of the city is so far away that it requires a flight point to reach in a decent amount of time and once again, everything is spread out across different levels. While Boralus is equally large, everything players are likely to use regularly[[note]]Scrapper, profession trainers, flight point, harbormaster, and the ship to Zandalar[[/note]] are all kept close together rather than requiring several minutes of running up and down stairs to get from A to B.
* Stormsong Valley is generally the most hated questing zone for Alliance players in ''Battle for Azeroth''. Where most modern zones have a single coherent questline with a spattering of side quest hubs along the way, Stormsong has multiple minor questlines that send the player running back and forth across the zone. The actual main questline is easy to overlook because it's so low key compared to the immediate problems of a Horde and quillboar invasion which are both minor subplots.
* The Torghast feature in ''Shadowlands'' has been subject to this, also generating a large [[ScrappyMechanic hatedom]] for being an extreme LuckBasedMission. Corridors and bosses are completely random each time you start a run, and some bosses can be unwinnable if you are in the wrong class or spec suited for it. As if that wasn't enough, Twisted Corridors takes it to a whole new level by virtue of relying on the player to obtain a large amount of Health Power-ups as well as self heal and damage ones. Got too few health power ups? Final boss is going to destroy you in a single strike. Not enough damage? Boss will keep getting stronger until you cannot handle the damage anymore. [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs Got the wrong boss for your class toolkit and wrong anima powers?]]same deal. And if you lose(deplete your death count)? That's 2 hours or more of your time wasted for nothing.
* Season 4 of ''Shadowlands'' introduced the addition of legacy dungeons for the Mythic+ rotation. Unfortunately, it seems as if Blizzard did not rework any of them to actually account for Mythic+, affixes and all. The end result is both Grimrail Depot and Lower Karazhan quickly becoming the most loathed dungeons out of the rotation, and the ones with the lowest number of successful runs, according to Mythic+ stats. It got so bad that Grimrail was eventually given massive nerfs some time after release.
** Grimrail was this way originally as it was clearly never meant to be used in a setting with affixes that requires room to work around them (Sanguine, Storming, Quaking, Necrotic, Spiteful) and, as a result, clearing trash often boils down to a lot of [[LuckBasedMission RNG]], with some weeks borderline on [[UnwinnableByMistake impossible to finish]]. This coupled with [[BossInMookClothing overtuned]] trash mobs, coupled with bosses that range from [[FakeDifficulty ridiculously overtuned]] and poorly telegraphed to [[GameBreakingBug bug prone]], not many were eager to do Grimrail Depot. It took a few waves of massive nerfs to make this place more reasonable and in line with the other dungeons. The nerfs reduced the difficulty of the trash, the damage values of some bosses, redesigned the visuals of the mechanics to be better telegraphed and they fixed most of the bugs. While a lot better as a result, Grimrail can still be this trope in weeks with affixes that exacerbate the lack of room and narrow corridors, as mentioned above.

** Lower Karazhan meanwhile suffers from a lot of extremely punishing mechanics in both trash[[note]]How bad it is? The strat used to time a lower karazhan is to ''intentionally wipe'' after first boss in order to avoid doing the following trash thats too difficult and time-consuming to be worth the effort.Some trash packs are also ''skipped as much as possible between bosses'' because of how [[BossInMookClothing difficult]] and not worth the time it is to kill them.[[/note]] and bosses, and poor telegraphing as well in some cases. It's saying something that this place has been nerfed multiple times since its re-release on S4, and its still considered one of the hardest dungeons to do in time. Of all the bosses, two in particular has been deemed the [[ThatOneBoss run killers]] for a reason:
*** Maiden of Virtue is possibly the one that roadblocks groups the most. Her shield is noted for requiring a extremely high amount of burst dps done in a 10 seconds window or else [[TotalPartyKill you wipe]], and its a mechanic you are guaranteed to see at least 2 or 3 times per fight, meaning completing a Lower Kara often boils down to having a comp with proper burst dps to burn her shield, so much it has been nerfed by 20% and she's '''STILL''' roadblocking groups and forcing burst dps comps for higher keys regardless. Even that didn't quit cut it, needing 2 additional nerfs that reduced her hp shield(10% then 15% ) just to make it relatively acceptable, but even then she is still bound to make groups wipe in tyrannical weeks with her shield in higher keys.
*** Moroes is another prime offender. He applies a permanent [[DamageOverTime DoT]] that makes healing a complete pain, even more so on Grievous and/or Tyrannical weeks. His adds, meanwhile, needs to be cc'd and killed one by one before he reaches 50% HP or else they will destroy your group. While his add rotation varies per week, some are notorious for having obnoxious mechanics, like a whirlwind that forces melees to stay away and be unable to dps him, another with a huge frontal cone aoe to dodge as well as another that can heal other adds and Moroes or drain your healer's mana and stun him. It reached a point where Blizzard had to step in and nerf some mechanics, by making adds sighly weaker and removing the permanent aspect of Moroes' garrote debuff(it now lasts only 1 minute instead), in addition to reducing its damage sighly.
[[/folder]]

