| 1 | Some MMORPG quests take that cake for being [[ThatOneLevel annoying and/or needlessly difficult]]. |
| 2 | |
| 3 | !! Games with their own pages |
| 4 | [[index]] |
| 5 | * ThatOneLevel/WorldOfWarcraft |
| 6 | [[/index]] |
| 7 | ---- |
| 8 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 9 | |
| 10 | [[folder:''City of Heroes'']] |
| 11 | * ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' |
| 12 | ** 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! |
| 13 | *** 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). |
| 14 | *** WordOfGod 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. |
| 15 | ** 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. |
| 16 | ** 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. |
| 17 | ** 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. |
| 18 | ** ''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. |
| 19 | ** In addition to the above, after about level 30, most missions featuring the Circle of Thorns took place in their home city, Oranbega. Oranbega is filled with twisty passages and gigantic multistory rooms and portals that don't always work right and multiple spawns of enemies within aggro radius of one another and randomly placed damage-inducing crystals. HATE. |
| 20 | *** Some archetypes hated Orange-bagel more than others. When playing a Mastermind, stepping though a portal is to be feared above all other things because (a) you could walk right into a spawn with no real weapons to fight them off until the minions show up and (b) 50% of the time the minions won't come through the portal; they'll instead run through the corridors to get to you, usually past other spawns meaning you have an army descending on your ass. |
| 21 | ** 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... |
| 22 | ** 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. |
| 23 | [[/folder]] |
| 24 | |
| 25 | [[folder:''[=zOMG!=]'']] |
| 26 | * ''[[Website/GaiaOnline zOMG!]]'': |
| 27 | ** 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. |
| 28 | *** Hell, Otami Ruins ''period''. There are Animated in there that are actually ''impossible'' to defeat. Plus swarms of annoying spammy Animated... |
| 29 | *** 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. |
| 30 | ** 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. |
| 31 | [[/folder]] |
| 32 | |
| 33 | [[folder:''EVE Online'']] |
| 34 | * ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'': |
| 35 | ** 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. |
| 36 | ** With the Apocrypha expansion comes a whole other galaxy cluster of completely uncharted systems accessible through naturally-occurring wormholes. The wormholes are classed 1 through 6, 6 being the most difficult. Some wormholes also have local stellar phenomena that can affect your ship both negatively and positively, with the effects increasing in higher classes. Guarding some of the most lucrative loots in the game are [[DemonicSpiders Sleepers]], AI-driven drones hell bent on guarding the technological secrets of long-dead (or possibly long-asleep) civilizations past. Sleepers start out NintendoHard compared to the pirates back in "known space," rivaling VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy as you approach Class 6, employing all manner of propulsion and sensor jamming, tactics-switching, target prioritizing, and reinforcements depending on the presence of players and their ship sizes. |
| 37 | *** Basically, sleepers [[TheAIIsACheatingBastard just cheat]] to be so hard. They can insta-lock. Their resists are incredibly high. Drones are useless since the AI blows those up first. They're immune to most EWAR. The range on their webs/scrams/EWAR is significantly greater then what player modules can provide. Their Energy Neutralizers are more powerful than possible. Bringing Capital ships spawns even more of them. |
| 38 | [[/folder]] |
| 39 | |
| 40 | [[folder:''Guild Wars'']] |
| 41 | * ''VideoGame/GuildWars'': |
| 42 | ** 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]]. |
| 43 | ** 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. |
| 44 | ** 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. |
| 45 | ** 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. |
| 46 | ** 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). |
| 47 | *** 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. |
| 48 | ** 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? |
| 49 | ** 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. |
| 50 | ** There are a few when it comes to [[VideoGame/GuildWars2 its sequel]] as well. |
| 51 | *** Explorable path 4 of The Ruined City of Arah. Two words: [[Attackofthe50FootWhatever Giganticus Lupicus]]. |
| 52 | *** 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. |
| 53 | *** 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. |
| 54 | *** 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. |
| 55 | [[/folder]] |
| 56 | |
| 57 | [[folder:''Star Wars: The Old Republic'']] |
| 58 | * ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'': |
| 59 | ** 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. |
| 60 | ** On Hoth the boredom of running vast distances from one quest to another is compounded by the lack of any scenery besides endless snow. |
| 61 | ** 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... |
| 62 | ** 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]]... |
| 63 | ** 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. |
| 64 | ** 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. |
| 65 | ** 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. |
| 66 | ** 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. |
| 67 | ** 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. |
| 68 | ** 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. |
| 69 | ** 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. |
| 70 | ** 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. |
| 71 | ** 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. |
| 72 | [[/folder]] |
| 73 | |
| 74 | [[folder:''Final Fantasy XI'']] |
| 75 | * ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'': |
| 76 | ** 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. |
| 77 | *** And there is a chance to have insanely strong mobs spawn on the ship during the ride. |
| 78 | *** 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. |
