There are some Behemoths that are just plain unfun to fight.
- The Boreus can summon flunkies to aid it, ranging from melee pests to suicide bombers to even ranged assailants. This wouldn't be so bad if it couldn't erect a shell of ice around its body that protected it from any and all attacks until said shell is broken, and said shell takes far less damage unless the slayer in question kills the flunkies; even then, the bonus gained from the flunkies expires when an attack is made or after a lengthy time period passes, which slows down the pace of the fight immensely.
- The Hellion is notorious for nearly perpetually dousing the field in magma which sets slayers ablaze by mere contact, compounded by the fact that it hits hard. The Scorchstone variant takes all of that and turns it up to eleven.
- The standard Scorchstone Hellion itself may be tough, but the Heroic Scorchstone Hellion is even worse in that when it digs into the ground and sprouts back up, it leaves a hole in the ground that continuously spews out magma balls that each leave big pools of lava upon landing, which will burn players. Regular Scorchstone can do this, but with the Heroic version? These fireballs will always target players, and players only. What makes it even more ridiculous is that the lava holes will target you no matter how far away you are even STANDING from them, practically across the entire ARENA. What is just as bad is that the holes linger for a LONG TIME. And Heroic Scorchstone tends to dig a LOT, so chances are, not only will the arena be constantly doused in lava, meaning that players will have little to no room to maneuver, but by the time the first hole expires, another hole will be created to repeat the cycle. And just when you think it could not get any worse, there is a bug that makes the holes continue spewing lava for a few seconds AFTER DESPAWNING. And all of this is only made far worse if you're inflicted with Burn Status, and you're out of stamina, meaning you cannot roll to remove the burn. And you will need its Hellstone Shards to fully upgrade the Hellion weapons.
- The Embermane has a nasty reputation of running away from slayers, only to either charge back in or lob fire from a distance. Slayer teams that don't know how to interrupt will find the fight dragging on for longer than is comfortable. But even then, it has an even BIGGER reputation of having many, many variants and monsters adapting its skeleton and/or fighting style. Notable examples include:
- The Stormclaw is similar to the Embermane above (being of the same type, just shock) but it has the additional ability to set up electric fences which prevents all movement through them even if you try to tank the damage or jump over it. And a lot of its physical attacks either have short windups, or have no windup at all. It becomes immensely easier to fight if you know how to reflect its lightning ball attack back at it (which stuns him and cancels the next series of attacks and abilities) but if you don't, be prepared to play the most annoying game of tag ever.
- The Urska also takes after the Embermane (seeing a pattern?) in that it is a fast, nimble behemoth that is very hard to hit. On top of this, it is an Ice Elemental behemoth with a freezing attack (in later patches, Frozen status was thankfully replaced with the Chilled status), a keystone behemoth (meaning only reachable at the end of a long escalation), and worst of all, its Escalation has a unique Fail condition known as Frostbite, which is a meter that slowly builds unless you perform a specific action or find a brazier to warm up. These actions often require you to damage or break bits off of the Urska which, combined with its buffed stats and evasion (including the ability to just cling onto the ceiling for short periods of time) makes the fight extremely annoying. This is only amplified because the Urska came after Agarus, a completely immobile behemoth that was rather well received.
- The Frostwulf is pretty much Urska-lite, but uses more Embermane-style tactics. Just like the Embermane, it spends almost the entirety of its fight running all over the place to tire out an entire team of players. Unlike the Embermane, however, there are actually way less opportunities for players to interrupt it, as Frostwulf instead prefers to conjure ice geysers and hurl ice lances in the air that will rain down on the battlefield, both attacks of which inflict the Chilled status. Since there are less opportunities to interrupt it, in the rare circumstances that Frostwulf does decide to use the trademark "Embermane Head Charge", chances are you will not be prepared to counter it. And because it runs all over the place with little to no opportunities to interrupt it, many players will be tired of running back and forth, either in terms of the use of in-game stamina or in terms of patience. Eventually, they might just call it quits.
