History ThatOneSidequest / Borderlands2

* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Mighty_Morphin%27 "Mighty Morphin"]]. The quest requires you to reduce Varkids' health enough for them to form pods so that you can tag them with a serum and spawn Mutated Badass Varkids, however this information comes from a singular sentence from Hammerlock which can be easily missable, and is not helped by decorative pods around the location which can mislead you to think the pod spawns are RNG based. Larval Varkids don't have much health, so you'd better use a low damage weapon... except Mutated Badass Varkids have an assload of health and powerful corrosive attacks that often eat away all of your own HP. (You ''did'' bring a second, high damage weapon, right?) You have to kill ''five'' of the damn things, which means hunting down a lot of Varkids... and likely several deaths. To top it off, [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper Mordecai has a tendency to steal your kills and deny Second Winds]].

* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Statuesque "Statuesque"]] in Opportunity, especially in [[NewGamePlus True Vault Hunter mode or higher]], is likely a mission to be completed after the Main Story is completed. It's an EscortMission, and if that weren't bad enough, you've got to protect a hacked Constructor (which makes no effort to not get killed) from a combination of Engineers, Loaders, Constructors, [[OhCrap Badass Loaders]], [[FromBadToWorse Super Badass Loaders]], and a ''[[UpToEleven Badass Constructor]]''. Clearing the areas the Overseer will pass through of regular enemies in advance will at least reduce the pressure on you, though.

** It's saying something when the easiest way to achieve this (and get all the bonus objectives) is to grind in Lynchwood. As in, the area ''swarming'' with powerful bandits, Bruisers, Lab Rats and more. At the very least, it's reasonably likely that you'll find decent loot along the way, the enemy density is high, and going to one end of town will typically allow enemies to respawn on the other end of town, making it easier to do in one sitting while keeping track of the secondary objectives.
* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Treasure "The Lost Treasure"]]. First you need to get the mission from an ECHO recording, luckily this one isn't far from the Fast Travel station near the beginning. The problem is then to collect map pieces scattered across the Bandit-infested "Sawtooth Cauldron" level. If that isn't enough, you have then to backtrack to the Varkid-, Crystallisk-, Spiderant- and Thresher-infested "Caustic Caverns" level and activate four switches. Once all those switches were activated, the elevator to the highly-hyped-up secret treasure area is activated, the problem is that such an area is Spiderant land, and they'll gang up on you until you reach the switch that reveals... the Dahlminator, a [[ScrappyWeapon/Borderlands2 Dahl E-Tech Dart Pistol]].

* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Mighty_Morphin%27 "Mighty Morphin"]] can be fairly tough if tackled as soon as it becomes available. The quest requires you to wait for Varkids to form pods so that you can tag them with a serum and spawn Mutated Badass Varkids, which have an assload of health and powerful corrosive attacks that often eat away all of your shield along with most of your health. And you have to kill ''five'' of the damn things, which means hunting down a lot of Varkids... and likely several deaths. [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper Mordecai's tendency to steal your kills and deny Second Winds]] doesn't help.

* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Catch_a_Ride,_and_Also_Tetanus "Catch a Ride, and also Tetanus"]] is a CollectionSidequest. You need to retrieve five vehicle parts sitting in five enemy-infested areas. Several of them have pirates, and the roads to many of these areas are infected with Spiderants, especially the Queen variant, and the reward is... a bunch of XP and money.

* [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Grandma_Flexington%27s_Story "Grandma Flexington's Story"]], and [[https://borderlands.fandom.com/wiki/Grandma_Flexington%27s_Story:_Raid_Difficulty its Raid Difficulty]] version are the only side missions from ''The Horrible Hunger of the Ravenous Wattle Gobbler''. What the mission lacks in difficulty (it can't get as easier as listening to Grandma Flexington's story), it makes up for ''tediousness''. The whole speech lasts 5 minutes in regular version and ''12'' in Raid, plus you're requested to correctly answer a question, fail the answer and it's starting all over again. And the rewards are... a dollar and a bunch of XP for the regular mission, and XP and a random Torgue Rocket Launcher for Raid Difficulty.

* There are a number of other quests such as ''Faster than the Speed of Love'', ''Catch a Ride, and Also Tetanus'', and ''The Lost Treasure'', which either involve revisiting an enemy-infested location the long way around, doing some rather pointless task, don't lead into any more interesting quests, or all of the above. Furthermore, the rewards for these quests are rather insignificant compared to the effort of going through them. It's safe to skip these and focus on different missions that have better rewards.
* ''Mighty Morphin''' can be fairly tough if tackled as soon as it becomes available. The quest requires you to wait for Varkids to form pods so that you can tag them with a serum and spawn Mutated Badass Varkids, which have an assload of health and powerful corrosive attacks that often eat away all of your shield along with most of your health. And you have to kill ''five'' of the damn things, which means hunting down a lot of Varkids... and likely several deaths. [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper Mordecai's tendency to steal your kills and deny Second Winds]] doesn't help.

