With Payday 2 having in excess of 1300 achievements and challenges, it stands to reason that there'd be more than a few that would be... not well liked, to say the least. Especially since several are Luck-Based Mission ones, that depend on what the RNG feels like doing:
- Short Fuse: On Day 3 of Rats, you need to get out with 7 bags without defusing bombs (two or so suitcases of money won't have a bomb). You may get lucky with an extra money and coke bag that spawn near the escape copter, but is otherwise quite an annoying achievement to ping.
- Big Deal: In Framing Frame Day 1, you need 9 paintings secured (the maps spawns randomly and gives you 5-9, most of which will probably be in the back and behind lasers just to make stealth harder).
- Afraid of the Dark: In Framing Frame Day 3, you need to prevent the cops from disabling the power while hacking a computer. Doing Day 3 loud already qualifies as That One Level, but the fuseboxes have a large number of spawn locations and can spawn very far away from each other, and the cops can kill the power very quickly if given the chance. Made worse by the sheer length of the hacking process and the fact that there is no way to accelerate it.
- Guessing Game: On Firestarter Day 2, you need to cut two wires without knowing if they'll set off the alarm or not. Deserves special mention as the number and location of the wire boxes changes each time and the whole day must be completed in stealth, already a difficult task. This has a ten percent chance of working, so good luck!
- Cappuccino To Go: Part of the Cafe Escape, you need to get out with all loot bags within 30 seconds of the van arriving, and there are three spots where it'll arrive that are nowhere near each other. The achievement has various ways of beating it, and made easier if you figure out when the 30 second timer starts, where to stand to be able to see two of the three potential van locations, and...if you play Ukrainian Job and you only stole the Tiara, you get no loot bags to move, and therefore ping the achievement. Also consider many people wear heavy armour in escapes (slowing them down), there's still the matter of reaching the van in time.
- "But Wait - There's More!" is unlocked by being in an Armored Transport heist when someone picks up the address loot that unlocks the bonus Train Heist, but the blueprints can be destroyed if you choose to open the transports with C4.
- "We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" requires you to secure 40 bags of shells in Train Heist (which used to explode if thrown too far or if damaged). The Spring Break update in 2017 made this a lot easier, as the requirement has been lowered to 20 bags and on higher difficulties you need to grab 12 bags, while each train car holds 10.
- "If you Liked it you Should Have Put a Ring on It" is obtained by completing any Armored Transport heist with 9 bags of gold secured. Each convoy can have up to 4 trucks, and each convoy also carries only one type of bag loot (jewelry, cash, or gold), meaning it is impossible to tell whether you'll even get the right kind of loot you need for it. Additionally, each heist only carries a minimum amount of bags that will spawn; it is perfectly possible to get a gold convoy that only has 6 bags. Compounding this is that if you use shaped charges, you remove two safety boxes on each truck you use them on, reducing your chances further. Can be mitigated by running on higher difficulties, which increases the minimum number of trucks, and thus bags, that appear.
- "Doctor Miserable" for Big Oil day 2 is an inversion of "Doctor Fantastic" (complete the day 2 of Big Oil with the first engine being correct), which you are tasked with sending every single wrong engine to Bain, leaving the last one as the correct engine. Not only do you crawl at a snail's pace when moving engine parts, but the cops are brutal on the map and it is possible to run out of ammo trying to last through massive amounts of assault waves while waiting several minutes for each engine to be verified. You also have to do it on at least Overkill difficulty.
- "Hot Lava 2.0" is quite difficult for the first day in Election Day. You have to reach and use the computer in stealth without ever touching the ground, which means you will have to use boxes and freight containers as platforms to jump to and it is quite easy to angle your jumps wrong and fall down, or to time your jumps wrong and alert most of the shipping yard as you pass overhead. However, many players choose to use the Hot Lava 2.0 route once they learn how to perform it, as it skips directly past common guard and camera locations, and does in fact lead very reliably to two of the computer locations.
- The "Murphy's Law" achievement in the same heist is just as bad due to it being purely RNG-based. First, you have to tag the wrong truck (easy enough) to get the Breaking Ballot distraction heist for day 2. You then have to break into the vault and hope there is no money inside to steal, which is how the achievement is done.
