There are a few enemies in Path of Exile no player likes seeing:
- Porcupine Goliaths shoots out spikes in a nova when killed, which deal an unusually obscene amount of damage, even from normal versions. They're especially devastating on builds that lack physical damage reduction, and getting too close to a pack of them and killing them can nearly or outright kill you. The only effective counterplay is to use an effect that destroys enemy corpses on kill like freezing them.
- There are a few monster mods that can down players quickly. For example, Corrupted Blood inflicts the bleed status effect and can sap your health in seconds unless you have a flask that can remove it on hand. Monsters with physical or elemental reflect were able to kill builds that dealt big damage in huge chunks by just getting hit, which prompted them to be nerfed by shooting a delayed projectile that deals reflected damage instead. On the same vain, Volatile Fire/Ice/Stormblood were able to one-shot melee builds instantly when dying, and were turned into a delayed tracking explosion. Piling on a load of Storm Calls or fully charging a Flame Blast can lead to an Oh, Crap! moment when you discover that the monster you're about to nuke is going to reflect that right back at you. Proximity Shield is just annoying for any non-melee builds.
- With the introduction of the Talisman league, which spawned monsters holding the aformentioned talisman, giving them a unique effect and rewarding the player with one if they managed to kill it, one particular type quickly gained infamy to the point of getting nerfed: Bonespire. Monsters holding the Bonespire talisman sporadically created spiky areas on the floor which both damaged and applied a stacking dot that can't be removed like bleed or circumvented like puncture. Problem was the damage was way too high, to the point of even the slightest of delayed reactions meant certain death and even then portaling back to town was the only real counter to its stacking DoT. This was quickly nerfed in a patch, almost not even a day after the league started.
- Monster packs with Bloodline mods can be horrifically dangerous. Bearers of the Guardian causes the pack to summon an Animated Guardian that cannot be killed until the pack is exterminated. Voidspawn of Abaxoth summons a Superboss unique demon when the last pack member is killed. Heralds of the Obelisk leave behind lightning-spell spamming untargetable obelisks until the last member of the pack is killed. Flame, Frost, and Storm Bearers get an honorable mention, as each one spawns a circular AoE that explodes a few seconds after killing them, which are easy to avoid, but used to have a visibility problem that made dodging hard. Necrovigil is a removed mod that made fighting the pack extremely annoying by making each of them leave a ground effect that makes other monsters in it unkillable.
- The Demonic Spiders factor can be compounded by enemies with multiple modifiers. A rare monster with a Nemesis mod, possessed by a Tormented Spirit, and bearing multiple Essences will probably drop some nice loot, but fighting it is going to be a real bad time.
- The Harbinger league throws the titular Harbingers at you: Enemy Summoner foes who are invincible on their own and spam devastating spells at the player. The only way to kill them is to slay their minions, as each dead minion drains a little more of their health. Unfortunately, the minions are also powerfully-buffed as well. Rounding a corner and coming face to face with a glowing blue Harbinger and it's backup turns a normal dungeon run into a surprise round of desperate kiting and minion-slaying against an enemy just as dangerous as most bosses.
- The Abyss leagues has the titular Abysses, which love to spawn extremely tough rare monsters with very, very high health regen and potential one-shot abilities. The ones with scythes are the most notorious, thanks to having an extremely fast spin attack that can oneshot basically any build with bad mods.
- Pretty much everything in the Azurite Mines are various flavours of annoying, but there are two creature types in there that are especially problematic. The first are the Cavestalkers, which are long-armed, monkey like creatures with monstrously powerful voices. They can weaponise this in two ways - Letting out a roar that temporarily knocks the Crawler offline, making you take heavy damage over time and rendering all enemies invincible, or they can let out a sonic scream forwards, which is utterly deadly and difficult to see in the chaos. The other enemy to watch out for are the Chimera-like enemies. These things are extremely agile (one of their favorite moves is to blitz through you then smack you with their tail, causing heavy damage both times), are quite relentless in chasing you, and are 'immensely' durable, which given the fact you are constantly having to chase the Crawler, makes them nightmarish to keep on top of.
- The members of the Immortal Syndicate are the most universally agreed upon example in years. Its officers can be more powerful than the bosses of the map (including end-game bosses like the Guardians), use abilities that deal tremendous amounts of damage (with many of them doing very high Chaos damage) and are sometimes difficult to see, and the locations make it worse - Research makes you rush through a horde of minions on essentially a timer first, Fortification spawns an infinite stream of monsters from clouds of smoke that cover the Syndicate officers' telegraphing attacks, and Intervention features the officers simply ambushing you out of nowhere. A few instances had the players being killed with attacks off-screen.
