That One Level / Warcraft

• Tides of Darkness
  • Level 11 "The Dead Rise as Quel'Thalas Falls" for the Orcs. This mission is a rude awakening due to limited gold in each mine compared to previous missions, making expansions necessary to keep pressure on. The mines are spread out, and the Humans apply pressure with a comprehensive tier-3 arsenal. Death Knights are introduced, but are limited to two basic spells: Haste which only affects limited numbers of units (Ogre-Magi gain no real benefit), and Raise Dead which allows you to summon very weak skeletons from the dead.
  • Level 12 "The Tomb of Sargeras" isn't much better. The mission requires island hopping to take over two gold mine islands at the bottom half of the map, and you're then required to destroy two orc factions (Stormreaver/Blue and Twilight's Hammer/Purple) that control an island along the top half of the map. The tough part comes when you're required to start making your naval fleet. The two enemies will constantly send non-stop Destroyers and Juggernauts at ya, which becomes a pain in the ass when you're trying to start up your naval base to make a fleet when all you start with to defend is 2 Destroyers and 1 Juggernaut. There's hardly any breathing room to get a naval fleet up in time before being overtaken by the non-stop enemy ships, and as a result, you're forced to just turtle on your island, and use catapults to kill any enemy ship that comes up to your coast until their resources are used up to the point of being unable to make any more units.
  • Level 10 of the human campaign "The Prisoners" isn't that difficult of a mission, but it's an extremely annoying one due to the length the player has to go to bring the Alterac/Orange prisoners to the player's Lordaeron/White base. To explain, the player has to build a base to make a naval army while fighting off attacks from a Blue Horde base, and then make landfall at a Red Horde/Blackrock Clan outpost. After clearing out the Red Horde/Blackrock outpost, the player has to then make another shipyard to make transports that will then have to traverse a river that goes obnoxiously long around the bottom half of the map covered by Red/Blackrock cannon towers to finally reach the area where the Alterac prisoners are being held. And it doesn't even end with the transports reaching the prisoners. The player than has to backtrack to bring the prisoners all the way back to the Circle-of-Power in the player's starting base.
  • The final human mission "The Dark Portal" suffers from a nasty Difficulty Spike that puts the mission in a league of its own compared to the rest of the Warcraft II levels. The toughest part of the mission is actually the initial set-up of the level where you must gather up your starting army to make landfall on the Orange-faction/Burning Blade clan village filled with Ogre-Magi ^note Including a nasty trap where 3 Orange-faction Dragons come at your base if you destroy too many of the Orange-faction structures, and build up your base from there. While building up, you're constantly attacked by dragons from the White-faction/Dragonmaw clan Horde AI, and because you start with such a large army, and no initial food reserves, you spend the first 20 or so minutes building up farms and gathering resources with just the six workers you're given as you're unable to build any more peasants to speed up your economy gain...unless you start axing off units from your army, such as the footmen and knights, that you deem useless. In addition, your starting Gold Mine has very little gold in it, and while the nearby expansion Gold Mine has a much higher amount, it's surrounded by unbuildable terrain, which means that you're going to have to long distance mine from it. The final kick in the balls is while trying to set up your initial base, there's a chance that the Black-faction/Black Tooth Grin Clan Horde AI will send Death Knights at ya early on to cast Death-and-Decay on your structures.
• Beyond the Dark Portal in general might as well be known as That One Game. Compared to original Warcraft II, the expansion ups the AI difficulty greatly to the point that the enemy factions will become highly aggressive as the campaign levels go on. For added difficulty, some of these levels have the player fighting as many as 3 to 4 factions at once that if you don't manage to take out one or two factions early, it will be extremely painful later on.
  • Orc 5: "Blackrock Spire" warrants mention due to a claustrophobic starting area. You have Peons but no buildings, and there's no time to waste because Gryphon Riders will soon start harassing your position. The objective is to "rescue" a roost of dragons in the mountain protected by a significant Human army.
