History YMMV / TheElderScrollsOnline

** Also from ''Blackwood'', Gloom-Tooth in the Library of Zenithar is one of the very few Public Dungeon bosses you absolutely need to have a group to beat due to his incredibly high damage output and ''insane'' health regeneration that no other boss in the game (not even other trolls!) has.

** With the release of ''Blackwood'' and the Rockgrove trial, Flame Herald Bahsei, especially with hard mode on. Granted, every boss in that trial can be a handful with or without hard mode, but Bahsei racks this UpToEleven with her undodgeable and uncleansable Death's Touch status effect, which she liberally applies to the tank holding aggro on her that deals upwards of ''27,000'' damage per second that scales with your max health, meaning that {{Stone Wall}}s will melt extremely quickly even with healers spamming their abilities like there's no tomorrow. The off tank doesn't get it any better in that fight either, as the Flesh Abomination adds that spawn also apply a nasty bleed on hit that does just as much damage over time to them as Bahsei does to the main tank. It's the one fight in the game where the oft-maligned vampirism [[SituationalSword becomes a massive crutch]], as the skill Blood Mist is absolutely vital for the tanks to survive such an onslaught of damage over time ticks, in an already high damage environment. The thing that annoys many endgame players the most about this fight though was that it was tweaked to become as hard as it is today, as the public test version of Rockgrove used to let you roll dodge away from Bahsei and her Abominations to avoid these [=DoTs=].

** Orryn Blackmarrow and Thurvokun are considered one of the hardest dungeon end bosses in the game, even on normal, and for good reason, as its one of the most mechanics-heavy fights in the game outside of Trials with ''very'' little room for error at any time. Thovukun itself is always surrounded by a poisonous aura that drains your health in seconds and can ''grow'' in radius, and as the fight goes on, Orryn will begin activating summoning crystals that will summon skeleton knights that just ''love'' to pin you in place. If the crystals aren't destroyed fast enough, they will summon a special Bone Collusus that possesses a unique OneHitKill attack that they can and will use liberally. Finally, the final phase involves Orryn summoning waves of ghosts that kill instantly on contact, and the sole area of the arena that's safe from them is ''very'' small and not always obvious with where it spawns. There's a ''reason'' clearing this fight on Veteran grants you a title, which no other Veteran Dungeon clear gets you.

** Hamstring. Basically any enemy can inflict this upon you, which lowers your movement speed significantly, preventing you from running away from them or just moving around at all, but the most common culprits are wild animals, like wolves and hyenas, who are all over the place wherever you go, making it incredibly frustrating just running across the map without being harassed by them. Worse still, Hamstring can ''stack'', which slows you down to a crawl. While Hamstring by itself is mostly just annoying and not dangerous, it becomes a significant threat when you're fighting ''other'' enemies, such as world or trial bosses, and can't quickly move out of the way of their attacks.

** Veteran Maelstrom Arena. It is a solo-challenge, and it is an eight arena-long marathon where you are up against enemies that hit like a truck and deal a lot of damage. You can only resurrect 500 times, which sounds like it is plenty... until you find yourself dying every single round. To be fair, this is meant to be the ultimate test of a player's ability, and if you happen to get the title of "[[BraggingRightsReward The Flawless Conqueror]]" for clearing it without dying ''once'', congratulations, you are officially ThatOnePlayer.

** The Wood Elves are the Bretons' diametric opposite, being so highly specialized in stamina damage-dealing that they aren't good at anything else. In fact, most of their racial passives seem to be geared towards solo play, since stealth detection is pointless in most group content, and poison resistance is cool but niche at best given the rarity of such damage type. While they have good stamina sustain, their peak damage potential was hit hard with the {{Nerf}} bat in Update 29, which removed dodge-rolling as a trigger requirement but also slashing the buff strength by half, in response to Bosmer players being ''too strong'' in PvP. Without any other bonuses to magicka and health, Bosmer players would basically be stuck doing sub-par damage as Stamina DPS and nothing else, while Bretons at least can tank to a degree and are amazing at healing.