| 79 | ** 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. |
| 80 | ** 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. |
| 81 | *** 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. |
| 82 | *** Sacrarium is essentially the same zone, but at a higher level. |
| 83 | ** 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. |
| 84 | ** 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. |
| 85 | ** 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. |
| 86 | *** You had to cross several zones with mobs that could basically kill you instantly if they attacked you. |
| 87 | *** 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. |
| 88 | *** 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). |
| 89 | ** 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. |
| 90 | *** 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. |
| 91 | [[/folder]] |
| 92 | |
| 93 | [[folder:''Final Fantasy XIV'']] |
| 94 | * ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'': |
| 95 | ** 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. |
| 96 | ** 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. |
| 97 | ** 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. |
| 98 | *** 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. |
| 99 | *** 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. |
| 100 | *** 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. |
| 101 | *** 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. |
| 102 | *** 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. |
| 103 | ** The Sunken Temple of Qarn is one for several reasons. |
| 104 | *** 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. |
| 105 | *** 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. |
| 106 | *** 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. |
| 107 | *** 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. |
| 108 | *** 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. |
| 109 | *** 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. |
| 110 | ** 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. |
| 111 | ** Aurum Vale tends to elicit groans from players any time it comes up in a roulette, for a multitude of reasons. |
| 112 | *** 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. |
| 113 | *** 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. |
| 114 | *** 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. |
| 115 | *** 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. |
| 116 | ** 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. |
| 117 | ** 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. |
| 118 | ** 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. |
| 119 | ** 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. |
| 120 | ** 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. |
| 121 | ** 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. |
| 122 | *** 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. |
| 123 | ** 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. |
| 124 | ** 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. |
| 125 | ** 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. |
| 126 | ** 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]] |
| 127 | [[/folder]] |
| 128 | |
| 129 | [[folder:''[=EverQuest=]'']] |
| 130 | * ''VideoGame/EverQuest'': |
| 131 | ** 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. |
| 132 | ** 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. |
| 133 | ** 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''. |
| 134 | ** 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. |
| 135 | [[/folder]] |
| 136 | |
| 137 | [[folder:Other Games]] |
| 138 | * The Temple of Twilight in the ''VideoGame/DarkAgeOfCamelot'' Trials of Atlantis expansion. Clearing this dungeon was the third of eight steps into completing the Master Level trials, which granted new [[PlayerVersusPlayer RvR]] abilities. 80% of the dungeon was underwater, meaning tons of annoying monsters attacking you from every direction, and going through the dungeon was slow because you were swimming. It was also surprisingly boring: most of the action is at the end when you fight Medusa, the rest of the time is spent farming mobs in the underwater tunnels to get [[RandomlyDrops dropped items]] to trade for keys. And there's always someone who forgets to bring water-breathing potions. |
| 139 | * Similar to the Jita example above, in old-school ''VideoGame/AsheronsCall'' ''everybody'' hated the town of Arwic. It was just a hop, skip, and jump from the Abandoned Mine, a dungeon called the "subway" since it had portals that could take you to key locations all over the gameworld. This meant that it was always crowded, laggy, full of inane chatter, and subject to portal storms. It got so bad that eventually the developers had the game's first BigBad KickTheDog by ''blowing it off the map'' with the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke. It was rebuilt a few months later as a collection of shopkeepers and basic amenities scattered around the edge of the crater, which alleviated the overcrowding immensely. |
| 140 | * GBL Laboratory in the older versions of ''VideoGame/DungeonFighterOnline''. Consider that the American version has a level cap of 40 and the level was designed for characters level ''50''. They even decided to put it in after the set of level 35 dungeons, while barely removing any enemies. Add the fact that two long quest series require beating the level on the highest difficulties many times, in order to get two legendary weapons that become obsolete in a few levels. |
| 141 | ** And later on, there's Scoria Core. Finishing all the quests requires completing the dungeon about 15 times, mainly because of one that requires 100 of an item that drops from the dungeon's boss monsters. This quest alone requires 10 or more (usually more) runs. To make things worse, the dungeon itself is a pain- it's filled with Soul Eaters, an enemy that saps MP (which can cripple a team's offense), and lava pits, which inflict a poison-style effect that takes off a good chunk of health. To make things worse, players who are on fire inflict damage on their teammates if they come into contact (and there are enemies who also share this effect). Additionally, this is the first time most people will encounter the status effect, and when players are damaged by burning teammates/enemies the effect does very little (really nothing) to indicate ''where'' the damage is coming from. |