* An expansion goes one better and introduced a reverse Jeuno Run by sending you into the past. This is even worse because the levels of enemies in these zones are basically arbitrary, so you can see a level 20 mob near a level 95+ mob. On top of that, most of the zones are zones found in the present, but there are little twists to the map. For example, the exit to the next zone is an area usually blocked off. A place that used to be a safe haven is now crawling with aggressive mobs. Paths are just flat out blocked in a few areas. On top of that, you are again not allowed to use chocobos in this area until you complete another quest.

* As of Patch 4.2, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium became this, at least past the first run, for making the cutscenes unskippable. This was due to [[AntiFrustrationFeatures complaints that new players were forced to skip them in order to keep up with everyone else]], usually those just grinding the dungeon for the daily bonus and wanting to get through it as fast as possible. This means for either, the time spent in the dungeon practically doubled or tripled. Castrum Meridianum in particular was often singled out, since it used to be hated when compared to Praetorium due to the length making running it less practical for players who had already done it, and people would often leave if they got Castrum, preventing newer plays from doing the dungeon. The developers eventually in Patch 6.1, reworked both dungeons, shortening both, reworking the fights, and moving the Ultima Weapon to its own dedicated fight, much to the delight of players.

** Another reason the dungeon is so difficult is because of bad timing -- it comes right around the point where White Mage players learn Holy, which hits multiple enemies and inflicts Stun for a few seconds. If they've only played Conjurer and White Mage, this is probably their first time having an ability that stuns enemies, but the game makes it clear [[GuideDangIt all too late]] that status effects like Stun grant diminishing returns until the enemy isn't affected anymore. Anyone who plays White Mage will eventually figure this out, but this dungeon is where they're probably going to have to learn the hard way.

* The Sunken Temple of Qarn is one for several reasons;
** You must pick up certain items and use them to tip scales in order to proceed in the last leg of the dungeon, and the puzzles themselves [[GuideDangIt give absolutely no hints]] (mitigated only in that a wrong answer sics enemies on you before opening the door anyway).
** The first boss has an attack that inflicts Doom (a timed debuff that is a OneHitKill if it hits zero) on people and it can only be ''safely'' removed by standing on platforms when they are glowing -- worse, the boss also summons bees that have their ''own'' almost-one-hit-kill attack (it always deals ~90% of the target's max HP).

* Aurum Vale tends to elicit groans from players any time it comes up in a roulette. The first room has mobs so close to one another that you can and will find yourself fending off half the room all at once, whether you wanted to or not. It's not uncommon for Tanks to try and pull multiple packs, only for more enemies to join the fray, causing a TotalPartyKill. At least dying here is only a few seconds of progress lost, but the alternative is to go very slowly and very carefully, which takes just about as long anyways. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat Marlboro Fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you, and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many hard-hitting swings that can one shot a Tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Marlboros, the DemonicSpiders of the ''Final Fantasy'' series, along with their multi-status-effect Bad Breath. And they can come in packs. And the last boss is one of them. Also, most of the dungeon -- including the arenas for the first and third boss, already noted for their gimmicky mechanics -- is filled with pools that do damage over time if you step in them. There's also Marlboro pods, which will spawn Marlboro Seedlings if not defeated before they hatch. Each seedling is pretty weak, but [[ZergRush they come in multiple pairs]], and usually along with fully-grown Marlboros breathing down your neck at the same time. Aurum Vale also has a tendency to show up a little too often in roulettes, meaning veteran players quickly become sick of it. Combine all of this together, and you have a dungeon that is frustrating to clear.

