That One Level / Genshin Impact

• Dragonspine, the first region added to the game after launch. A massive mountain infested with some of the game's worst Demonic Spiders, including Fatui Skirmishers, Ruin Graders, and Lawachurls, all at level 90. The "Sheer Cold" mechanic leaves you constantly scrambling towards sources of heat or else you'll slowly freeze to death, with certain areas making you freeze even faster than usual. Cryo enemies are everywhere and you often have to light fires yourself to stay warm, forcing you to rely on Pyro units. You can craft a gadget that will create a source of heat for you on the spot, but you have to raise the Frostbearing Tree found in the area to Level 4 to do so, which requires exploring enough of the mountain to collect 30 Crimson Agate, and uses Starsilver, an ore you can only find within the mountain. Many players have vowed to never touch this region again once they've completed all the quests for it.
• Chasing Shadows is a very hard mission compared to everything preceding it. There are two optional fights that give no reward and can be skipped by bribing or scaring the guards (Wooden Shield Mitachurls can only be killed by a non-bow Pyro character, which are unobtainable without grinding for wishes, so skipping the fights are highly recommended). The boss of the level is another story. The boss is a Pyro Fatui Agent that deals 500-1000 damage per hit (your characters at level 17, like the game recommends, have around 2500 health), attacks extremely fast, turns completely invisible until you beat the visibility into it, teleports to you and deals a hit every 0.5 seconds or so, leaves exploding, permanent landmines after every hit that deal more damage if touched, clones itself up to 5 times, and takes about 200 hits to kill, again at the game's recommended level of 17. This wouldn't be so bad with healing, except you also can't bring any healing items into domains, so no healing before or during the fight. Every single source of damage is also Pyro, so you'll have constant Damage Over Time if you run into an enemy the wrong way. Fire damage is based on a fraction of your max HP, so level grinding will not save you. Good luck no-hitting all 20 flamethrowers and the 2 large Pyro slimes at the start of the mission. The cherry on top is that there are no checkpoints anywhere in the level, so if you die to the boss, you have to restart the entire level, all over again, including killing all those enemies and inspecting every object in all 4 rooms of the dungeon to get the key again. TL;DR: You have to clear an array of flamethrowers, kill a ton of enemies, inspect around 20 objects and kill an invisible, teleporting boss without getting hit or you pretty much have to restart the level.
• Floor 7 of the Spiral Abyss became infamous as the biggest barrier for most players. It purely consists of Fatui squads, notoriously difficult enemies that cooperate to heal/buff each other and trigger reactions on you, and three Electrohammer units (a literal Lightning Bruiser) are among them. Their most perplexing feature, however, is their special Elemental Barrier that reduces all damage taken significantly and (for most of them) can only be broken with attacks of specific element, so you need to think carefully about who to bring for this level. Even if you can deal with these in the overworld, Floor 7 is in the split-floors section, so you'll need two separate teams that can fight them independently. Floor 8 is almost trivial by comparison.
• Any area with Balethunder is the bane of many a player's existence. Similarly to Corrosion, Balethunder ignores shields and drains HP slowly. While it is possible to protect yourself with an Electrogranum, Electrogranum spots can be few and far between and disappear quickly until they are leveled up to their maximum level, which requires exploring areas with Balethunder to complete. The player will also be hit with lightning strikes in Balethunder areas, which can easily kill characters. Even worse, several Inazuman World Quests give players no choice but to interact with the Balethunder to complete them.
• Yae Miko's "Anti-Raiden Shogun training" in Inazuma's Archon Quest frustrated quite a few players, especially those playing on higher ping. Simply going through the motions isn't enough; the game makes you participate and the quest won't progress until you succeed at dodging enough of the very fast lightning attacks (regardless of whether you actually take damage from them or not) making the entire thing an irritating ordeal. Additionally, this takes place over grass and Pyro damage taken from burning grass if trying to destroy the orb with the use of a Pyro character like Bennett or Diluc will count as you getting hit by the machine's finishing move and failing the challenge. It may take a player a long time to realize that Pyro is failing the challenge for them because the game designers seemingly failed to account for the fact that other things besides the machine could hurt the player while in the arena.
• Enkanomiya is absolutely huge and unbelievably labyrinthine. The place has so much topography, that your minimap might as well be useless; you could be searching for that icon that appears on the map, only to realize it's located in an underground cavern whose entry point is on the other side of the island. Additionally, it is absolutely crawling with difficult enemies, including the new Bathysmal Vishaps, Ruin Guards in groups of two or three, and Abyss Lectors and Heralds. The place is rich in lore and has interesting puzzles and challenges, but the deep combing required to fully explore the place is not everyone's cup of tea.
• The Chasm takes many of the things that made Enkanomiya and cranks them up even further. It's composed of gargantuan caverns from start to finish, and scouring every inch for content requires a whole lot of climbing and gliding because the sheer vertical topography of the map dwarfs any other location seen so far. In addition, areas seemingly adjacent to each other on the minimap are not always connected, and the ones that are tend to be joined together by deceptively small tunnels, some of which need to blasted open. Just navigating the place is immensely confusing, and that's not getting into how dark it can get, which requires use of a special gadget that lights the area and helps unlock puzzles. The new Shadowy Husks are relatively few in number and not that difficult, but the average level of enemies in the Chasm is much higher compared to other areas, and the Chasm is also heavily populated with Fatui, Abyss enemies, and Ruin Machines (including the Ruin Grader), not to mention the jump scares provided by Adult Geovishaps smashing through walls for a surprise attack. Several enemy groups are encountered in tight spaces or on narrow cliffs and platforms, making engaging them effectively a difficult task. Making things worse is that unlike the aforementioned Dragonspine and Enkanomiya, completing the Chasm and its corresponding quest chain is mandatory in order to progress the main story, which means if you don't want to get locked out, you better get to work.
• Sumeru is the fourth major region visited, and it's hard. Better hope you prepared yourself and studied up for the land of Wisdom, because you're about to get schooled:
  • While Enkanomiya and the Chasm had confusing topography, up until this point the overworld at least had most of its stuff spread out in the open on the surface. No such luck in the land of Wisdom; on top of having an expansive overworld rivaling the size of its neighbor Liyue as opposed to the limited island topographies of Inazuma and Enkanomiya, it has many, many caves and tunnels underground, some of which wind around and dig down several layers deep. This got so confusing that in version 3.4, the devs added in markers to indicate which waypoints were underground and as of version 4.0, have added a layering system to the map to make it easier for players to tell where they are underground. In addition, compared to Liyue's open plains, Sumeru's surface as of 3.0 is often filled with dense jungles that make it easy to miss things like Dendroculi or the Dendrograna puzzles, not in the least because Dendro green is easy to miss among all the leaves.
  • Combat-wise, the big thing is the introduction of Withering Zones: special areas with one main Withering Tumor and a number of secondary nodes that must be removed in order to get rid of the zone, and each node destroyed either spawns more enemies or unleashes an attack. Withering Zones are especially dangerous because they stack a nasty debuff on the party that reduces their physical and elemental resistance. The more stacks the party has, the more damage taken, and once the max number of stacks is reached it just flat-out kills your whole party. Players that rush in assuming that they can just kill everything and be done with it may be in for a rude awakening if they fail to take this into account.

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