  • Orc 9: "The Tomb of Sargeras" (again) is a brutal slog with a limited army that is barely sufficient to reach your goal. Because the Orcs can't heal their troops, this makes the mission much more finicky than any of the Human's no-base missions. You're also pretty much screwed if you don't keep enough air-attackers alive to kill the flying Daemon at the end of the level (especially since said Daemon has buffed up stats compared to normal Daemons). Don't feel bad if you need to Save Scum to make it through, especially to keep that one Death Knight alive whenever it unexpectedly gets one-shotted by a Paladin's Exorcism.
  • Orc 11: "The Eye of Dalaran" puts most of Beyond The Dark Portal to shame. You need to transport your troops off of an island and make a beachhead while contending with a very aggressive opponent. You have very limited time to get your base up and running, while your main enemy has a head start on advancing to their Castle technology. After that, they attack relentlessly. Even starting your base at the alternate gold mine to get cover from Dalaran in the south is still a struggle, as it's well protected, and White/Lordaeron pressures you with constant Gryphons for a long while, and stands a chance of exhausting your starting army.
• Reign of Chaos: The game is not too frustrating on Normal difficulty, but Hard mode makes many of the levels harder than most Blizzard fans may be used to. A full-clear on Hard Mode unlocks a special ending after the Night Elf campaign.
  • March of The Scourge (Hard): The enemy applies considerable pressure, attacking with a much stronger army and siege weapons to makes your towers unable to Hold the Line on their own, and they send a Lich hero to cast Death and Decay to destroy your towers and nuke your army for good measure; to make this especially painful, you have no way to interrupt Death and Decay and he can take multiple Holy Lights from Arthas before going down, so he will ruin your day one way or another. Base expansion and multi-tasking skills are suddenly required in a campaign that has not been too difficult up until this point. There's also an optional Side Quest that is almost impossible to complete as you would need to take a small army out with your Paladin hero to take out a Meat Wagon escort, but in the meantime, those units you sent out would be extremely helpful if they had just stayed at the base for the primary Hold the Line mission. Even worse, this mission is when the Undead begin training the abominations as regular units, but the player does not yet have the luxury of training knights to tie the score. Have fun throwing Footmen into the meat grinder as the enemy repeatedly attacks you with full armies' worth of better units than what you have.
  • Into The Realm Eternal (Hard) An early Undead mission, the prime reason for its frustration is that you have three units available to you. Ghouls, necromancers, and the meat wagon siege weapon. The limited troop types means that a balanced force is impossible, and there is only on strategy available to you; the Zerg Rush. And even by Zerg Rush standards your troops suck. Ghouls are fragile and don't deal all that much damage, meat wagons are slow and fragile, and so are necromancers. Their ability to Animate Dead is vital early on, but the computer knows that the troops they summon will fall apart after a while, and doesn't bother to attack them until all the things that matter are dead. And when the priests start to show up in large numbers their dispel magic spell can wipe out swathes of animated skeletons in seconds, as well as buffing their troops and healing them through ghouls' attacks. Unlike the other examples in here, it's not a difficult mission, but you will hate it, possibly more than the other mentioned missions.
  • The Last Undead mission, "Under the Burning Sky" on Hard: It is considered by some to be the hardest in the game. It is a Hold the Line mission where you have to defend Squishy Wizard, Kel'Thuzad for 30 minutes until he summons Archimonde, during which you have no control over Kel'Thuzad and he won't even defend himself. There are three ways to get to them, one of which is defended by your base and the other two, which hold a spirit tower each. Your opponents? 3 human bases with their full arsenal. The last few minutes are particularly terrifying as your opponents proceed to dump their full arsenal into you. This was so bad that Blizzard patched the free reinforcements from the Burning Legion, which in early versions were just Felhounds, but after the patch the final wave gave the player Infernals that don't count as summoned units.