** Another reason the dungeon is so difficult is because of pure bad timing, as it comes right around the point where White Mage players learn their famed Holy spell, which hits multiple enemies and stuns them for a few seconds. If they've only played Conjurer and White Mage, this is probably their first time having an ability that stuns enemies, especially one that isn't on a half-minute cooldown, and after only testing it on low-level enemies it kills in one hit, they're likely to come to the conclusion it's perfectly possible to play White Mage purely-offensively by spamming Holy to add on damage while preventing the tank from getting hit - very quickly leading to wipes in the first area of the dungeon as the game makes it clear [[GuideDangIt all too late]] that stun abilities grant diminishing returns and, after three or four of them, the enemy isn't affected at all.

* As of Patch 4.2, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium became this, at least past the first run, for making the cutscenes unskippable. This was due to [[AntiFrustrationFeatures complaints that new players were forced to skip them in order to keep up with everyone else]], usually those just grinding the dungeon for the daily bonus and wanting to get through it as fast as possible. This means for either, the time spent in the dungeon practically doubled or tripled. Castrum Meridianum in particular remains this way, since it used to be hated when compared to Praetorium, and people would often leave if they got Castrum, preventing newer plays from doing the dungeon. The developers eventually in Patch 6.1, reworked both dungeons, shortening both, reworking the fights, and moving the Ultima Weapon to its own dedicated fight, much to the delight of players.

* As of Patch 4.2, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium became this, at least past the first run, for making the cutscenes unskippable. This was due to [[AntiFrustrationFeatures complaints that new players were forced to skip them in order to keep up with everyone else]], usually those just grinding the dungeon for the daily bonus and wanting to get through it as fast as possible. This means for either, the time spent in the dungeon practically doubled or tripled.
** Castrum Meridianum in particular remains this way. In order to entice players to run them [[AntiFrustrationFeatures so any newbies won't spend forever in a queue]], the dungeons give some excellent tomestone and experience rewards. Unfortunately, Castrum gives way ''way'' less. It's not uncommon for people to just [[RageQuit eat the abandoned duty penaltly]] the second you get a Castrum. People are more forgiving if they get a message about it being somebody's first time (as a bonus is applied) but there are just as many times people get unlucky and get assigned Castrum or a {{Troll}} queues for it intentionally to annoy people looking to get Praetorium experience and tomestones.
** As of Patch 6.1, both Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium have been heavily reworked, to much acclaim from the fanbase. Castrum Meridianum was made significantly shorter with the removal of many of the unskippable cutscenes and the extra objectives or mechanics that existed solely to make it drag on longer (like having to sidetrack to sabotage the ceruleum tanks or spend several minutes firing mortars at an airship), changing it from a slog that could easily take upwards of thirty minutes to a relatively breezy dungeon that can be completed in less than twenty. The end boss was also reworked and made into something more in line with how modern dungeon bosses are designed, removing the phase against her NighInvulnerable magitek armor and giving her on-foot phase actual attacks to make her a real threat. The Praetorium was likewise made shorter by trimming down several of the cutscenes and removing some pointless mechanics. In addition, the final two fights against The Ultima Weapon and Lahabrea were both removed and made into separate pieces of content. The former was reworked into a four-man Trial and the latter into a Solo Instanced battle. Finally, all of this content was rebalanced and brought up to a level where it poses an actual challenge to properly-geared level 50 players, as opposed to the [[AntiClimaxBoss hysterically easy encounters]] that were a major part of why these levels were so [[ItsEasySoItSucks disliked]].

* For the Frontlines [=PVP=] mode, there is The Borderland Ruins (Secure). Frontlines is a 72-player melee with three teams of 24 players, and it's designed to be a bit chaotic. What makes the Borderland Ruins so frustrating to play on is that much of this chaotic nature is taken away. There are six stations at fixed points around the map. These bases are always active instead of spawning at random, with the station in the middle spawning nodes at set intervals which players can destroy for large point boosts. Three of these stations are each team's home base, so that leaves only three targets to realistically fight over. The dominant strategy involves going to a target, capturing a base, fighting the opposition if necessary, and leaving to go to the other base nearest your home base. Break that up once in a while with heading for the middle to destroy the high-point nodes, and it's just plain boring. But more than that, it's frustrating because of the midpoint's elevation. It's all too easy for one team to just [[ZergRush gang up on another team on the bridges that lead upwards]], since the three bridges are the only way up. And even if a team gets to the top, [[NotTheFallThatKillsYou the high elevation means lethal falling damage is in play]]. A Monk or a Machinist can push you off the edge, a Warrior can pull you off, or a Reaper can make you run off. And if that happens, there's nothing you can do but fall to your death, [[GameBreaker making it a nearly-counterless strategy]]. While other Frontlines maps feature elevation changes, Borderland Ruins is one of only two where falling damage might kill you, and the other map which has it -- The Fields of Glory (Shatter) -- only has it come into play in a few spots that you'll have to visit all of once to break the crystals. It's telling that when the Borderland Ruins was announced to be temporarily unavailable in patch 6.4, the immediate reaction of the playerbase was cheering that it was gone.[[invoked]]