** Baron Montclair, the ArcVillain of the Rivenspire episode. While the gist of his story can be surmised as a WellIntentionedExtremist being driven mad with grief by his wife's illness and death, with blame being pinned on Verandis Ravenwatch for being the one who struck her down, the actual in-game story is a lot more complicated. For starters, Montclair hadn't the foggiest idea of how to cure his wife in the first place, willfully ignoring her desire to die naturally and be free of her physical torment. To this end, he employed the services of the Argonian necromancer Reezal-jul, who suggested a very sketchy plan to wield the power of the Doomcrag, a corrupted Ayleid artifact whose true powers are known only to him, which Ravenwatch repeatedly advised against doing. Instead of trusting his long-time friend Ravenwatch, Montclair instead derided him as an honorless coward, and after the activation ritual predictably went wrong, heaped all blame onto him for the heinous act of putting his wife, whom he transformed into a bloodfiend against her will, went mad and had to be {{Mercy Kill}}ed. This gets worse after the liberation of Northpoint, where his daughter Lleraya is slain by the Vestige. MoralMyopia doesn't quite cut it, and Montclair [[NeverMyFault never seemed to grasp the notion]] that everything that's happened was the result of ''his'' idea to begin with, making it ''extremely'' hard to sympathize with him in any capacity. That he went out of his way to antagonize Ravenwatch, who is an EnsembleDarkhorse, didn't help his case either.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Shalidor. The entire Mages Guild questline can be summed up as him being on a maddeningly-obsessive quest to obtain four supposedly mythical tomes from Sheogorath (or rather, him having ''you'' be on this quest on his behalf), in order to free the long-lost sanctuary of Eyevea from the Shivering Isles, which he himself bargained away for a book filled with nonsense. While he does eventually succeed, his zeal in doing so further paints the picture of him as a man with an extreme obsession with hoarding any and all knowledge (which did lead to his wife Ulfsild leaving him in the past), and being more concerned with a supposed rivalry with Sheogorath, who's a known {{Troll}}, rather than the safety of his guild members, since poor Valaste may end up irreversibly insane from translating the tomes you've found and whisked away to the Isles at the end of the questline.

** You'll be hard-pressed to find a player who doesn't heavily invest in the Tower and Shadow constellations, since they house four very important skills, Warlord, Sprinter, Shadow Ward, and Tumbling, which help reducing your Stamina consumption. Warlord and Sprinter help to immensely reduce the Stamina cost of breaking free from CC effects and sprinting, while Shadow Ward and Tumbling make your blocks and dodge rolls cost less, respectively. Regardless of what role you're playing and your current build, you're still going to have to wiggle out of stuns, block, dodge, and run around a lot, which cost no small amounts of Stamina to perform. As the cherry on top, the Tower's max level milestone also grants your mounts infinite stamina, making traveling ''much'' easier.

** Among the ten playable races, Bretons are widely considered to be one of the weaker picks due to their racial bonuses. When it comes to racial traits, Bretons are the poster children of CripplingOverspecialization, in that they are blessed with superb Magicka regeneration and resist, cheaper spell costs...and nothing else, making them very magically defensive, but not so strong offensively. As they are, Bretons have subpar health, no Stamina or Health bonuses, and their spell damage is okay at best, [[SquareRaceRoundClass making them poor tanks and Stamina damage dealers, while being very awkward to play in any role other than healers]], though they can be rather serviceable as Magicka DPS mains. And even then, there are still so many other race choices that would do their job far better than they can (e.g. Argonians can theoretically achieve far better sustain than they can, and they also have an innate bonus to healing strength, while High Elves can [[NotTheIntendedUse wield their naturally-high spell damage for insane healing bursts instead]]). As a whole, Bretons are not objectively bad, but they are so well placed into their niche that they are virtually OvershadowedByAwesome by just about anyone else in any field. If there is such a clear-cut example of the SquishyWizard in ''Online'', the Bretons would fit this to a T.

*** At stage 4, most people will refuse to talk to you, 'including most Stablemasters', excacerbating the maligned mount training mechanic. While Mesmerize allows you to circumvent this, not only is Mesmerize not all that useful as it's the only direction-sensitive stun, [[GuideDangIt this aspect of it is never mentioned, anywhere]].
*** Also at stage 4, you have 0 health regeneration. '''Period'''. Any sets or food buffs that provide health regen are thus wasted; this includes the Corrupting Bloody Mara, which 'explicitly raises Vampire's stages to 4'.

** Orryn Blackmarrow and Thovukun are considered one of the hardest dungeon end bosses in the game, even on normal, and for good reason, as its one of the most mechanics-heavy fights in the game outside of Trials with ''very'' little room for error at any time. Thovukun itself is always surrounded by a poisonous aura that drains your health in seconds and can ''grow'' in radius, and as the fight goes on, Orryn will begin activating summoning crystals that will summon skeleton knights that just ''love'' to pin you in place. If the crystals aren't destroyed fast enough, they will summon a special Bone Collusus that possesses a unique OneHitKill attack that they can and will use liberally. Finally, the final phase involves Orryn summoning waves of ghosts that kill instantly on contact, and the sole area of the arena that's safe from them is ''very'' small and not always obvious with where it spawns. There's a ''reason'' clearing this fight on Veteran grants you a title, which no other Veteran Dungeon clear gets you.