| 142 | * Ragnarok Online. Lighthalzen Bio-Labs Level 3. It is home to superpowered ghost versions of the 2-1 transcendents (Lord Knight, Sin X, Sniper, etc) whose normal attacks hit for 4-digit damage. Any and all of them can be your personal DemonicSpider, but among the worst is Kathryne Keyron, the High Wiz. She's a ghost type, making her immune to the [[OneHitKill Extremity Fist]] packed by the Monks and Champions who regularly frequent the area. If you're a Sniper, the only other job class that can reliably solo here, fellow Sniper Cecil Damon is around to make your life miserable. Luckily, the usual experience penalty upon death is nonexistent here - for commercial servers, anyway. FreeToPlay players are still out of luck. |
| 143 | ** And Freya helps you if that Cecil Damon you just shot is actually the MVP Sniper Cecil. The fact that all of the [=MVPs=] look identical to their normal counterparts is particularly frustrating. |
| 144 | *** Freya help you if someone used a Dead/Bloody Branch to summon a Sniper Cecil-outside of Prontera! |
| 145 | * ''VideoGame/ToontownOnline'', just beware the Brrrgh... Beware... |
| 146 | ** Minnie's Melodyland isn't criticized for being particularly hard, but for being ''boring''. |
| 147 | * ''VideoGame/MapleStory'' has a lot of irritating missions, but the undisputed king of them all are the jump quests. They're crazy-difficult platform segments full of hazards that can knock you back to the beginning with ridiculous ease, they're long, they're completely at odds with every other aspect of the game, and the rewards are nowhere near enough for the agony you have to endure to complete even the simplest of them. |
| 148 | ** On occasion you notice that one guy passes by you about five times... and [[DespairEventHorizon doesn't seem to be cheating, either]]. |
| 149 | ** Don't be silly. There are some people that [[SelfImposedChallenge enjoy doing them repeatedly.]] |
| 150 | * Trickster Online has the Potpourri Dungeon and the Pyramid Dungeon, among others. |
| 151 | ** Pyramid Dungeon: |
| 152 | *** Auto-aggro enemies. Lots of them. |
| 153 | *** The first enemies in the game that primarily attack with magic instead of physical attacks. |
| 154 | *** High-defense enemies backing up aforementioned magic-using enemies. |
| 155 | ** Potpourri Dungeon: |
| 156 | *** Auto-aggro enemies. Lots of them. |
| 157 | *** The Sppo, which has a weak BulletSeed style attack... and a randomly-used attack that can deal upwards of 1000 damage and can knock you into the scenery. |
| 158 | *** The Larva, an obscenely durable wall surrounded by high-speed and high-damage enemies that will attack you on sight. |
| 159 | *** And every last enemy is part of one long TwentyBearAsses quest... |
| 160 | ** Both of these dungeons are where Newbies that are fresh off of the training course are directed to. |
| 161 | * ''VideoGame/{{Runescape}}'': |
| 162 | ** Half-way through the quest "Ratcatchers", you must do a forced stealth mission in order to kill some rats with your cat. However, this part of the quest suffers from heavily bugged AI. Meaning guards will often spot you behind walls when they're not facing you and often walking out of their patrol routes into places where they are completely unavoidable. Thankfully, a fix has made this quest less frustrating, but god help you if you're doing this quest with only a kitten, as you will spend hours watching your chatbox filling up with "Your kitten fails to catch the rat". |
| 163 | ** While frustrating, that doesn't have the straight-up difficulty of some other parts of the game. The quest Nomad's Requiem requires you to kill a level 699 boss. He has one attack that will do 750 damage (and your max health is 990) unless you avoid it, makes copies of himself that hit way too high, and another attack that will kill you unless you're at or above full health. Combine this with attacks in between that regularly hit 200+, and you have a boss that few have killed in less than 5 tries and that some have taken 20+ attempts to kill. |
| 164 | ** Mourning's End, pt. II is another example. The quest revolves around solving several light puzzles inside of a massive underground temple called the [[MeaningfulName Temple of Light]]. While this would be a fair challenge on its own, the temple is packed with Shadows that are always aggressive and frequently deal up to 130 damage. Worse still is there's also a section where you must use your agility to crawl across wall supports to reach more pieces of the puzzle, which depending on your agility level is a Luck-Based Mission in itself. |
| 165 | ** Dungeoneering. All kinds of enemies, skill puzzles that have a strange tendency to deal around 20-50% of your health in damage for failing, just plain puzzles that require thinking of a solution while taking damage (or at the risk of dying, which has SEVERE consequences)...actually, EVERYTHING about the skill is frustrating. The bosses sometimes end up ''easier'' than the rest of the floor...[[ThatOneBoss or, in some cases (cough cough Stomp), they make every floor done to date look easy]]. |
| 166 | ** [[BlatantLies "One Small Favor."]] A FetchQuest and a ChainOfDeals, rolled together. That doesn't sound so bad, but then the chain gets absurdly long, and by the time you've finally managed to reach the point where you can start resolving it, you'll have traveled nearly an entire circle arround most of the main world, and you'll have travel nearly that entire distance again in order to resolve the fifteen or so "small favors" that you've accumulated (as well as a few unexpected hiccups). The player character lampshade it themselves. |
| 167 | ** Elemental Workshop III. You're given a huge 8x8 grid, and you're told (via pictogram) that you need to use this grid to charge and operate a machine. It's recommended that when you do this quest, you have a couple of aspirin handy because you WILL have a headache afterward. |
| 168 | ** The final part of Some Like It Cold. You're escaping from pursuing seals in a heavily damaged submarine. To defeat the seals, you play a game of Battleship. You know, that game that's heavily luck-based. Meanwhile, the submarine is falling apart at the seams, and you have to assign your crewmembers to hold it together. There are four crewmembers, but five different parts that need to be constantly repaired or the sub's health will decrease. Oh, and every time you get hit in Battlefish, the submarine's maximum health is decreased. It really all boils down to luck. |