  • The second orc level, "The Long March," easily stands out as one of the most disliked levels of the game. Said level is a long Escort Mission where you have to escort Cairne's Kodo caravan with Thrall's small limited army of low-tier units along a path to reach the 3 oases (healing fountains) spread out around the map. However, It's quite common for players to try to just rush through it as fast as they can as the level comes with a ton of annoyances the longer it goes on. To explain:
    • You're constantly under attack by respawning centaur creeps throughout the escort, which slowly whittles away at your army and caravan Tauren guards as you have no means of healing your forces other than the first two oasis stops and possibly buying some healing scrolls at the goblin shop where you pick up the Orc raiders. It's a lot worse if you didn't save some of the Healing Wards found in the previous mission.
    • Your Far Seer hero (Thrall) is still particularly weak to use as it's only the second level of the campaign, which along with your small army of low-tier units, you'll find yourself engaging in battles with creeps that could end up taking awhile to clean up, which constantly slows the caravan walk to the point of it always being under threat.
    • Your ranged Headhunter units will always get focused down due to how the AI works always going for the lower health units first. Thus, you'll find yourself constantly microing your Headhunters in-and-out of fights against creeps, especially the centaurs, to keep them alive.
    • Finally, going off the beaten escort path to search for loot is almost useless as most of the loot around the map is pretty lackluster (the Centaur Khan near the end has the best stuff), and fighting the creeps guarding said loot just to even out with a low potion that will only heal the damage you just took is usually just not worth it.
  • The "Spirits of Ashenvale" mission of the first orc campaign where you have limited resources and are tasked with harvesting huge amounts of lumber with the worst lumber gatherer in the game. The only gold available for mining is far away from your main base, so you need to raid enemy bases (and the units that are good against buildings are bad against units). Your unit options are limited to some melee units with an inefficient anti-air attack, the worst ranged unit in the game, and the enemy just loves attacking your harvesters with air units, and most damning of all, no way of healing your units. There is a way to get lumber faster, but it involves a ridiculously difficult battle against tough enemies, during which you will take heavy losses, which must be replaced at great cost. And adding insult to injury, the hero you start with is The Berserker, and this entire mission (defending against impregnable bases) goes against everything he stands for. On Hard, the attacks are even more ruthless.
  • The mission right after that, "Hunter of Shadows," isn't anything too difficult per se, but its well known to be problematic just to get pass the opening battle where you must survive Cenarius' all-out assault with nothing but your berserker hero, and a few other units that are likely to die off fairly quickly. It's more of a race to get a decently sized force than to actually win against the assault with the small force you have currently. Once you get past this, the mission does get significantly easier, compensating for that Early Game Hell.
  • The third mission of the Night Elf campaign, "The Awakening of Stormrage" really pushes your limits as to how fast you can rush the main objective. You're basically on a Race Against the Clock to reach Cenarius' Horn before the undead completely chop through the 100 trees (90 on Hard mode) protecting Malfurion's Barrow Den, which is about a 15 to 20 minute window to complete the mission. To get the horn however, the player has to build up their initial Night Elf base, and then build up a large enough army that can push through a Horde settlement blocking the path leading to the horn. And it doesn't even end there. The player has to then defeat the three Keeper of the Grove guardians protecting the horn. It's such an unforgiving mission that you're pretty much forced to pull everything off on the first attack. This includes making very few mistakes to keep your army alive through the Horde base just so that the player still has enough units to take on the three guardian forces. By the time all the guardians and their minions are finally killed, you're very likely to only have around 10 or fewer trees protecting Malfurion remaining.
  • It is possible, throughout the game, to play most levels by simply sitting in your base (turtling) until you have gained all tech levels and upgrades, and then go around to most other bases and either wipe them out, or beat them down building by building. "Twilight of the Gods," however, totally invalidates this approach, forcing players who have been playing the entire game by turtling to learn a whole new way of playing on one of the toughest levels in the game. This also applies to the multiplayer AI, who will Curb Stomp you with their high-level heroes before you can blink if you try the single-player turtling approach.