- "Sewer Rats" in GO Bank. It takes a very long time to transport all those bags via the sewers (not helped at all by the confusing layout of the tunnels), and the SWAT forces are very capable of swarming the place.
- "Not Today" requires you to kill a Cloaker with the GL40 Grenade Launcher while he is trying to jump kick at you. Doing the achievement is tough due to the fact that Cloakers may decide to just bum rush you instead of doing a jump kick and the fact that Cloakers have enough health to survive one direct grenade blast, requiring you to weaken him first.
- "In Town You're the Law, Out Here It's Me" requires you to do the same as "Not Today", only you have to use a shotgun instead. While this takes projectile travel time and self-damage out of the equation, it also means that the Cloaker will need a lot more weakening, lest they end up grinding your face into the ground. And since one shotgun blast isn't terribly damaging on its own, you will need a shotgun that fires fast and does high damage. And of course, you'll have to try and force a Cloaker to jump kick you rather than simply charge at you, the latter of which Cloakers are much more fond of.
- "We Are All Professionals" requires completing GO Bank with no alarms and zero civilian casualties on the Overkill difficulty and above. This is especially difficult as players will have to control a map up to ~40 civilians with only two dozen cable ties, a feat that is nigh-impossible without the Stockholm Syndrome skill or killing civilians; assuming the crew can tie and move all bank civilians and guard bodies out the back, players will still have to deal with the civilians that constantly spawn into the map, as well as the GenSec and police that will shoot players on sight and alert everyone.
- "Tabula Rasa" requires players to complete Hoxton Breakout with zero skills and only wearing suits with only the Golden AK and Chicago Typewriter equipped as primary and secondary weapons. Needless to say, your team either needs to very VERY good or very VERY lucky, since Hoxton Breakout can only be done loud, meaning you're constantly being shot at with minimal protection, and both the Golden AK and Chicago Typewriter are not ideal weapons to handle Shields and Bulldozers, and there are no skills either, which means you can't even use basic equipment and lack all of the passive buffs and abilities that would make the heist manageable. It's even worse with the SWAT van turrets active during Day 1, which are conventionally handled by RPGs. The only saving graces you will have are that you still get access to Perk Decksnote , and your AK and Typewriter can be modified however you wish, unlike the similar "Here Comes the Pain Train" achievement for Firestarter.
- As of Update #100, you can now use any deployable thanks to changes to how the Skill Trees work, but this is at best a marginal boost in survivability as you still have to worry about everything else that can go wrong, including Captain Winters' platoon on Day 2.
- "Knockout" requires players to kill a Bulldozer by using the Overkill Boxing Gloves. Basically, take the "Are You Kidding Me?" (kill a Bulldozer with knife) achievement, swap out the knife with boxing gloves, and pray that the Bulldozer doesn't down you when you get close to him (requiring the player to weaken them before delivering the final blow). To make matters worse, the achievement was bugged during Update #51 where people connected to the host could not damage the Bulldozer with the gloves. This is mitigated slightly with the Sociopath perk deck (after Update #164, which significantly buffed Sociopath and its melee skills), but the player needs to own the Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number Digital Special Edition on Steam.
- "Overdose" is not only an achievement that relies on RNG, but also a case of Guide Dang It!. The achievement requires the player to cook and secure 6 bags of meth on day 1 of the Hotline Miami job. Only the game will decide whether or not the map will have enough chemicals for 6 bags worth of meth - three or four are guaranteed in various boxes in the basement, requiring the player to open the boxes in very specific order, and the lab itself might only have a single set.
- "King of the Hill" from the Park Escape is brutal. Not only does it take place in the Park Escape getaway (which only has a chance of spawning after specific days of specific missions that go loud), which makes even planning for an achievement run annoying, but the actual unlock requirements for the achievement are that no law enforcer can enter the titular park in the center of the map until the secondary escape van arrives (which can take anywhere from 2-4 minutes). The park in question is the size of a city block, cops can enter the park simply by climbing over the walls while players are restricted to 3 gates on random sides of the park, and the cops are plentiful. Even Sentry Gun spam isn't a viable option, as they'll run out of ammo very quickly and most "special" cops have enough health to scale the walls before the sentries can kill them. Ironically enough one of the best tactics is to hope to spawn in the parking lot across the street and camp out there hoping that the police won't try to cut through the park as a shortcut or during a tactical retreat, cementing this technique as a Luck-Based Mission.