| 169 | ** A huge part of "Sliske's Endgame" has you go through not one, but ''two'', series of [[TheMaze massive and overly cryptic mazes]] as you make your way over to the Stone of Jas. There's no obvious indication as to which path you need to take to progress, and it's very easy to get lost (even with the minimap maximized as much as possible), costing you a lot of unnecessary wasted time in the process. Even if you're [[GuideDangIt relying on a guide]] just to go through the mazes alone while skipping random encounters with the other participants of Sliske's sadistic games, it can still take an excruciatingly long time before you finally call the mazes done and dusted. |
| 170 | * ''VideoGame/FusionFall'' has the quest added with Ice King Invasion, "Princess Princess Princess." It has absolutely nothing to do with combat and everything to do with your platforming skills, and the game decides to throw you a bunch of momentum-based platforming. And if you fall at any point, unless you miraculously land on a platform (which you probably won't) you get to do the whole thing over again. |
| 171 | * ''VideoGame/GrandChase'' has Tower of Disappearance, which is called [[NintendoHard unforgiving]] by articles online. You only get one life. When you die, that's it. Not to mention that items, and revives are disabled. If you were to take too long to clear one area, you'll take damage constantly with no way to stop it until you enter the next area. Have fun reaching Kaze'aze! |
| 172 | * If you're not a stealth-based class such as a rogue or a ranger, the early-level "Stealthy Repossession" quest from ''VideoGame/DungeonsAndDragonsOnline'' will make you want to tear your hair out. The quest requires you to steal a worthless gem that a small-time con sold to a kobold proclaiming it to be the "Eye of Khyber," which resulted in a fanatical cult of the Dragon Below springing up surrounding the Eye. Until you steal the worthless gem, you cannot kill more than five of the Kobold Prophets without failing the quest. Stealth-based classes can simply ghost through the instance like the freakin' ninjas they are, but everyone else either has to use spells to keep the Prophets tied up, or run like hell. The problem with this is that once a Prophet has been alerted to your presence, he'll run for the gong and ring it, bringing down a load of enemies on your head, who will happily Interrupt any attempt to pull a lever to advance through the instance if they catch up to you. And since the Prophets love to join in any mass kobold fight against you, killing the other kobolds without killing the Prophets is problematic at best. And if you simply run through without engaging anyone, you will start incurring Dungeon Alerts, which opens up the biggest source of aggravation for nonstealth players in this instance -- the Harried status effect, which ''massively'' reduces the movement speed of players who are hit in mass aggro situations, and if it gets too bad, you won't be able to move AT ALL without turning around and killing everything (see note on killing kobolds above). And all the while, a harried player is getting pelted with projectiles, spells and other attacks, meaning that DeathByAThousandCuts is a very strong possibility. |
| 173 | ** And "Proof is in the Poison" is stated in the DDO Wiki to be one of the most difficult quests in the game and that a party going in needs to be over-powered compared to any other level 4 mission. The [[DemonicSpiders Quickfoot Casters]] on the bridge alone has led to many a TotalPartyKill of an unprepared party, and that's not even mentioning the traps or the other casters that use Melf's Acid Arrow as their main attack. |
| 174 | ** Most of the ThatOneLevel examples in DDO are not so bad once you've done the quest a few times and know it, but who didn't want to engage in senseless violence against their computer during their first run of such quests as The Pit, The Coalescent Chamber, Rainbow in the Dark, or Inferno of the Damned? |
| 175 | ** Another nasty one is The Crucible. Early on in the quest is [[TheMaze the Maze of Cunning.]] It's a confusing maze with three crests you have to find, as well as three levers that your party has to stand on, various monsters inside and bow- and magic-wielding gnolls on the walls, the latter of which will happily trip you with Cometfall. Assuming you make it through this section without having to leave the computer, there are two separate portions where you have to send one guy to run through an area with multiple traps, one of which requires jumping and another that's underwater. And if they die, your Cleric probably isn't going to make it in there to resurrect them. |
| 176 | ** The Temple of Elemental Evil is a two-part quest, with each part taking [[MarathonLevel around two hours or longer.]] Ostensibly a level 7 quest, its enemies are much stronger, especially on Elite, where a character that can breeze through the likes of Elite Gwylan's Stand and Tear of Dhakaan on his own will be wiped out by the first group of bandits in the Temple. Each group of said enemies usually has [[Zerg Rush five to ten of them who will happily attack you all at once]], and before all is said and done, you'll be fighting at least thirty such groups at the very least. Semi-randomized elemental explosion traps are scattered about, and Rest Shrines are scarce. The first part's boss is a fairly difficult fight that includes a [[DemonicSpiders literal Demonic Spider]] along with a wizard and four souped-up Elementals, and the second part's boss fights in a room full of poison mushrooms that drain your health quickly unless you run to certain healing mushrooms, while the boss is hitting you with strong magic (including Earthquake, which can knock down multiple targets) and summoning hordes of demons (including [[DemonicSpiders Hezrous and a Goristro!]]) Thankfully, some of the treasures (like the Orb of Golden Death) are well worth the hassle. |
| 177 | ** Tomb of the Tormented. The adventure pack Necropolis Part 3 is already unpopular because four of the five quests involve pointless and annoying gimmicks, but Tormented must be the worst. The quest involves guiding an infuriatingly slow and fragile undead rat through a maze with Zombie meat, which naturally requires you to keep stopping to kill zombies. Three times. Did we mention the last maze is full of insta-kill timed spike traps? Not for nothing is it said that the Tormented in the title refers not to the Zombies, but ''you''. |
