Team Fortress 2 has many achievements that are difficult, ridiculous, or require ridiculously astounding luck (which is inevitable when there are more than five hundred of them). Some can be obtained in normal play with lots of time, and lots can be "cheated" if you have one or two friends and an empty server, but some are a cut above the rest:
Class-Exclusive Achievements
Scout
- "A Year to Remember", which requires getting a certain number of lifetime kills. Most classes only need to kill 1,000 enemies to get their respective achievement. How many kills does the Scout need to get this achievement? 2,004. This can literally take dozens of hours to do, and while dedicated Scout players will get it fairly soon, those not so good at playing the Fragile Speedster will find themselves in a pit of frustration.
- "Foul Territory" requires a Scout to cause an environmental death by stunning someone with the Sandman. What this translates into is hoping to smack someone with a stunball (usually at long range, as the Sandman doesn't stun enemies up close) in the path of a buzzsaw, on train tracks, or in front of the Horseless Headless Horsemann and praying that they get killed by that hazard before the stun wears off. And the Sandman isn't exactly easy to aim in the first place. It's gotten even more difficult with the Sandman being nerfed to only slow enemies instead of stopping them from moving entirely, meaning that the victim will have a chance to get out of the way.
- "Out of the Park." It doesn't just require you to get a kill with the Sandman's taunt, the longest in the game- no, you have to hope the enemy's ragdoll flies long enough and doesn't collide with anything to count the achievement.
Soldier
- The Snakewater pack added "Mutually Air-sured-destruction", where you and an enemy have to be rocket jumping, and both of you have to kill each other with a rocket while you're both rocket jumping. And you have to do this on Snakewater, a map almost nobody outside of competitive plays.
Pyro
- Pyromancer: Deal 1,000,000 points of fire damage as a Pyro. That's basically 5,000 Soldiers. There are career Pyros out there that still don't have this one.
- Makin' Bacon: Kill 50 Heavies with your flamethrower. Not only do Heavies completely heavily outmatch the Pyro's damage output at close range, but they have absurd amounts of health, the Sandvich, and Medics to combat afterburn damage as well, means that you can't even rely on hit-and-run or posthumous kills. To make matters worse, it only counts the default flamethrower for the achievement. Most, if not all experienced Pyro players will choose the Degreaser over the default flamethrower any day, and you can't even use the Phlogistinator or Backburner for crits to try and burst down the Heavy.
- "Got a Light?" requires you, as a Pyro, to ignite a Spy who is using the cigarette-flicking taunt. Spies rarely taunt anyways, but they'll never use this taunt unless they're going for an achievement that requires using said taunt after a kill, so getting this without setting it up requires that perfect moment.
- "Full Spectrum Warrior", hands down the hardest Pyro achievement and hardest taunt-kill-related achievement. How to get: Ignite 3 enemies with the Rainblower's taunt (it's an AoE attack). No, not "kill". "Ignite". Due to the way the attack is coded, you have to hit no fewer than five powerful enemies (on average; only four if they're overhealed) with a slow, loud, short-ranged, incredibly-brightly-advertised attack and hope that only the first two die. It's not even easy to get this achievement "boosted" for you because of how many friends you need working on the enemy team.
Demoman
- "Tartan Spartan" is pretty much the same deal as Pyromancer, as you must deal 1,000,000 points of explosive damage as a Demoman. Both of these achievements suffer from a glitch where sometimes Steam erases all progress on them, requiring starting over from scratch.
Heavy
- "Krazy Ivan" requires the Heavy to kill 50 enemies while both you and your victim are underwater. The only maps where this is even close to viable are Well and 2Fort, which have a lot of deep water, but good luck actually finding anyone who willingly goes in the water.
Engineer
- How do you get "Best Little Slaughterhouse in Texas"? Why, just rack up a mere 5,000 lifetime kills with your sentry. Good luck getting this one without more than 100 hours of play time just with Engineer.
Medic
- Many early Medic achievements either required a lot of fighting for a class whose main purpose is healing, or were otherwise outright counter-intuitive to the success of the team. When the Medic's achievement pack was released with the Gold Rush update, completing all of them was the only way to obtain the useful Ubersaw item. Because they were so difficult and often required farming, they were one of the reasons later class-specific updates had lower thresholds for milestones and more achievements in line with what the class was actually designed to be doing, before Valve later changed the item system from achievement-based to a Random Drop system.