• The Frozen Throne, like Beyond the Dark Portal ramps up the the average difficulty of levels, from Reign of Chaos.
  • The first major roadblock level for many players is "Balancing The Scales", the 5th mission of the Night Elf campaign. It features the challenging main task of bringing Malfurion and Tyrande to Maiev's base while she has no gold mine. This makes the mission slow and tiring to micromanage through. After reuniting them, Maiev has to move her base into the Naga base that Malfurion and Tyrande just destroyed and then the three heroes have to lay siege to Illidan's very large Naga base, which is hard to break through due to its heavy defenses, especially the Naga Royal Guards.
  • "The Brothers Stormrage" is the last mission of the Night Elf campaign and is very challenging. It requires controlling two bases, a Night Elf one with Malfurion and a Naga one with Illidan. The difficulty of micromanaging these two bases with their own resources is tough, but is further increased by the presence of six Undead bases (one of which cannot be reached) and neither one of your factions can help either other in any way and are unable to build flying units. The Undead bases are all very difficult to push into in this mission, especially the Green base north of the Red Base (which is the actual objective of the map) that has a ton of Abominations and Destroyers. It is especially tough for Illidan since the Naga do not have a proper siege unit with long ranged attacks. The final red base can be a challenge to push into as well because it has a high leveled Dreadlord and Lich (8 and 5 on Normal, both 9 on Hard).
  • "A Dark Covenant", the second Human (Blood Elf) mission, is Frozen Throne's equivalent to Reign of Chaos's "Into the Realm Eternal". The mission requires you to destroy a big green Undead base. You start in a fairly healthy position (As well as an unusual fully upgraded tech tree), with your main base on the middle island and four expansions around the outer edge of the lake (two on each side), but they are quickly taken over by starting orange and purple Undead forces that destroy their respective two north and south Blood Elf bases, and since your main base lacks a gold mine, you need to retake an expansion. This part is not difficult due to the new Naga units you get, and the right most expansions of orange and purple's newly built bases are basically just outposts that can easily be taken back as they don't even rebuild or reinforce at these bases.
    • The real problem is when you have to go on the offensive to attack the 3 remaining Undead bases. Especially the main green Undead base mission objective. As it turns out, you cannot build human, dwarven or gnomish units, all of which are replaced with elven equivalents... with the exception of the Workshop, which cannot be built. This means you cannot build ANY kind of siege unit in this mission (Not even Ballistas, something the High Elves used in Reign of Chaos). And amongst the limited Naga units your gifted when Vashj shows up, you're provided no Dragon Turtles, which are supposed to be your buildable siege unit for the Blood Elf campaign. You do get a Naga Royal Guard, which is more powerful than your heroes at the time, has Chaos-type damage and has no damage reduction against buildings, as well as Kael's Flame Strike spell to damage buildings, and Dragon Hawks to Cloud defensive structures to temporarily keep them from attacking, but that's all you have. Oh, and to make you feel angrier at Blizzard... in the following Undead campaign, the Blood Elves get to build Glaive Throwers.
  • The Scourge campaign Legacy of the Damned is That One Campaign in contrast to the Founding of Durotar being a Breather Campaign. It is the most difficult and time consuming campaign between all of them in Warcraft III. It has the highest number of missions (10 total) and a disproportionately large number of very difficult missions, some in-depth details:
    • "King Arthas"; especially on Hard mode. Despite having practically unlimited resources^note 120,000 gold and lumber split evenly amongst you and your two allies, and three factions to control, the game-play to complete the mission is an absolute freaking nightmare! You have to block off three map exits with each of your three factions in order to not allow a certain number of humans to get by and escape Arthas' slaughter. And while you do that, you gotta destroy 9 outlying villages^note 3 for each of your factions that will stop these humans from spawning. To make matters worse, there's a Paladin encampment in the center that not only protects these villages if they are attacked, but acts as a barrier to keep each of your three factions separated^note Sylvannas can handle the Paladin on her side just fine thanks to her Silence spell, but Arthas and Kel'thuzard's sides have no real way to counter them. To top it off, your forces are vastly limited to 40 between each of your three factions for a total of 40/40/40, and aside from Ghouls, you're restricted to Abominations from Arthas' faction, Necromancers from Kel'thuzad's faction, and Banshees (that can possess) from Sylvannas' faction. Kel'thuzad's side in particular really struggles at pushing offensively as Skeleton spam with Necromancers and Ghouls is just not able to hold up when pushing into his side's village bases, especially when the Paladin and his knights comes to defend them. Don't be surprised if you find yourself having to resort to cheesing the village structures with Arthas' Animate Dead and Kel'thuzad's Death and Decay.