| 178 | |
| 179 | * The Thai MMO 12 Tails Online has several of these. |
| 180 | ** Mission 3-6 falls between this and EarlyBirdBoss. The battle consists of three Rock Bugs, which charge at players for heavy damage, as well as tripping them. Since player speeds are very slow at this point, it is extremely difficult even for speedy characters to dodge one, let alone three. Gang-ups can occur that will wipe out a single party member. They also introduce the player to unavoidable movement lock spells, which can only be negated if certain classes pick a very specific skill in their tree. |
| 181 | ** Mission 4-5: Wind Valley 1 is a veritable pain in the tail. Characters in the game travel fairly slowly, but in this level you have to traverse a long canyon of wind pushing you backward, slowing you to the breakneck pace of about half a meter per second. But that's not all, there are occasional cactus enemies who will punch you if you get too close. And some of them are underground (you can't see them). Additionally, there is a constant barrage of miniature cacti that will push you back a huge distance and deal ten damage. While ten damage isn't a huge deal, they'll knock you back a long distance, and when you get KO'd (but not killed) your helpless body will get bombarded by tons of the little buggers! Oh, and guess what: when you reach the end, there's a wall of large cactus enemies that you somehow have to get through/around while the wind is still pushing you back. Last of all you have to compete in a battle with two enormous monsters in an enclosed space, now that you're out of potions and low on health! Hope you don't die! Oh, too bad! Have fun navigating the valley again! RAGE. |
| 182 | ** Mission 9-6: Shadow God Zera has broken the spirits of many. The level has five shadow crystals that must be destroyed in order to move on, each with at least one clone of Zera next to them that will attack you with Coma (an unavoidable status attack that temporarily sets the player's [[HPToOne HP to 13]]) and Doom (An avoidable attack that [[FixedDamageAttack always deals 300 damage]]) in alternation. Some of the crystals are in the aggro range of two Zeras, meaning that you will find yourself constantly running, in fear of a Coma+Doom combo. The place is also littered with several weak Shades that, in this situation can [[CherryTapping Cherry Tap]] you for a cheap kill with their guided projectile attacks. Oh, and if you're playing with friends, missteps caused by lag can easily result in death. Destroying all five will then open the way to the boss arena, which has three more Shadow Crystals, constantly respawning Shades, and ''all four copies of Zera'' in your sight, spamming their Coma+Doom combo. Managed to avoid dying and destroyed all three crystals? Good, now here's another set of them for you to destroy. Do it again. ''Fifteen more times''. |
| 183 | * ''VideoGame/GranadoEspada'''s Judgement Day questline, and by extension, Tora's recruitment quest. Both require you to traverse through the insanely high-end Lucifer Castle at least three times, sneaking past enemies and traps that will OneHitKill anyone who isn't invulnerable to damage, meaning that you will need to spam dozens upon dozens of Soul Crystals just to get to the quest point. Worse, you can't save warps inside, so if you need to get out to talk to an NPC in town, be prepared to walk from the start. Even worse, this is part of the main storyline, meaning if you want to proceed further, you need to finish this questline. |
| 184 | ** Also, overlapping with ThatOneBoss: Time Paradox, Rose. The main reason why this is ThatOneLevel material is because ''the whole raid will screw the entire squad up'' if anyone in the raid isn't careful. Taking down the boss to certain HP levels will cause it to spawn flowers that will spawn mini versions (though equally as painful) of the boss once their bars become full, or when you kill them, basically SNAFU if you don't lure the boss somewhere far from the patch of are where it spawned the flowers. |
| 185 | * Ask most players of ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'', and you'll find the most frequently despised quest is the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Quest for the Holy MacGuffin]], the level 11 quest. As opposed to the previous ten levels worth of main quests, each of which are fairly self-contained in one area of the game each, the MacGuffin quest has you running all over the Kingdom on six different mini-quests (one to get your father's diary, three for the key to the final area, one to find the final area itself, one to find the MacGuffin), each with its own set of annoying mechanics. Heavy on inventory-clicking? Identifying four otherwise similar spheres by combat results alone, leaving yourself open to attack while doing so? (possibly) Backtracking to a low-level area to waste turns to look for two items to drop? Bouncing back and forth for five turns at a time between the desert and the oasis? It's all there. A shame, too, since that's the most interesting part of the game, just the most annoying game-wise. |
| 186 | ** ''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 ''Franchise/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.) |
| 187 | ** The Level 12 quest, where you have to [[OneManArmy start a war and finish it all by yourself]] on the [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment Mysterious Island of Mystery]]. Like the previous quest (Level 11, mentioned above), in order to increase the amount of enemies you kill for each victory on the battlefield, you have to do mini-quests all around the Island. Some of them are fun (like Defowl the Farm, where you have to beat up a bunch of giant ducks, and there are many different types of them making it pretty interesting), the others not so much, like Recover the Sister's Meat, where you have to beat up 50-100 identical thugs that don't drop anything besides meat, which is taken by sisters anyway. Oh, and it's the only miniquest where you have to be dressed as a War Hippy/Frat Warrior, and those aren't the best equipment sets out there. Or Advertise for the Mysterious Island Arena, where you have to slap flyers on lots of monsters outside the Battlefield. Granted, you can use flyers on monsters from other miniquests, but it's not guaranteed that those will be enough to please your quest giver. Ignoring those mini quests is not recommended, as otherwise, you will have to spend ''1000 turns'' in the Battlefield. Oh, and the boss at the end - he's not exactly hard but has ''tons'' of health, and you may have problems if you're not strong enough. |