- "Specialist" requires the player to heal 10,000 points of damage in a single life, and overheal does not count for this. Even if the Medic is incredible at surviving, most games don't even last long enough for the Medic to hit 4000.
- "Does it Hurt When I Do This?" requires killing 50 Scouts with the syringe guns - which translates to "kill an almost impossible-to-hit enemy who's out for your blood with a weak weapon with slow projectiles." And no, the Crusader's Crossbow does not count for this.
Sniper
- "Jarate Chop" originally required you, as a Sniper, to Jarate three enemies at once and then kill them all with your Kukri. You couldn't use the Bushwacka (which always crits on Jarate'd enemies) or any other melee weapons for this one, only the default Kukri. Once you've managed to find three enemies in close proximity (good luck with that), you'd have to try to kill those three in eight seconds with a weak featureless melee weapon as the weakest melee class, who has the lowest base health. Good luck. The requirement was eventually changed to melee-killing three Jarated enemies in one life, making it more manageable (if still difficult because going melee with Sniper is risky at best).
- Achievements related to the Classic aren't much better. It's not just enough for them to make you use what's generally considered the worst Sniper primary in the game, but you also have to do difficult feats with that crappy primary like landing a full-charge no-scope headshot on a rocket/grenade jumping enemy for "Eagle Eye" (which, needless to say, requires borderline Improbable Aiming Skills) or gibbing every class during a single round for "Prime Cuts".
Spy
- Most taunt kill achievements are difficult enough, but "The Man From P.U.N.C.T.U.R.E." is easily one of the worst. It requires you to get a kill with the second longest and loudest kill taunt in the game, which doesn't immediately kill until the last swing but WILL notify the enemy as you will stab him twice beforehand non-fatally (unless they're incredibly low on health and die to the weak stabs, which itself requires a small miracle).
Multiple Classes
- The "WAR!" update added "Out, Damned Scot!" and "Kilt in Action" for Soldier and Demoman respectively, requiring that you kill the other class 500 times. This is a lot harder than it sounds, as you need to single out one specific class on the enemy team and make sure you get the killing blow. Even with a helpful friend on the other team getting any significant progress with this achievement takes hours.
- The parachute-related achievements are bad not just because they're difficult to get, but because there are separate achievements for Soldier and Demoman so they have to be done twice. The "kill a parachuting enemy while parachuting" and "kill three enemies in a single parachute deploy" ones are bad enough, but the worst are "Project Excelsior" and "Operation High Dive". How do you get these? Just travel 19.47 miles with the parachute. That's more than 1.2 million hammer units
, and again, this has to be done twice. Still don't understand? OK, then let me make it more clear: On a good day, you'll travel around 200 hammer units per second while parachuting (as either class). If you somehow continuously move in a straight line at top speed without stopping, getting this achievement ONCE would take 102 HOURS. - "You'll Feel a Little Prick" (and the Scout's equivalent "Doctoring the Ball", so you have to pull off this feat twice.) requires getting 3 kills with a single Ubercharge on a Scout, who is one of the least desirable and usable targets because of his speed. (Less so after the introduction of the Quick-Fix, and even less so when all mediguns were buffed to let the Medic match the Scout's speed while healing one, letting you give the Scout a Kritzkrieg and hope he can aim.)
- In a similar boat is "Big Pharma" (and the Heavy's equivalent, "Division of Labor", so again, you have to pull off this feat twice), which require a Heavy/Medic duo to earn 10 kills without dying, which was originally 20 kills without dying.
Other Achievements
- With Friends Like These...: Play in a game with 7 or more players from your friends list. Now, this isn't exactly too hard if you are friends with a lot of people on a server you frequent or have a large friend's list, but if you're someone who just plays random servers and/or doesn't go and add random people or accept friend invites from random people, good luck to ya.
- This could also apply to Banner of Brothers (buff 5 Steam friends at once with the Buff Banner) and Brotherhood of Steel (complete a Mann vs. Machine mission with 5 Steam friends; not quite as hard as the others, as finding a good team in Mann Up mode will quite likely net you five new friends before the mission's done, and the achievement didn't say that they had to be your friends before the mission).