- The Riftstalker uses a similar skeleton to the Embermane, but its attack pattern is different enough from it for it to be a standalone boss. That being said, it is most certainly not an easy one. From traveling through portals that it opens up (portals through which your player character cannot travel) to trapping an entire group of players in a dark spherical dimension and firing shadowy orbs and clones of itself out of multiple portals in that dimension, Riftstalker is a speedy rat that will most likely trip up players on their first play-through. And then there is its Limit Break attack: once it enters rage mode, it opens up two portals on top of each other and travels through them, building up speed, and then opens up portals next to the player and spins really fast from one portal to the next in an attempt to deal massive damage to the players. The main problem with this is that the time that it spawns in the portal actually varies; it could either spawn very late and a player would mistime an interruption and get hit, or it would spawn much too early and the player would strike too late and get hit. What is worse is that Riftstalker can hit you if you happen to be standing on the OTHER SIDE of the portal, as its body is wider than the portal and its hitbox is too FAT.
- The Nayzaga periodically spouts out spines from its back that serve as electrical tuning forks which fire ball lightning to harass hunters on top of its unorthodox direct attacks, too. The fight gets worse when aether-charged, and moreso at higher ranks (the spines gain an electrical shield that shocks on contact). And let's not get started on Shockjaw!
- The Valomyr is set to take the Boreus' spot as the most despised Behemoth. Between the rotating minefield that is the swarm of sparks it summons almost regularly (the prisms it leaves behind at this time give buffs to the slayer that grabs them, but the purple "radiant shield" pickups are the least common), the laser spam that its drones give off not to mention its own, its periodic teleportation and its own prismatic shield which can lock you out (or in with the minefield) until it's broken, expect plenty of frustration when you go up against the thing.
- Sahvyt is a literal Lightning Bruiser in that it uses Shock attacks. It can be a hard fight for all the wrong reasons. All it loves to do is spam the ever-living daylights out of its dash attack. Said dash attack has no interrupts and knocks over slayers over and over again. Even when it is not enraged, it is still capable of using this attack multiple times in a row, but not as often as when in rage mode. But when it IS enraged? It just keeps spamming that dash three times in a row, every 20 seconds. Players that fight it are either running back and forth trying to catch the wretched bug, or they are getting knocked around, left and right, with little to no breathing room. What is even worse is that while all other agile behemoths, like Embermane, Shrike, Kharabak, or Nayzaga have an attack that can be interrupted, Sahvyt has ABSOLUTELY NONE WHATSOEVER. And while other behemoths have gotten some form of nerfs in certain patches, Sahvyt was not nerfed at all.
- The Chronovore is noted for being annoying not because of the fight, but because of its part drops and the conditions to initiate its encounter. Unlike any behemoth before it, it is an event-only behemoth that can only be initiated by using the Paradoxicon on a specific map. The Paradoxicon itself also requires 8 chronostones, which only drop one at a time on the island that the Paradoxicon is on. After the event is started, 2 other random behemoths are spawned before the Chronovore appears. This means that assuming you're not working with other players, a total of 10 behemoths must be killed before you even get a chance at the Chronovore (and these behemoths are all end-game level, meaning the fights are not going to be short). And once you do get a chance, the most desired part of the Chronovore is its tiny wing tips, known in-game as temporal fins, which have notoriously hard to hit (and at one point, bugged) hitboxes. It's not uncommmon to grind through 3 or 4 of these without a single wingtip breaking, which only makes it all the more frustrating when 10 of these are needed for a single weapon. The temporal tentacles, located on its underbelly, are not much easier. The Chronovore tends to move around a lot, and even coil its own tail around itself, making your attacks hit the tail instead of the temporal fins and tentacles that you need to craft its weapons.
- And it does not end at its microscopic fin hitboxes. A few times throughout the fight, Chronovore will unleash a wide-radius area-of-effect attack that inflicts One-Hit Kill damage to every player in the vicinity (or, if you are lucky enough to survive, it just reduces your health by approximately 75-80%). Said blast radius is considerably wider than the arena itself, so evading this is nigh-impossible.
- In version 1.10.3, Chronovore's encounter requirements are completely reworked, granting it its own Radiant Escalation to put it on par with the other Keystone Legendary Beasts. Taking its place in the Paradox Breaks is a new behemoth called Alyra, and the Temporal Anomaly event has been renamed to "Melodic Convergence".