| 188 | * ''VideoGame/TheLordOfTheRingsOnline'': |
| 189 | ** Attempting to complete Fil Gashan's Challenge Mode requires a group to play carefully and stealthily, as you're allowed to kill no more than 2 sentries, and at least one of them is required. The care needed requires the fellowship to take a lot more time than simply mowing down everything, which is hard to do if you have a pick-up group that may not understand the strategy of the level. However, since the reward is currently only a few more medallions than normal (plus bragging rights), most players will not only never complete the level this way, but not even be aware of the correct way to accomplish this feat. This has only gotten more pronounced in the time since original release as power creep has made it so players can easily take on virtually a whole level's worth of enemies at once to speed your way through it, so going through the Challenge Mode will take literally 3-5 times as long. |
| 190 | * If you play ''VideoGame/SpiralKnights'', you will have (soon or later) entered an Arena, where each chamber involves facing multiple waves of enemies according to the elemental type of the level. This can become a major problem when the element happens to be Ice or Electricity (a few patches ago, Fire also counted). One of the rounds will invariably involve 10+ turrets, which in the midgame can fire 3 shots of status-inducing goodness at once. Freeze sticks you in place, ready to be mobbed by the other enemies, while Shock causes you to occasionally pause, spasm and take damage. This can also result in you being mobbed and quickly dying. Ice or Electric Arenas can easily consume hundreds (even thousands) of energy on a, particularly bad run. |
| 191 | ** It's not so hard if you're prepared though. Note that Arenas is one of the most rewarding levels to fight in. |
| 192 | ** Forget about Arena. There's a reason players don't like entering Danger Rooms often, especially one that costs 5 energy to open. |
| 193 | *** Yo dawg, I heard you like Gun Puppy. So we add [[BulletHell 1x more Gun Puppies so you can evade while you evade!]] |
| 194 | ** The expansion mission, Operation: Crimson Hammer, is a nasty one. There's plenty of Gremlins, including two new types of Gremlin. Mortafires, gremlins with large shields and mortars, aren't too tough to avoid, but they're very time-consuming to fight, especially solo. Ghostmane Stalkers are ninja gremlins with buzzsaws that can turn invisible. They can't attack while invisible, but they can cause a Death Mark status which lowers defenses. And unless you break their cloak, which is tough to manage without a dedicated haze-bomber, they don't stay visible for long. Aside from these new enemies, the mission itself has some very difficult rooms; a good example is a cramped room with a Battle Pod and various Gremlins and Gremlin Spawners, as well as the particularly nasty Mecha Knights. Finally, there's the boss of the mission, Warmaster Seerus. There are five phases to the fight, two of which involve running around in the boss room dodging rockets, lasers, and respawning Gremlins while waiting for a central Battle Pod's shield to drop. Warmaster Seerus himself runs quickly, drops large-range bombs that deal Shadow damage, and has a hammer that causes four-way explosions when swung. And the entirety of the fight is zoomed out, which is good for watching where you are in relation to the Battle Pods, but also good for hurting your eyes. |
| 195 | ** The Shadow Lairs are very difficult. First, it costs 1800 energy just to get the key to enter one; though a full party can split the cost, that's still 450 energy per party member. The Lairs themselves have similar floor layouts to the different boss areas (Gloaming Wildwoods, Royal Jelly Palace, Ironclaw Munitions Factory, and Firestorm Citadel) but the difficulty is highly increased, with more enemies in more cramped areas. Each of the levels gets an extra status theme, too; Ironclaw Munitions Factory keeps its Shock theme as well as the new Fire theme, and Firestorm Citadel has the Carnavon, a Slag Walker with cursed breath and a shield on its back. Each Shadow Lair boss gets a new status and increased abilities (in the Snarbolax's case, an EXTRA Snarbolax is added to the arena, as well as a respawning Silkwing) and a Swarm Seed is added into the boss room. This Swarm Seed generates a large shadowy zone that increases enemies' defenses and slows down Knights inside- and this is while the boss is mauling/squashing/firing at/swinging at the Knights. Finally, once that's done, there's [[spoiler: the [[EldritchLocation Unknown Passage,]] which contains Void-based enemies that don't drop anything, as well as invincible Swarm Turrets and more Swarm Seeds throughout. The final section of the Unknown Passage swarms you with them.]] Make no mistake, you WILL need to energy revive. |
| 196 | ** In May 2013, a new level was added to the Clockworks: Compounds. These aggravating levels have the widest variety of enemies in the entire game -- combinations of [[ElementalRockPaperScissors Slimes, Constructs, and Fiends]] are not uncommon, for example. Also, you're going to get mobbed by new mini-monsters (Dust Bunnies in the Ravenous Warrens, Scarabs in the Chittering Burrows, and Glop Drops in the Creeping Colonies) that rarely drop anything of value. As if that wasn't bad enough, near the end of every compound is a large room where the mini-monsters respawn infinitely and the only way out is by pressing a bunch of hidden buttons that, when activated, release enemies into the room. ''Then'' you can finally leave this monster-infested hellhole... ''and take the elevator straight to another compound.'' |
| 197 | * Mabinogi's G2 Paladin storyline. In a game where rushing into a dungeon alone pretty much means suicide, they make an entire chain of quests with 90% solo dungeons. Cue ragequits from pure mages and archers after reaching a certain dungeon with a monster that can't be knocked back. |