** Ri'Atahrashi and his Elementalist students in Southern Elsweyr will absolutely nuke the snot out of you if you don't know how to approach the fight. As the boss himself is accompanied by a small mob of students, most players will be conditioned to try and burst the squishier adds down first with a big [=AoE=] attack, only to then be instantly deleted when all eight of them focus on them at the same time, on top of the boss leaping on them. Their combined damage can one-shot most players, even unprepared tanks, and will make short work of those who survived, making this boss an absolute chore to beat unless you know what to do. Ironically enough, Ri'Atahrashi himself is almost trivial to fight alone, [[MightyGlacier as he's slow and all of his attacks have very visible telegraphs to them]], which should clue you into the fact that to beat this boss, you should ignore all of the adds and focus your damage on him and ''only'' him. As soon as Ri'Atahrashi dies, all of his Elementalist students will despawn immediately.

* JunkRare: The War Tortes. The first recipe is randomly found in Cyrodiil, the second requires 'hundreds of thousands' of Tel Var to acquire 'and' craft, and the third is found very rarely after a Battlegrounds match, with its respective ingredient rarely dropping from crafting nodes in Cyrodiil. What do the Tortes do? They... increase the rate of a character gaining experience for the Alliance War skill lines. Experience that is already easily earned just by participating in Battlegrounds or tagging along in raids in Cyrodiil.

* JunkRare: The War Tortes. The first recipe is randomly found in Cyrodiil, the second requires *hundreds of thousands* of Tel Var to acquire *and* craft, and the third is found very rarely after a Battlegrounds match, with its respective ingredient rarely dropping from crafting nodes in Cyrodiil. What do the Tortes do? They... increase the rate of a character gaining experience for the Alliance War skill lines. Experience that is already easily earned just by participating in Battlegrounds or tagging along in raids in Cyrodiil.

** Orryn Blackmarrow and Thovukun are considered one of the hardest dungeon end bosses in the game, even on normal, and for good reason, as its one of the most mechanics-heavy fights in the game outside of Trials with ''very'' little room for error at any time. Thovukun itself is always surrounded by a poisonous aura that drains your health in seconds and can ''grow'' in radius, and as the fight goes on, Orryn will begin activating summoning crystals that will summon skeleton knights that just ''love'' to pin you in place. If the crystals aren't destroyed fast enough, they will summon a special Bone Collusus that possesses a unique OneHitKill attack that they can and will use liberally. Finally, the final phase involves Orryn summoning waves of ghosts that kill instantly on contact, and the sole area of the arena that's safe from them is ''very'' small and not always obvious with where it spawns.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Shalidor. The entire Mages Guild questline can be summed up as him being on a maddeningly-obsessive quest to obtain four supposedly mythical tomes from Sheogorath (or rather, him having ''you'' be on this quest on his behalf), in order to free the long-lost sanctuary of Eyevea from the Shivering Isles. While he does eventually succeed, his zeal in doing so further paints the picture of him as a man with an extreme obsession with hoarding any and all knowledge (which did lead to his wife Ulfsild leaving him in the past), and being more concerned with a supposed rivalry with Sheogorath, who's a known {{Troll}}, rather than the safety of his guild members, since poor Valaste may end up irreversibly insane from translating the tomes you've found and whisked away to the Isles at the end of the questline.

** "Do you know how long I've been looking for you?"[[labelnote:Explanation]]In a similar vein to the above entry, players who have purchased the ''Orsinium'' DLC, but haven't started it yet, will find themselves being seemingly stalked by starter NPC, Stuga, all around the capital of their first major alliance zone (i.e. Davon's Watch, Glenumbra, Vulkhel Guard), saying the same line over and over again until her quest is accepted. Unlike the other DLC quest givers, Stuga is scripted to approach the player as they come near her area, which is pretty bloody large, so you will run into her several times just walking around town, causing her to become irritating ''very'' quickly, as she can't simply be avoided by not visiting a certain spot on the map. Most players who take her quest, simply do so to shut her up, as she won't stop stalking you otherwise.[[/labelnote]]

** One side-quest in ''Summerset'' has you stopping a Bosmer from growing more plants he brought from his homeland to prove a point to the Altmer gardener, who reflects high elf philosophy that everything must be in control and planned, rather than grow naturally. The quest has you feel that the Bosmer is in the right by having more natural growth, but the Altmer who gave you the quest has every right to tell you to destroy all the plants, since not only did he do it in his property, but the plants have nearly caused the ecosystem in the area, possibly the entire island, to collapse because it is becoming invasive. Any environmental scientist can tell you that bringing an outside species of plants and animals can cause havoc to the local flora and fauna.