Goddamned Boss / MMORPG

• EverQuest: The Fabled Trakanon takes this to the point of Fake Difficulty ^note  for those who've never played, fabled bosses are harder versions of old-school bosses in the game that only show up on the anniversary as he has an unresistable spell that teleports the player to the zone's beginning, and effectively reloads the zone for said player, meaning Trakanon will have completely regained his health by the time they get back unless other people are engaging him, making him almost impossible to solo even if you're 30+ levels above him, as he can use this ability at any time. The regular Trakanon also has a banish ability, but it just teleports you to a dangerous part of the zone without reloading you, meaning you can just run back.
• Monk bosses in Guild Wars have an unfortunate tendency to be able to heal themselves very quickly, making it difficult to do enough damage to kill them. And Dwayna help you if there's another monk enemy in the boss's spawn. One of the worst is a mission where there is a Monk boss and a Mesmer boss (crowd control and interrupts) together. Neither does a large amount of damage, but one makes it hard to attack properly while the other heals what attacks do get through.
• Guild Wars 2 has Jade Maw and Cairn the Indomitable.
  • Jade Maw is an obnoxious pseudo-Lovecraftian squid that can only be hurt by hucking charged crystals at it - crystals that can only be obtained by killing its Goddamned Bats flunkies and charged by using them to soak up a massively telegraphed One-Hit Kill move. Not hard, just a tedious, annoying fight.
  • Cairn The Indomitable is Goddamned Bats, the Raid Encounter. He throws the raid team all over the place. Throughout the fight you get a stacking debuff that makes you slower, he tosses you into the air inflicting more stacks of the debuff, shoots projectiles that knock you all over the place, teleports you all over the field and swings around a giant crystal club that launches you off the platform. Just when you get used to all that, he starts in with a shockwave of crystal that - if you couldn't guess by now - launches you all over the place. Oh, and if that weren't enough, all these attacks interrupt your moves, and with the projectiles, the recovery time is just barely shorter than the interval between them (so you don't suffer Stun Lock, but come so close you go insane.) Despite all these absolutely infuriating mechanics, he's regarded as probably the easiest real raid boss (after McLeod the Silent who's basically an overgrown Elite Mook).
• In City of Heroes, Reichsman has 225,000 hit points. A team without regeneration and/or resistance debuffs is in for a loooong fight.
  • Actually, he does not regenerate his health. However in the villain version of his task force, he has a phase-shift power that makes him impossible to damage and he cycles in and out of phase. If you didn't bring a Mastermind class on your team (or lost the Mastermind player for any reason), you cannot get the temporary power that neutralizes this ability.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Mr. Smite, the Prophet Tharon'ja, King Ymiron, and other bosses who pause the action before changing their attack pattern. Very frustrating the first time around if you just blew your cooldowns, with better gear merely annoying to wait most of the fight on the pauses because the boss just loses HP that quickly. Ymiron has four pauses like that.
  • You can wipe on Heroic Pit of Saron on Garfrost because you did too much damage for him to throw the saronite you hide behind. In Lich King anyways.
  • Razorgore in Blackwing Lair has become this now that players are high enough level that he's no longer a threat. You have to force him to destroy the eggs before you can kill him, so while his HP is insignificant by Cataclysm standards, you have to sit through a fairly long and tedious process if you're not the controller, killing adds that require hardly any effort if you're past their level range.
  • Asira Dawnslayer in Hour of Twilight is not particularly difficult, but periodically throws down smoke bombs that make it impossible to attack her while she and/or you are in the smoke, and if you're a caster, casting a spell will result in her throwing a knife to silence you.
  • Echo of Kros is the easiest of the summonable Champion bosses on the Isle of Thunder, but it can summon spirit raptors that can silence you, can do a roar that fears players, and can summon an add that will heal it if it reaches the add.