| 198 | ** Dungeons at least give you the benefit of reviving at the last statue - Generation 11 brings in Shadow Missions, in which enemies get their stats doubled for about every hundred EmptyLevels you earn, you have to restart completely if you die, and everything is chock full of gimmick pain missions like {{Timed Level}}s and {{Escort Mission}}s. Pain all of the way through. |
| 199 | ** As tricky as G2 can be, it's comparatively little trouble if you managed to clear G1's final stretch alone. As stated about Shadow Missions, dungeons normally give you the benefit of reviving at the last statue... except for Albey Dungeon, which has three missions in G1- the first two of which must be completed back to back without fail or you'll have to start over, and the third of which has FIVE FLOORS- and kicks you out if you die. And unlike Shadow Missions, you can't even use a Nao Soul Stone to revive if you have them! To make matters worse, Albey Dungeon is rife with [[DemonicSpiders Gargoyles,]] who will attack you when alerted (as opposed to only attacking when they aggro) and a look at the wiki shows they have the same attack damage as G1's final boss. And that's the Light Gargoyles. There are Heavy Gargoyles too, with enough bulk to survive anything but the likes of critical Magnum Shot, and their minimum attack damage is equal to the G1 endboss's ''maximum'' attack damage. |
| 200 | * Theobomos Secret Labs dungeon in Aion can take upwards of 6 hours to complete, and that's if you manage to scrape together a team that actually knows what to do. The fact that it's so far away from any quick transport means it can take 20 minutes to back to the instance if you wipe. |
| 201 | * ''VideoGame/PhantasyStarOnline2'' doesn't have a scrappy level, per se, but a scrappy code: "Change Over Code: Capture", where the objective is to lure a boss over to a specific point to capture it. As a normal Emergency Code, it's tolerable, but as a Change Over Code, it's annoying, since by that point, the boss is close to half-way dead. As such, most players opt to simply kill the boss and be done with it. |
| 202 | * ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'': |
| 203 | ** There's a mission in the "Romulan Mystery" arc on the Federation faction, where you have to fight two Romulan battleships equipped with plasma torpedoes that can be either high yield or cluster sprayed, which means that your ship is constantly taking damage from the plasma burns, and at the time, you are using a tier three ship, which is either a pathetic heavy cruiser, a science vessel with moderate shields, or a heavy escort with hardly any hull strength and slow regeneration. (That's assuming you played the storyline straight through, of course. If you get into side missions and so forth it's not uncommon to hit the level cap before you finish the "Klingon War" arc.) |
| 204 | ** "Assimilated", in which you and your crew must work your way through a Borg cube absolutely crawling with huge numbers of drones, searching through hazards and occasional ambushes for a randomly-placed transporter... and then achieve a series of objectives in [[OhCrap a room stuffed with a good fifty or sixty Borg.]] If you fight through it you will probably die. But even if you switch your bridge officers to passive, one ambush in the wrong place can lead to a ZergRush. Suffice it to say this mission drew a lot of screaming on the forums from people running it for the first time. It was RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap by the Season 9 update, which shortened it and made it much easier and also greatly improved the loot. |
| 205 | ** "Devil's Choice", the final mission of the Elachi storyline for the Romulans, was this at first; fighting ''three'' Sheshar dreadnoughts and dozens of Monbosh battleship escorts, all using crowd-control abilities and ''Scimitar''-esque one-shot kill weapons. Ostensibly it should've been relatively easy in the tanky ''D'deridex''-class warbird you're scheduled to get right before reaching it, but the preceding much zippier and more fragile ships in the Romulan lineup don't in any way properly prepare you for flying the ''D'deridex''.[[labelnote:*]]Cryptic got lazy and gave the Romulans access to their allies' ships through Tier 4 to fill out their lineup rather than going to the extra work of giving them a full array of warbirds, but they forgot that ''almost nobody buys pre-Tier 5 C-Store ships''.[[/labelnote]] Elachi mobs got hit with the {{nerf}}-bat later. |
| 206 | ** "Hive: Onslaught", especially on Elite, and most certainly if you want the optional. First stage: Dozens of Borg cubes, spheres, and tactical cubes. Second stage: Two Borg unimatrixes, boss ships with an extra OneHitKill attack in addition to their usual one, and the extra one, a plasma lance, can hit you from 30 kilometers away. Also, you're supposed to be able to avoid being targeted by staying next to the shielded Borg diamond containing the Borg queen, but sometimes they'll lance you there anyway because of a bug. Final stage: The Borg diamond, easily a match for five player-piloted ships. No matter what you're flying, expect to die at least twice before you're done. Fortunately DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist. |
| 207 | ** "Boldly They Rode" is disliked because the EVA portion takes freaking ''forever''. You can't run on the exterior of Deep Space 9, or even walk normally; all you can do is shuffle or use your suit jets. And the suit jets can only fly between beacons, which frequently aren't placed remotely conveniently to where you need to be. |
| 208 | ** "Divide et Impera" is reviled not for any particular gameplay aspect, but rather for blatant {{Railroading}}. It forces you to [[spoiler:massacre a Romulan medical facility in order for the Undine impersonating Admiral Zelle to KillAndReplace the facility's commander and infiltrate the Romulans]]. Two different Foundry authors eventually stepped in to write {{Fix Fic}}s, one of which, Captain.Hunter's [[Recap/StarTrekOnlineFoundryDivideUtRegnes "Divide ut Regnes"]], even became a Spotlight. |