- "Reputation Beyond Reproach" requires you to complete Election Day's Plan C on Death Wish with a full four-man crew without any crew member being downed once. Considering Plan C must be done loud, there is no way to avoid fighting, and on Death Wish, getting downed at least once is almost practically guaranteed.
- "120 Proof". This requires a four-man crew to kill at least 120 enemies with an overall crew accuracy of at least 120%. This means the entire crew must spam high-explosive weapons like the GL40, RPG, or shotguns with HE shells in order to complete.
- "Gone in 240 Seconds" requires Car Shop to be completed in four minutes. While simply going loud and using the Normal difficulty's timer as a guideline may be simple, the RNG elements and the cars' heavy understeering mean it gets difficult fast. Not only can the Teuer Autos manager be in a spot that is just too far away from his office, but the IT employee's desk is completely randomized; one would have to check every office to find it, and it had better be in that cubicle area on the second floor or the office on the first floor! Even then, the computer will always take 100 seconds, or 1:40 minutes, giving you just over 2 minutes to complete every single objective in the mapnote . Bumping into things during the escape is a sure-fire way of losing this achievement.
- The "Overkill Salutes You!" achievement requires you to complete every single heist on the Death Wish difficulty. This is a problem threefolds: First off, you have to complete each heist individually from start to finish; so if you disconnect at any point, you're screwed. This is mitigated by being the host for the lobby, as you can never disconnect from yourself, but it also means you have to at least live through the entire heist from start to finish. The second part is that some of the heists are loud-only, which significantly ramps up the difficulty, especially the "staying alive" part mentioned before. Finally, this achievement changes over time; when a new heist is added, it gets added to this achievement too, meaning it was far easier to complete this achievement in 2014 than it is in 2018 onward, as you will keep the achievement if new heists come out, but new players will have to complete the old ones and the new ones.
- "Didn’t See That Coming Did You?" requires you to kill 10 enemies with a sniper rifle while ziplining. If you were to use rapid fire or scatter-shot weapons to do this, it would be tolerable. Doing it with a bolt-action rifle that requires precision aiming when precision aiming isn't possible is ballbustingly annoying. "Last Action Villain" takes this up a notch, requiring you to get a headshot while performing those shenanigans with the R93 rifle. That part about not being able to aim? Ho boy you will be feeling that one without a laser module attached.
- The "Triple Kill" achievement requires you to kill three enemies with one shot. Sounds simple until you realize that cops will actively try to dodge your shots. Double Kill ramps this up: while the players are only required to kill 2 enemies in one shot now, you have to do it with the Rattlesnake, the weakest of the DLC's rifles (that might not have enough power to kill both enemies) and you have to do it 25 times. The best way to do this is to simply go loud on a mission that spawns a lot of cops, and blindly fire through an alleyway hoping you get them, or camp at a wall or window that cops use to enter the level (i.e. the manager's office windows in Nightclub).
- Finally, "Dodge This" requires you to kill 10 Cloakers with the Thanatos, the rifle with the lowest total ammo count in the game. To make it matter difficult, you have to land headshots on them, so simply baiting Cloakers to charge at you won't work. You'll have to do a careful balancing act of moving yourself into position to see their heads, but also not in a way that they decide to just straight up Bruce-Lee you into the ground. Thankfully, there is an easier (but very risky) way of helping with this one; equip the Electrical Brass Knuckles and stun that Cloaker for a free headshot.