* The second dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'', Dohn Mheg, is widely seen as the hardest dungeon in the expansion as a result of incredibly bulky and hard-hitting trash mobs and frustrating boss mechanics. The trash pulls simply do too much damage to do the normal "wall to wall" pulls and yet have high enough HP that it can take several minutes just to kill one small group. The first boss, Aenc Thon, has an annoying mechanic where you need to move between non-bubbling water puddles to avoid being knocked up, but the window of time is only a few seconds, while the second boss has a tether mechanic that can be a wipe if the boss gets more than one tether when they appear. The final boss, who is also Aenc Thon but in a diffrent form, is considerably easier, but has unusual and difficult mechanics. Compared to the dungeon before and after, Dohn Mheg's DifficultySpike seems out of place and unusual, leaving it one of the hardest dungeons in the game.

* A lot of healers hate the ''Stormblood'' dungeon Bardam's Meddle due to the difficulty of keeping up with healing on trash mob pulls. Up until this point, a lot of tanks would simply pull to the wall, but doing that in the first section is certain to cause a party wipe. The second section is also no slouch either. The only upside to the dungeon is it does contain one of the more liked boss battles.

* For leveling zones, Stranglethorn Vale. On paper it sounds like a formula for the BestLevelEver - loads and ''loads'' of quests, long level range (30-40+), a beautiful tropical jungle with a beautifully designed neutral town (Booty Bay), ferries leading players to multiple areas of the world making it somewhat of a hub, the introduction of Hemet Nesingwary (Giving a good chain of quests spanning the entire zone) and {{Pirate}}s. So what went wrong? It was a ''massive'' bottleneck. Most other zones intended in that level range were either out of the way and/or didn't have enough quests compared to Stranglethorn Vale (Such as Desolace and Thousand Needles). But if you were on a [=PvP=] server? You were easy prey for people who enjoyed making your lives hell - earning it the nickname of "Stranglepwn Vale" or "Ganklethorn Hell". People could easily harass you in Booty Bay by [[LoopholeAbuse attacking you and then doing something to remove aggro - making the guards kill YOU instead]]. People used to create challenges specifically to ''avoid'' Stranglethorn Vale.

* Vashj'ir in ''Cataclysm''. Many claim the zone is boring, but the zone is actually quite diverse, with seaweed forests, massive palaces, deep ravines, underwater caves, and enormous sea creatures. Its status as a ScrappyLevel seems to come mostly from the fact that people just don't like underwater levels. Also when first released it was incredibly buggy, preventing some people from even progressing through it (you can still get screwed on the final quest if you're unlucky), and secondly, the whole theme of the zone was a build-up to a confrontation with underwater [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch abominations]] which [[AbortedArc never happened,]] making the whole thing feel pointless.

* Again in ''Cataclysm'': The Dragon Soul raid which was the grand finale, with some going as far to call it the worst raid ever. Completely recycled locations, featuring bosses with completely recycled models. Even the trailer which preceded the raid's release was half-assed.

** Really the entire Court of Stars sub-region of Suramar is this in comparison to the rest of the city. While most of the city is relatively easy to travel through and patrolling mobs are sparse, this region is densely populated with both detectors and elite mobs. Just getting inside while stuck on foot is dangerous and once inside being revealed will almost certainly end in death.

* For the Frontlines PVP mode, there is The Borderland Ruins (Secure). Frontlines is a 72-player melee with three teams of 24 players, and it's designed to be a bit chaotic. What makes the Borderland Ruins so frustrating to play on is that much of this chaotic nature is taken away. There are six stations at fixed points around the map. These bases are always active instead of spawning at random, with the station in the middle spawning nodes at set intervals which players can destroy for large point boosts. Three of these stations are each team's home base, so that leaves only three targets to realistically fight over. The dominant strategy involves going to a target, capturing a base, fighting the opposition if necessary, and leaving to go to the other base nearest your home base. Break that up only slightly with heading for the middle to destroy the high-point nodes, and it's just plain boring. But more than that, it's frustrating because of the midpoint's elevation. It's all too easy for one team to just gang up on another team on the bridges that lead upwards so they can't reach the top, since the three bridges are the only way up. And even if a team gets to the top, the high elevation means falling damage is in play. A Monk or a Machinist can push you off, or a Warrior can pull you off, and there's nothing you can do but fall to your death, no matter which class you were playing or how much HP you had left. All of this means that once one team gets in the lead, there's very little that the other two teams can do to try and pull a comeback, and the map as a whole has been derided by players for a long time. It's telling that when the Borderland Ruins was announced to be temporarily unavailable in patch 6.4, the immediate reaction of the playerbase was cheering that it was gone.