    • "The Dark Lady" is famous for being the mission when you control creeps and overrun Varimathras' base, but it is easy to fall into a few pitfalls. Varimathras' forces attacks are very large and often have Abominations or Necromancers + Meat Wagons. Sylvanas' techtree is limited mostly to Ghouls, Banshees and Obsidian Statues. This is especially bad if you don't silence Necromancers and they summon a huge number of skeletons you can easily be overrun as there's no way for you to dispel them with the units you have. Once you possess a few troops, you can get past the Early Game Hell.
    • "Dreadlord's Fall" can be somewhat problematic if the player isn't quick enough to take advantage of the sneak attack to deal plenty of damage to Garithos' and Detheroc's bases.^note Or even possibly taking one of the enemy factions out of the game completely with enough micromanagement. Leaving too much alive will cause the enemy's starting counterattack once the timer runs out to send everything at the player; which can make for a very difficult 2 on 1 fight. On Hard mode, going on the offensive against two powerful foes becomes even more problematic, because you need practically your entire army to push against one of the enemy factions, but the second enemy faction will then send their attack at your base which is almost impossible to defend against since you'll hardly have anything to defend with other than static defense. It almost makes you want to just let your original base die, and just start over on the ashes of the enemy base that your primary force is attacking.
    • The last mission in the "Sylvanas Windrunner" story arc "A New Power In Lordaeron" can hurt your brain on Hard. What makes it painful is that the Undead in the main city at the center are protected by Burning Legion demons as well as Balnazzar himself (A Dreadlord hero on crack). The main army will repeatedly send powerful summons to Garithos's Alliance army to distract you from planning your attack. After demolishing the support camps on the edge of the map, you'll likely attempt to assault the capital with both of your armies, only to see that the Undead army and the Burning Legion support can easily mulch your army. After a few hours of failing, you may then realize that it is best to teleport your Alliance army over to your own Undead one once you get the Siege Tanks (or vice versa) for a steamroller attack, but even this does not make the assault easy.
    • Even the final mission "A Symphony of Frost and Flame" is extremely difficult and time consuming. It requires you to build a base from scratch and race Illidan for control of the four obelisks to access the Frozen Throne. The enemies have three large bases already assembled and each base has a level 10 hero that will attack you. Arthas starts the mission at level 2 in contrast. Illidan's base is inaccessible by land units (due to being surrounded by deep water) and has so many in-base static defenses it is impossible by normal means to destroy it so there's no way to really knock him out of the mission ^note Though it is possible to trap him by surrounding him with Shades, and the troops from his base will not go anywhere without him, effectively taking him out of the fight. Once you take obelisks you need to build up bases from scratch to defend them from attacks from any of the three factions, and huge portions of the obelisk areas have unbuildable terrain so you can never quite build a proper base in these areas. Illidan's attacks on the obelisks tend to be very difficult due to their sizes and the prominence of Naga Royal Guards. The push against the North Obelisk (the first one that Illidan will take that is closest to his base) is exceptionally hard due to the huge amount of defenses it will have, which may include up to 4 Royal Guards. This mission more than any other in the campaign forces you to take a ton of losses of units and buildings to wear down the enemies by attrition. Because of all this it is very satisfying to beat.

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