| 209 | * ''VideoGame/Wizard101'' has an ''entire world'' of That One Level: Azteca (at least pre-2013 nerf). Leading up to it were two easy worlds (Wizard City and Krokotopia), three moderate worlds (Marleybone, MooShu and Dragonspyre [this last one was actually kinda hard before a 2010 nerf], plus an additionl side world [Grizzleheim] that started as level 20 but the areas escalated in level), then a difficulty spike with Celestia, introducing the second arc (also later nerfed, though not to the extent of Dragonspyre, sorta like the Azteca nerf) which slightly changed the way enemies fought (health was now much more dependant on school, hardly any enemies used off-school spells [meaning no more annoying Weakness spam], now they'd use irregular spells [not taught by the teacher in quests or otherwise], they'd start with much more than just one pip [this amount was later nerfed since they sorta went in all-guns-blazing] and would now have a new weakness [in the form of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors] in addition to their antithesis [Ice-Fire, Life-Death, Storm-Myth, Balance with none, but being weak to Life, Death and Myth], these being Life-Storm-Fire and so forth for the schools in the Sun triangle and Ice-Death-Myth for the schools in the Moon triangle [ie. before Fire enemies would only be weak to Ice and vice versa but Celestia+ Fire enemies would be weak to Ice and Storm and Ice enemies to Fire and Myth], while in turn reducing the percentage of the boost), which was kept for Zafaria, then Avalon kept it mostly the same but started using a health system more akin to WC-DS (health being more dependent on rank that class, thus making Storm enemies more difficult), then Azteca introduced bosses that had mastery over two schools (but only having the weaknesses of one) and it's been suspected that they also started having better stats other than HP. Azteca was pretty hard and grindy, with the high amount of health enemies had, plus being kinda boring and being released at a point where players were going through a nostalgia kick with the first arc and classic [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]]. |
| 210 | ** Slightly less so, some cheating bosses and postgame towers are this. The boss Jotun was it before his cheats were removed due to a really unfair cheat and having extra bosses helping him in that fight, the dungeon Xibalba is still considered this, though with the added relief of being the final dungeon of Azteca; after it you get to play through the much more enjoyable world Khrysalis, Briskbreeze Tower was pretty hard when it was released but due to level cap increases it's no longer hard, Waterworks Tower was just like Briskbreeze Tower when it was released but it also had the best gear in the game available there, thus it was running much more often for farming, and it's still really hard to solo these days, and Tower of the Helephant is still this. Even 40 levels later, this tower is nigh impossible for Storm wizards to solo (although 30 levels later it was literally impossible, so at least there's a tiny improvement) and extremely difficult for anyone else. |
| 211 | * ''VideoGame/{{Pirate 101}}'' has the first quests from Book 8 which serve as introduction to Port Regal Skyway, which involve defeating an absurd amount of ships that are quite hard (or take a long time if you board/let them board you and take out the crew) to sink solo, especially with the slightly outdated ship you have at this point (because the next ship available is ''inside'' Port Regal Skyway unless you have someone teleport you into Port Regal to buy it or did a lot of side quests and ground ship EXP and have someone to teleport you into Tumbleweed to buy the Bison Galleon [next ship after Marleybone Skiff], which makes these quests much easier). There used to be a glitch where you could access Tumbleweed Skyway [and thus Tumbleweed] from the entrance to it on Big Sky but it has since been patched). Then around five quests later you get to find ten ''more'' ships to sink. Then next quest you get ''TEN FREAKING MORE SHIPS TO SINK!'' At least after that you get to one of the coolest dungeons in the game (which is a little long but still very fun and furthers the plot). |
| 212 | ** Not to mention the infamous White Buffaloon quest from Book 7 which was later nerfed and became the Striped Bumbaloon quest, which was thankfully further nerfed to the point where it's a (relatively) normal quest like it was supposed to be. |
| 213 | ** Also Dusty Arroyo Cave, an annoyingly long dungeon with farm appeal and a nightmare fuel room, which has also since been nerfed. |
| 214 | ** Like in ''VideoGame/Wizard101'', there's a postgame tower that's considerably hard and requires a good team to fight with you if you don't wanna spend four hours in this damn tower (at least most of the time on ''VideoGame/Wizard101'''s postgame towers you can get by if the others just know how to avoid the cheats/work around them, and don't necessarily have to play very well so long as any one person can carry the team). Add in the fact that there's a badge with a really cool effect for going rogue on the before-before last fight and only one player can go rogue, which means a lot of players only do this tower for the badge and ragequit if someone beats them to the punch on the said fight. Not to mention that there's so much good gear up for grabs in this tower that it almost demands you run it a lot of times (plus there's a badge for completing it ''25 times''). |
| 215 | * Ask any player of ''VideoGame/TheSecretWorld'' what their least favorite quest type is, and you'll inevitably hear 'Sabotage'. Much of the time the goal is to complete the mission within a certain time limit, without being spotted, et cetera. While the game does have AntiFrustrationFeatures for some of these (respawning multiple times in one results in a completely abandoned facility), the end result is inevitably getting sent back to the start... over, and over. This crosses with ThatOneAchievement where you have to perform these runs ''perfectly'' to obtain those points. |
| 216 | * In ''VideoGame/DoctorWhoWorldsInTime'', it was that one level on Skaro that began with you running into a trio of Daleks who had to be attacked using one particular strategy for you to have any chance of defeating them before they killed you (and even if you knew the strategy, that only gave you a chance). What really elevated it was that the attack phase was preceded by a lengthy rant from the Daleks, and ''Worlds in Time had no Skip Cutscene command'', so every time the Daleks killed you you had to sit through the whole rant again before you could have another go at them. |
| 217 | [[/folder]] |
| 218 |
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