  • Progress on raid bosses in general tends to include a certain number of wipes, some more than others (and generally speaking more wipes the further you get into the raid), in order for the group to learn how to properly handle mechanics. Every once in a while, however, you will run into a long endurance boss where most of the challenge is back-loaded to the final portion of the fight. This means you can get the first 7 minutes of the fight down in only a few tries and then spend the rest of the night repeating that portion effortlessly only to wipe at 10%, qualifying the boss in question as this trope. Some of the more infamous cases of this are Sindragosa in Icecrown and the multi boss fight Iron Maidens in Blackrock Foundry. The latter in particular, where three new mechanics activated whenever one of them falls below 20% health and gaining a damage buff for the rest of the fight that stacks up over time, eventually overwhelming you if too many damage dealers get caught out by one of the numerous danger zones.
• Perfect World has Kun Kun, a boss who is a huge coward and so doesn't attack at all, only running away. He also has full spell immunity and absurdly high physical defense. He really isn't a problem for most classes (Melee classes and Archers just smack/shoot him to death, Venomancers sic their pets on him, Clerics use Plume Shot and their other physical attacks), but Wizards and Psychics have to run up and physically smack him with their wands/soulspheres for 3-4 damage per hit. Another complaint is that he tends to run straight into groups of aggressive mobs. This is obviously another problem for Wizards and Psychics, but also for melee classes because most of the mobs in Kun Kun's area are casters and heavy armor does not protect very well against magic, sacrificing magic defense for physical defense.
• DC Universe Online has Harley Quinn, Complete with two different mallet attacks that will knock you across the room for massive damages, stun and ground attacks that cripple most ways of dodging her, even better she can't be harmed DURING the mallet attacks that are annoyingly long with annoyingly short periods between them to actually hit her! Once you figure out the cues to her attacks you can stay out of the way then rush in to hit her before running off again, but it's still a long fight. BONUS, she comes in two modes, normal and Challenge once you hit Level Cap...have fun!
• End-game bosses in Aion tend to have the Recovery ability, which is an uninterruptable attack that restores usually about 1/6th to 1/5th of their HP. Because they can use it without fail, and thanks to A.I. Roulette, they can use it back-to-back, a party that's capable of beating the boss normally will quickly find their patience running out when the boss heals almost back to full while they can do nothing about it, even if the boss is in the same situation (i.e. unable to kill the party). The accepted and understood method of killing these bosses is just to do damage fast enough that Recovery just drags the fight out, as opposed to making it unwinnable.
• In Champions Online, there's Viperia in the Serpent Lantern missions. Literally invulnerable after the first few hits, you have to defeat her by basically blocking and relying on your defenses for long, boring stretches, then run around and place crystals to imprison her. Rinse, repeat, etcetera no less than five times.
• The Crystalline Entity in Star Trek Online. The famous Crystalline Entity from The Next Generation requires an entire fleet of ships to kill, and it requires that EVERYONE learn a very specific set of tactics. The Entity itself is not terribly powerful. It will directly attack whatever ship currently has the most aggro, but a cruiser who specifies in healing and aggro control can take care of it without any hassle. The entity sends out little shards from its body to chase after the ships. Also not a problem if you put enough power into your engines to outrun them. If you get hit by them, two things happen: You will instantly die or come dangerously close to dying, and the entity itself will heal a huge portion of its life. The entity has an insane amount of hitpoints, so instantly healing itself by 7% will just add another 10 minutes to the fight. There are certain crystals which players are allowed to kill, and others which will also heal the Entity if they are destroyed. Once it gets knocked below 30%, it switches up tactics a little, but is still not too difficult to handle as long as everyone knows what they're doing. All it takes is one player to completely mess up and ruin the entire fight for EVERYONE, resulting in the Entity healing itself back to full health in a few seconds. The encounter itself has rarely ever been defeated save for fleets who specifically organize just to take it down. It became so much of a hassle that the developers eventually decided to just remove the encounter altogether. Now, nobody can fight it.
• In RuneScape, during the Boss Rush at the end of The World Wakes, the last boss you fight is Enahkra. Enahkra has a ton of HP and can leech your HP to heal hers. And she does so constantly. The more HP you have, the more she heals from her leeching attacks. Even worse, as the fight drags on, she eventually graduates to pinning you down and sucking your HP away until you can break her grab. The only way to really reduce the amount she heals by is to keep your health as low as possible - a risky proposition, considering she also has reasonably powerful magic attacks.