* For the Frontlines PVP mode, there is The Borderland Ruins (Secure). Frontlines is a 72-player melee with three teams of 24 players, and it's designed to be a bit chaotic. What makes the Borderland Ruins so frustrating to play on is that much of this chaotic nature is taken away. There are six stations around the map, with the station in the middle spawning a few high-point targets at set intervals. Three of these stations are more-or-less guaranteed to be a team's home base, so that leaves only three targets to fight over. The strategy involves going to a target, capturing a base, fighting the opposition if necessary, and leaving to go to the other base nearest your home base. Break that up only slightly with heading for the middle to destroy the high-point nodes, and it's just plain boring. But more than that, it's frustrating because of the midpoint's elevation. It's all too easy for one team to just gang up on another team on the bridges that lead upwards so they can't even get to the top, since the three bridges are the only way up. And even if a team does get to the top, the high elevation means falling damage is in play. A Monk or a Machinist can push you off, or a Warrior can pull you off, and there's nothing you can do but fall to your death, no matter which class you were playing or how much HP you had left. All of this means that once one team gets in the lead, there's very little that the other two teams can do to try and pull a comeback, and the map as a whole has been derided by players for a long time. It's telling that when the Borderland Ruins was announced to be temporarily unavailable in patch 6.4, the immediate reaction of the playerbase was cheering that it was gone.

* Aurum Vale tends to elicit groans from players any time it comes up in a roulette. The first room has mobs so close to one another that you can and will find yourself fending off half the room all at once, whether you wanted to or not. It's not uncommon for Tanks to try and pull multiple packs, only for more enemies to join the fray, causing a TotalPartyKill. At least dying here is only a few seconds of progress lost, but the alternative is to go very slowly and very carefully, which takes just about as long anyways. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat Marlboro Fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you, and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many hard-hitting swings that can one shot a Tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the ''Final Fantasy'' series, along with their multi-status-effect Bad Breath. And they can come in packs. Also, most of the dungeon -- including the arenas for the first and third boss, already noted for their gimmicky mechanics -- is filled with pools that do damage over time if you step in them. Aurum Vale also has a tendency to show up a little too often in roulettes, meaning veteran players quickly become sick of it. Combine all of this together, and you have a dungeon that is frustrating to clear.

** The second boss traps a party member in a Queer Bubble that does damage over time and interferes with abilities in general. Not good if he traps the healer and your DPS isn't paying attention. Once he's almost dead, the final boss swoops in for a change of pace that lasts just a bit too long (certainly longer than it'd take to just finish the last of the original boss's HP yourself) before flying off again.

** Another reason the dungeon is so difficult is because of pure bad timing, as it comes right around the point where White Mage players learn their famed Holy spell, which hits multiple enemies and stuns them for a few seconds. If they've only played Conjurer and White Mage, this is probably their first time having an ability that stuns enemies, and after only testing it on low-level enemies it kills in one hit, they're likely to come to the conclusion it's perfectly possible to spam Holy to add on damage while preventing the tank from getting hit - very quickly leading to wipes in the first area of the dungeon as the game makes it clear [[GuideDangIt all too late]] that enemies that get stunned repeatedly gradually resist further stuns until they're not affected at all after three or four of them.

* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can and will find yourself fending off half the room all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many of hard hitting swings that can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.'' Also most of the dungeon including the arenas for the first and third boss (already noted for their gimmicky mechanics above) is filled with pools that do damage over time if you step in them, making things [[SarcasmMode fun]] for everyone, especially Melee DPS classes.

* More of a Scrappy Star System, Jita. The system chat is flooded with scammers, {{Real Money Trade}}r bots and spam trades involving overpriced crappy rare drops. At any given moment, there are 1000+ people in the system resulting in bad lag, sometimes resulting in waits of up to five minutes just to get in or out, and often the shortest route going through Caldari space will pass through it. "[[StarWars A wretched hive of scum and villany]], inside a much larger wretched hive of scum and villany".