- "Local Cinema Star", "Indie Film Sensation" and Blockbuster". These achievements require you to make a replay, post it on YouTube, and then get 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 views, respectively. The worst part is, while all the previously mentioned achievements have at least some kind of a strategy for you to do them, there is literally no strategy in these three. You just have to make something a bunch of people will find. There's a reason these three achievements are among the least-earned in the entire game (and if it weren't for helpful sites like this Reddit, would likely still be THE lowest).
- And now as of 2019, the achievement has gone from needlessly difficult to outright impossible when YouTube updated the part of the code which TF2 used to track the video's view count, preventing the game from properly counting the views and breaking the achievement.
- "Terminated, Too". You have to kill another player by knocking them into the cauldron of molten metal behind the final capture point on the map cp_foundry. The main problem is that almost no one hangs around back there—they're too focused on getting that last point.
- "The Great Deflate" requires killing 79 players who have Balloonicorn pets. Never mind that killing that many players is tedious enough itself, never mind that only a few players actually have Balloonicorn, but unless you're using Pyrovision you can't even see which players have them and gain progress on the achievement. About three percent of players have this one, despite it being a general achievement obtainable by any class in any non-MVM game mode.
- "Metal Massacre": kill 1 million robots in Mann vs. Machine mode. Killing robots is easy, but since you're lucky to average nearly 300 robots every half hour, this will take you a very, very long time. As in, well over a month of playtime just in Mann vs. Machine, not counting between-wave breaks. And that's a generous estimate. Even die-hard Mann vs. Machine players with over a thousand hours under their belt still aren't anywhere close to that amount.
- Valve has developed a bad habit of creating achievements that require an absurd amount of round wins on a certain map to obtain. That's not total games, that's wins. There's "The Crucible" (Foundry), with 137 wins; "The Fight Stuff" (Doomsday), with 138 wins; "Stand and Deliver" (Standin), with 139 wins; "Process of Elimination" (Process), with 140 wins; "Snakewater Salesman" (Snakewater), with 141 wins; and "Competitive Spirit" (Helltower), with 142 wins. It's going to take either months of playing a single map ad nauseum, or winning all those games on a solo server. These achievements are truly the least-earned in the game. Only one has a completion rate above 4%. "Competitive Spirit" is the most evil, since you win Helltower not by pushing Blutarch/Redmond's corpse to the Final Terminus, but rather by grabbing the spellbook in Hell. Even if you've won in the mortal world, it's still very possible to lose in Hell.
- Among the taunt-related achievements added in the Love & War Update, none are more insidious than "Running with Scissors" and "On the Rocks," which require you to win or lose three games of Rock, Paper, Scissors in a row with a specific hand. Each possible hand is totally random and the opponent's hand is totally random, so it's all a Luck-Based Mission in the end. *
- "May I Cut in, Too?" requires you to melee kill 10 Square Dancing players. Wouldn't be too difficult, but it's indirectly hindered because A: Not everyone has the taunt required and it's extremely unlikely you'll find enemies square dancing in the open, and B: killing players who are participating in a taunt is considered very rude, and some people simply don't want to interrupt a moment of fun. And if your attack doesn't kill someone in one hit, it's also likely that the victims will immediately stop square dancing.
- "Carnival Of Carnage: Arms Reduction", for killing 15 players while it's A) either Halloween or a full moon, B) on the map Carnival of Carnage, and C) either Merasmus has just placed a curse on both teams to delete all non-melee weapons or you're using the Minify magic spell. Melee only kills wouldn't be THAT hard, since there's plenty of melee builds... except the melee-only curse shrinks everyone's hitbox, gives everyone a running speed boost, jolts you into third-person camera (trust us, it's more debilitating than it sounds), and causes players to fly all over the place when hit. It's entirely possible for no one to die during this curse because of how ridiculously hard it is to hit anyone.
- Meet Your Match added "Tune Merasmus' Multi-Dimensional Television". In the Pass Time Bricktown map, you need to open a secret room, then activate some smudges. Problem A) It's Guide Dang It! to how you get into the room in the first place. Shoot a guitar, and have someone else else throw the ball in a secret goal that appears on the other side of the map, with no indication that you can do this) Problem B) How you activate the smudges is even more of a Guide Dang It! There are eight smudges. For each smudge, a specific class from a specific team needs to stand on it, I.E., one smudge needs a blue spy, and another needs a red sniper. However, again, there is no indication what classes or teams are needed for each one. Problem C) GIFT is in full effect here, as anyone from either team can enter the secret room and kill you and your friends, or simply close the room again by winning the round.