- The Gage Historical Pack adds "Death From Below" for snipers. You have to use the Nagant sniper rifle to kill 25 rappelling cops. The problem is that there aren't that many heists where it is easy to shoot rappelling cops. Either they don't rappel in the heist, or it's so short a distance that you would barely have time to shoot. Complicating matters, the Nagant is a bolt-action rifle with very slow reload and a five-round magazine, so you can easily be caught unable to fire on the cops you need to kill because you need a reload. Not to mention as well that the cops get invincibility frames when rappelling in certain instances (such as the initial jump down from a helicopter, before they actually start their full descent), meaning that if you waste your shot on a guy that can't be killed, he's likely going to be on the ground already by the time you're able to fire again.
- "City of Sin and Well-Oiled Gears" requires you to complete the Golden Grin Casino in loud while preventing the BFD from breaking even once. Much like Afraid of the Dark, the drilling process takes more than several minutes, even with if upgrades are purchased. The biggest problem is the number of ways the drill can "break": if cops reach the circuit boxes (two of them by default on opposite sides of the second floor, though can be reduced to one with an upgrade), if the cops reach the drill's controls, and if the BFD runs out of coolant water, which requires trips to and from the bathrooms carrying a heavy coolant tank and a delay to fill it, requiring either a well coordinated team spread out across the hall of the casino or a large number of Sentry Guns. Getting downed once provides enough of a delay that any one of these breaking causes might be triggered, forcing a restart from the very beginning of the level.
- "The Turtle Always Wins" is necessary if you want to unlock some of the mods that are part of the The Butcher's AK/CAR Mod Pack DLC. It involves completing the Art Gallery Heist in stealth with four players wearing the Improved Combined Tactical Vest, all within 4 minutes. If you're not a stealth-oriented player, it would be difficult enough just to successfully stealth a mission where you're already going to get screwed over by the locations and numbers of the stealable paintings and whether or not the doorways to the back areas where the most paintings are likely to be will have motion sensors across them that only the guards can pass through without setting off. Now add on that you're on an extremely strict time-limit, you're moving as slow as molasses even when sprinting because you're in the heaviest armor, and the guards will be easily alerted should they see or hear you. The closest to an easy way to do this is simply ECM rushing, and even then you need nearly a full team of players with fully-upgraded ECM jammers just to have enough time on them.
- "Here Comes The Pain Train" is something of an inversion of "Tabula Rasa". You need to complete Firestarter on at least Overkill difficulty with a full 4-person team, using the AK assault rifle and Para submachine gun. There is no restrictions on your armor or skill sets, but you do need to have completely unmodified guns - even having previously put on and then removed the fire-rate-restricting mods doesn't count for it due to an oversight. And unlike Tabula Rasa, where the only restriction was that everyone present worked under the restrictions of the achievement (meaning you could easily do it solo, even with bots at least prior to the Henchmen update), here you need a full four-person team working under the achievement's restrictions. Worse is that unlike Hoxton Breakout, Firestarter is a three-day job; it does make up for this somewhat by Day 3 being rather easy to stealth (in comparison to the massive pain that is stealthing Day 2), but that still gives even more chances for someone to disconnect at an inopportune time and not get the achievement because they didn't technically do the whole thing in one go (anyone who doesn't disconnect gets it so long as there is a full four-person team at the point they complete the heist).
- "Walk Faster" requires the player to get to the Commissar's apartment in less than 210 seconds on OVERKILL or above. This sounds quite easy, but like "Gone in 240 Seconds"note it is subject to a good deal of RNG. First off, doing it co-op is out of the question unless you have a very coordinated team, so most of the time this will be attempted solo (which of course requires the DLC itself). Second, the layout of the various scrap walls and holes changes each time; there are very few actual layouts, but they can catch those who don't know them off-guard until they just know where to go. Third, you of course have to open a gate somewhere in the chase, so either you waste time with a drill or sacrifice your secondary slot for the OVE9000 Saw (it was once a primary weapon, adding onto the difficulty of this before it was changed). Fourth, to be able to run fast and long enough you need to forgo armor almost entirely, which is a problem because OVERKILL-level gang enemies hit like a truck; getting downed at ANY point is basically a restart since there is no way the AI will be able to catch up in time. Fourth, this IS OVERKILL so it is very possible to run into Shields, Medics, Tasers, Bulldozers or (if you're very unlucky) Cloakers. Finally, there is the very real chance of a claymore mine being behind the only door out of a particular area, which will down you if you don't notice it in time - and you won't, since you're in a hurry. Basically, everything needs to align up just right and a single mistake or badly placed obstacle can ruin the entire run.