• In The Lord of the Rings Online, the final fight of Fil Gashan against General Talug can be this, especially if your group doesn't communicate/coordinate well. The orc boss is wearing significant armor, and the only way to damage him in the first part of the fight is to lure him into one of the traps his minion keeps lying around (without setting it off yourself). In the second part of the fight, you have to kill one of his other minions right next to him so it will splash oil on him, and then lure him into one of the traps. The final part of the fight is a much more standard tank and spank fight that will kill him quickly. Although the damage isn't horrific, people will tend to find their patience tested as inevitably one of their Fellowship members will accidentally step into a trap meant for the General, will kill the Firefist too far away from him, or will grab his aggro and deter him away from the trap in time.
• Various bosses in MapleStory have skills called Weapon Cancel and Magic Cancel, in which your attacks (weapon or magic, depends on your job) all deal 1 damage for a short period of time, with a tiny chance of breaking through. Another form of this is Damage Reflect, in which you deal 1 damage and receive a certain amount of damage back, depending on the boss. In many cases, this is a 1hko.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • The second boss of the Hullbreaker Isle dungeon doesn't hit particularly hard, doesn't have much HP, and its special attacks are laughably easy to dodge. However, it spends half the goddamn fight underground, untargetable, from which it launches its irrelevant special attacks. The diving mechanic doesn't make the fight any harder, it just makes it a lot longer than it ever had to be because, for half of the fight, you can't damage it. You're stuck waiting with your thumb up your ass until it surfaces so you can wail on it for all of 15 seconds before it dives again.
  • Leviathan and Ramuh, in their Extreme mode fights, are noted for giving unsynced parties trouble due to unskippable mechanics that, if done wrong, result in a Total Party Kill. Ramuh's ultimate outright One Hit Kills the whole party if you DPS too quickly, and no shield or Vitality-focused melds will ever survive it. Leviathan, on the other hand, has a "fair" ultimate that can be mitigated through normal means along with the elemental converter, occasionally allowing one or two quick-thinking players to salvage a screwup — but that fight also has a mechanic that knocks players off the arena, preventing their resurrection, so it's a toss-up as to which one is worse overall. Ironically, both of these fights are made significantly easier by just not bringing as many players.
  • The Labrynth of the Ancients alliance raid is by no means tough, but it has two sticking points that can really annoy players:
    • After beating the first boss, there's a mini-boss in the form of three Atomos that each party must taackle. The first bit of annoyance comes from the fact that if someone starts the fight, everyone has 15 seconds to get into their appropriate lane. Anyone who misses this gets teleported to Alliance A's lane by default, regardless of which alliance they're in. If there's not enough people to do the main mechanic proper, a super-powered Iron Giant will spawn to wipe everyone to prevent an unwinnable situation. As for the mechanic proper, the Atomoses are invincible until a pad in each lane has four people on it. Each pad makes one of the other Atomoses vulnerable. Queue not enough people not standing in the pad and the alliance chat filled with yelling to have people stand on the pads.
    • The final boss of The Labrynth of the Ancients has an alliance-wipe attack where the players must step on three platforms to protect themselves from it. It's not particularly hard, but the annoying factor comes when the second round comes: whether to wail on the boss and defeat it before it goes off or head back and step on the platforms. If the alliance is not in unison of what to do, chances are, a wipe will happen. Less patient players tend to vocalize their frustrations soon after.
• Wynncraft: Prior to 2.0.1, the boss fight with Charon was unique in that instead of battling him one-on-one, you summoned army units to help fight him and his army. But it tended to drag on for a bit due to the fact that you could only summon one unit at a time, the fact that they all had cooldowns ranging from 4-14 seconds, Charon’s minions spawning at a constant rate, and most damningly of all, the AI of the soldiers, including General Graken, the only unit that could damage Charon himself, who tended to get hyper-focused on one enemy only to end up getting slaughtered by another group behind them. Oh, and you couldn’t damage Charon yourself, because he was protected by an invisible barrier that only your units can pass. When 2.0.1 came around, this fight was dropped in favor of a more traditional boss arena battle.

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