** ''Very'' few people like the Level 9 quest revamp. First, you have to spend multiple turns gathering parts to build a bridge; while there are ways to speed this up, they're not hinted at ''all''. Once you get through that, there are the Peaks. A-Boo Peak is easiest (you fight ghosts), but the constant bashing of the StarWars prequels and certain parts of the Franchise/StarTrek franchise gets old ''instantly''. Oil Peak can be a pain due to requiring Monster Level adjustments to do it faster. And Twin Peak is utterly ''despised'' - you get only the vaguest hint what you need to get past its tests, and if you fail, you don't get ''any'' hints as to what you did wrong! (There is an AntiFrustrationFeature, but that takes fifty turns to trigger.)

** The actual final boss fight spews poisonous AOE pools that will quickly overtake the battlefield, and leaving the boss on the pools will have its HP regenerate, forcing the tank to pull them around. Fortunately not as bad in more recent patches; unless the party is heavy on melee DPS or Aiatar targets the tank regularly (which he usually doesn't, as "randomly" targeting the healer [[SpitefulAI usually takes priority]]), the pools are fairly evenly spread and also don't provide too much regeneration.[[note]]In earlier builds, even one pool was sufficient to rapidly regenerate Aiatar's health, and he used the attack very frequently.[[/note]]

** The second boss traps a party member in a Queer Bubble that does damage over time and interferes with abilities in general. Not good if he traps the healer and your DPS isn't paying attention. Once he's almost dead, the final boss swoops in for a quick change of pace, then flies off again.

* Two-thirds of the dungeon of Cutter's Cry is composed of drab brown rooms filled with the same enemies over and over, with randomly occurring (and irritatingly frequent) environmental ground [=AOEs=]. The first boss is a boring tank-and-spank with adds, while the second is a sandworm that repeatedly vanishes during the fight, returning with a bursting, untelegraphed column AOE, combined with damage-over-time effects from other attacks that ''will'' kill your healer if they're not optimally geared. The dungeon's sole saving grace is its Chimera final boss, but even she has ThatOneAttack: an AOE that either fries everyone in melee range or fries everyone who's ''not'' in melee range, the distinction given by a coded message (its eyes glow violet for the ranged attack or blue for the melee one). In any pick-up-group, there will always be ''someone'' who forgets the code under pressure and runs the wrong way, or runs back and forth on the spot unable to make up their mind. Other than that, the dungeon isn't hard -- it's just so damn ugly and boring.

** As of Patch 6.1, both Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium have been heavily reworked, to much acclaim from the fanbase. Castrum Meridianum was made significantly shorter with the removal of many of the unskippable cutscenes and the extra objectives or mechanics that existed solely to make it drag on longer (like having to sidetrack to sabotage the ceruleum tanks or spend several minutes firing mortars at an airship), changing it from a slog that could easily take upwards of thirty minutes and changing it into a relatively breezy dungeon that can be completed in less than twenty. The end boss was also reworked and made into something more in line with how modern dungeon bosses are designed, removing the phase against her NighInvulnerable magitek armor and giving her on-foot phase actual attacks to make her a real threat. The Praetorium was likewise made shorter by trimming down several of the cutscenes and removing some pointless mechanics. In addition, the final two fights against The Ultima Weapon and Lahabrea were both removed and made into separate pieces of content. The former was reworked into a four-man Trial and the latter into a Solo Instanced battle. Finally, all of this content was rebalanced and brought up to a level where it poses an actual challenge to properly-geared level 50 players, as opposed to the [[AntiClimaxBoss hysterically easy encounters]] that were a major part of why these levels were so [[ItsEasySoItSucks disliked]].

** As of Patch 6.1, both Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium have been heavily reworked, to much acclaim from the fanbase. Castrum Meridianum was made significantly shorter and had many of the unskippable cutscenes removed, changing it from a slog that could easily take upwards of thirty minutes and changing it into a relatively breezy dungeon that can be completed in less than twenty. The end boss was also reworked and made into something more in line with how modern dungeon bosses are designed. The Praetorium was also made shorter and had the cutscenes trimmed down. In addition, the final two fights against The Ultima Weapon and Lahabrea were both removed and made into separate pieces of content. The former was reworked into a four-man Trial and the latter into a Solo Instanced battle. Finally, all of this content was rebalanced and brought up to a level where it poses an actual challenge to properly-geared level 50 players, as opposed to the [[AntiClimaxBoss hysterically easy encounters]] that were a major part of why these levels were so [[ItsEasySoItSucks disliked]].