- Thankfully, the achievement counts when you reach the door to the apartment, before you put the C4 on, so you don't have to fight the Commissar with a saw and trip mines; just restart as soon as the achievement pops up and gear up for the real battle.
- Basically ANY achievement which boils down to "Play Heist X with all four players using masks from Set Y", especially if the masks are DLC. You basically need to orchestrate that mask setup yourself - or be VERY lucky with your random team partners.
- Similar to the above, while not actually very difficult to complete, several older achievements involving "Complete objective X using weapons from set Y" are now all a case of Guide Dang It!, as the achievements refer to these weapons by the DLC packs they originally came in while ingame these are now all referred to as "Ultimate Edition" weapons, making it impossible to tell which ones you're supposed to use without looking it up online.
- While not strictly achievements, per se, some Safe House trophies are quite maddeningly difficult to get.
- "Big Daddy" basically requires the player to perform the "Knockout" (kill a Bulldozer with the Overkill Boxing Gloves) achievement five times. The main issue is that the Boxing Gloves are more designed for knockdown rather than damage, and Bulldozers are immune to stun or knockdown.
- "Bushido" requires you to get the samurai armor on Shadow Raid before you secure any other form of loot on Overkill difficulty. While opening the safe is enough of a challenge, now you have to do it first. Opening the vault is usually saved for last, on account of patrolling guards sounding the alarm if they see the door open. But if you have to do it first, then you have to blitz through the rest of the map and hopefully find five more bags of loot that're light enough for you to quickly move to the escape van.
- "Clueless" requires the player to complete the Big Bank heist on Overkill using no skills. This throws a serious monkey wrench in a stealth, as you can only carry one body bag at a time, and getting more in Pre-Planning requires you to have a skill, or to sacrifice your ECM jammer for a bodybag case; the drills are loud without a skill, so you NEED to find the keybox, you can't disable cameras with a feedback loop, you can't sprint as fast, and you have a much higher chance of running into guards you weren't able to maintain a tag on. Doing it on loud is even harder, as you'll need powerful firearms, a good amount of armor, and a hell of a lot of luck.
- "Failed Assassination". Basically, you're stuck with completing the Undercover heist on Overkill, with no skills, no armor, and a sniper rifle. Most of the map is cramped with little cover, poorly suited for a sniper rifle, and a single bullet will empty your armor or down you on the spot. Add in the fact that most enemies will dodge a high threat weapon, and it's an exercise in insanity.
- "Long Fellow". Complete the Meltdown heist on Overkill or above in 7 minutes or less. You pretty much need a full lobby and a perfect run to be able to do this, as in solo, it's just impossible. Find the vault in the first container you open, open the vault with three crowbars in the fans pretty much as soon as you find it, stash 4 of the extremely heavy bags in the trunk of the Longfellow, with the other four on forklifts, and make a mad dash to the drop-off point, praying that the ones driving the forklift can dodge enough of the gunfire to make it.
- "Robbedacop" is in essence, a grinding achievement, with the goal being to kill cops. Not hard on its own, but how many cops does it require? 658893. This is not an exaggeration, either. You have to literally kill the entire population of Washington DC.
- "Snipe It" requires completing the Watchdogs with sniper rifles, and an accuracy of 100% or higher. You cannot miss a single shot, or at least get enough One-Hit Polykills to rebalance the stat. You will also have to do this for both days. Watch that trigger finger!
- "One More Down, No More To Go" and "Ultimate Heister" requires the player to complete all heists on the Death Sentence difficulty with the One Down modifier on. Up against the Department of Homeland Surveillance's ZEAL team, who will take you into custody the first timenote you go down and can tear through your armour/health bars with a few shotsnote ? Well... You really do have a death wish. On heists notorious for being painfully difficult while dealing with the above issues, especially when you can't abuse the Stealth loophole? There's a high chance that wish is going to be granted.
