YMMV / V Rising

• Breather Boss:
  • Beatrice the Tailor. She's an elderly tailor and won't even attack you, simply running around the village pleading for help. Once the village militia are defeated there's no opposition whatsoever. The only difficulties in defeating her are in clearing the village militia out first, avoiding the other Carriers that wander through (Vincent, Christina, and Jade), chasing her down before her health starts coming back, and killing a harmless old grandmother to learn how to make yarn.
  • Leandra the Shadow Priestess. For someone at the same tier as Tristan the Vampire Hunter, you might be expecting a difficult fight with a lot of tricks. Leandra isn't that. The real fight is just getting to her past the hordes of skeleton mages and skeleton bishops, then dealing with the Undead Commander. Leandra herself is surprisingly weak, especially if her two escorts are picked off before the fight.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Chaos Volley is a near-permanent resident of most players' ability lists and Lidia the Chaos Archer is one of the most sought-after targets in the early game specifically because of how good it is in both PvP and PvE. All it does is fire two simple fireballs that do significant burst damage and apply Damage Over Time. It's easy to use and complements any player's build, it simply never stops being useful no matter where you are.
  • Merciless Copper/Nightstalker equipment is often skipped altogether as it's faster and easier to kill Quincey and unlock Iron/Hollowfang than it is to get all the recipes. Actually getting Merciless Copper/Nightstalker equipment means discovering it through research, which is time intensive and requires a lot of Paper or Copper Coins to buy it from the Shady Book Dealer.
  • Veil of Chaos is the standard against which all other travel abilities are compared and it's generally assumed players will have it unless they're doing something specific. The double dash and invisibility are simply that good for moving around the battlefield, dodging enemy abilities, or making space. Players will sometimes transition to Veil of Frost later on for its substantial shield, and Veil of Illusions has its fans, but most stick with Veil of Chaos.
  • If a barrier spell is needed it's probably going to be Ward of the Damned as the skeletons will draw enemy attention, allowing you breathing room to get hits in, heal, or run away.
• Demonic Spiders: Some enemies are notorious for causing deaths among even experienced players. These enemies are also usually favored for defending castles on PvP servers.
  • Militia Longbows have a tendency to set everything - you, your horse, the ground, terrain, their allies - on fire, which can deal terrifying amounts of damage if you're not constantly using Fire Resistance brews to mitigate it. They're durable, often found in pairs, can land this shot from far away, and immune to their own flames. They also rarely appear in Silverlight Hills where they have the advantage of being unexpected, letting them set you on fire easier.
  • Militia Brawlers. The average patrolling Militia member in Dunley is level 40 or so. Militia Brawlers are level 56. This massive level difference means the Brawler's surprisingly-long-range charge can one-shot players new to Dunley and take huge chunks out of players' health until they're ready to leave Dunley altogether.
  • Lightweavers. Though lacking in health and offensive might, Lightweavers make up for it by being infuriatingly evasive. Remember Meredith the Bright Archer's dash? They have that too and they will spam it, using it to keep themselves out of trouble, take accurate potshots while you fight other enemies, and wake up nearby passive enemies. Moving to hit them almost ensures they'll hit you back without guaranteeing they won't just teleport away from your attack before it connects.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Muggers love to use their Shield Block once they get close to you, meaning any attack that grazes their front arc stuns you and opens you up to hits from their friends, or just wastes your time. What separates them from other enemies that have this ability, like Militia Guards, is that it's their only ability, meaning they use it whenever they can.
  • Skeleton Mages on their own aren't too bad but in pairs or grouped with other enemies they become frustrating, as they have a highly-damaging AoE snare with a large radius that leaves you vulnerable to their friends or their own follow-up bolts, which have fairly good prediction. They also have quite a bit of health. While they're Demonic Spiders in the Farbane Woods, they're encountered all over and remain irritating throughout.
  • Riflemen have an extremely fast projectile and very good predictive tracking, making them the primary reason that Silverlight Hills is a horse graveyard. They're also masters at killing any charmed minions a vampire might have following them to be converted into servants or prisoners.
• Fan Nickname: Octavian the Militia Captain is often called 'Beyblade' due to his ultimate attack, where he starts spinning around the arena while chasing the player and creating dozens of smaller spinning projectiles.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Possibly the most common criticism you'll find against this game is the Castle Decay mechanic. Basically, your castle needs blood essence as fuel to stay strong, healthy, and defended. Once it runs out of blood, it starts to decay and becomes vulnerable to attack. Once that happens, you are likely to lose all your belongings in the ensuing destruction. On paper, this provides a decent enough incentive to keep base maintenance at the front of your mind during your escapades, but the biggest issue is that, being an online game, your castle is spending blood essence even while you're offline. This becomes a massive problem for players who don't want or have the time to spend in-game and can find the next time they log in to have lost all their hard work. While it is possible to change this via file editing for your own servers, you're at the mercy of the hosts of other servers.
• That One Boss:
  • The Ferocious Bear. As noted under Wake-Up Call Boss, the bear marks the first point in the game that knowing and understanding the game's expectations for how a boss is supposed to be fought is truly required, and even then it's harder to kill at-level than most of the game's other wake-up calls unless you use specific skills or tricks. The bear has very few moves and a simple pattern but moves extremely fast and is unrelentingly aggressive, allowing few openings to fight back effectively if the right weapons, skills, and strategies aren't being used. Fortunately it's one of the most optional bosses in the game, as the main thing its reward is useful for is breaking down the gates to the Bandit Stronghold, something explosives do just as well.
  • Tristan the Vampire Hunter can be encountered far earlier than he can be effectively fought but even at-level he's a fierce combatant due to his mobility, with most of his attacks able to hit from deceptively far away, his leap strike having no tell, and his bomb-throw blanketing a large area in highly-damaging flames. As a wandering boss it may also be difficult to find him in favorable terrain, as his attacks require space to dodge and there's always the danger of pulling too far away and causing him to leash, which might require you to dash through a fire pool to catch up to him before he heals. Additionally, while not strictly required for progression you'll need to bring him down to craft Merciless Iron equipment at any reasonable pace (as he teaches the Greater Blood Essence recipe), and to unlock the Greatsword weapon.
  • Octavian the Militia Captain deserves special mention for being the point many players stop playing. Octavian is required for progression as he unlocks Dark Silver, meaning there's no getting around fighting him and no skipping past him and coming back with better gear. He's notorious for his extraordinarily dangerous spinning attack that fills the arena with projectiles and for spawning Militia Longbows to assist him; a single misstep against either Octavian's spin or a longbow's flaming arrow can shave off over a third of a player's health bar.
  • Ungora the Spider Queen is an extremely durable Flunky Boss who floods the arena with long-lasting AoEs and spawns a lot of spiders to assist her, with even more coming into the fight if you don't break all the eggs beforehand. While not tough, the spiderlings do almost as much damage as Ungora herself and can quickly eat an unsuspecting vampire alive.
  • Gorecrusher the Behemoth is generally considered to be the hardest of the three endgame bosses due to having a colossal amount of health and a number of dangerous moves with a long reach that come out extremely quickly, making them very hard to avoid.