* "Arms Dealing". You have to pick up five arms across a large map under a strict time limit and then deliver them to a drop-off point back in Overlook. If you stop for ''any'' reason, you're likely to fail the mission, which might mean going a long way back just to restart it. This isn't helped by the fact that one of the delivery points is impossible to get to without going, on foot, into a cave packed to the gills with stalkers. Placing vehicles around the map and teleporting to them when you can takes the edge off, but if you're driving from point to point, this mission is tough. It's by far the toughest timed delivery mission in the game.
* "Lighting the Match" as part of the Children of the Firehawk questline. Not so much ''difficult'' as it is ''annoying''. You have to go all the way back to the Southern Shelf and climb to the top of Captain Flynt's ship to burn Matchstick, and by the time you get the quest the enemies are so low-level that they're little more than an annoyance who don't drop any useful items and only give minimal to zero experience points. The lack of fast travel stations in the Southern Shelf amplifies the annoyance, as you have to go from Liar's Berg all the way to the top of the ship, and then all the way back down (unless you jump off the right side of the arena and skip the trek down the rig). Thought you could bypass all of this by taking Claptrap's ship from the Three Horns Divide? Wrong, said ship relocates in front of the area where you fight Boom Bewm.
* "Hyperion Slaughter: Round 5" is most likely the very last side mission you will complete. Like the previous 4 rounds, it starts with a handful of engineers, but this particular Circle of Slaughter immediately starts throwing Surveyors at you, and there's only one wave of engineers. Then it starts loading on a random selection of [=HOT=] and [=RPG=] Loaders, and after that is when the Constructors start showing up. The final round starts with a Badass Constructor followed by two regular ones. Finally, every wave but the first has turrets on the scaffolding that you're probably too busy to think about, leading to cheap deaths if they happen to be shock turrets. The cherry on top of all of this is that if one player dies, they can't re-enter the match until the rest of the team dies or beats it, most likely the former.
* Most of the Circle of Slaughter quests are this. Each set of rounds takes place in the same general area killing the same type of enemies, which can get repetitive and tedious very fast. If you fail, you gotta start at the beginning of the round again. Finally, even if you can kill the enemies fast enough, they spawn on a set timer, so you'll end up sitting there waiting for them to pop up. On top of being annoying, this also means that a lot of Action Skills will run out before the next wave comes in (which can be a death sentence for builds relying on the action skill). ''Creature Slaughter'' in particular, unlike the other Circles of Slaughter, doesn't have the benefit of having a fast-travel point nearby. For this reason, it's almost ''imperative'' to complete the whole thing on the first or second visit to the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve.
* "Medical Mystery" and its second part, "Medical Mystery: X-com-municate", are notoriously painful to complete. First, you have to defeat Doc Mercy, who qualifies for ThatOneBoss. Then, you have to kill 25 bandits with a specific gun given to you for the mission. Unfortunately, the gun in question is a Bandit E-tech assault rifle, which features double ammo consumption for less than 1.5 times the damage output of a normal Bandit assault rifle and reduced critical damage; in other words, it's just plain awful. In normal mode, your ammo capacity won't be very high yet, so you're likely to blow through all of your reserves before you're even done with the objective; in True Vault Hunter Mode and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, on the other hand, enemies take proportionally more damage to kill, so the weapon's lackluster damage will be the major sticking point instead. And to top it off, a glitch means that the crappy E-tech gun has a chance to spawn without an element, making it even worse. Pretty much the only reason to attempt either mission is to unlock the ability to farm Doc Mercy for the Infinity.
* "Statuesque" in Opportunity, especially in True Vault Hunter mode or higher. It's an EscortMission, and if that weren't bad enough, you've got to protect a hacked Constructor (which makes no effort to not get killed) from a combination of Engineers, Loaders, Constructors, [[OhCrap Badass Loaders]], [[FromBadToWorse Super Badass Loaders]], and a ''[[UpToEleven Badass Constructor]]''. Clearing the areas the Overseer will pass through of regular enemies in advance will at least reduce the pressure on you, though.
* "Hyperion Contract #873" requires you to kill 100 bandits, which is significantly higher than most other "kill X amount of Y" quests. The quest is even more troublesome if you want to fulfill the secondary objective as well, which require you to kill EXACTLY 25 bandits with each of the four elemental damage types. This of course means you have to have access to at least four decent elemental weapons. Plus, the quest immediately cuts off at 100 kills, so if you screw up and kill too many or too few bandits with one of the damage types, you either have to suck it up or start over if you aim to achieve all optional sub-missions. Also, some bandit enemies, such as Buzzards and Bandit Technicals, will not credit you with an elemental kill regardless of what weapon you use to kill them. Oh, and Suicide Psychos count as non-elemental kills if they blow themselves up, while their grenades count as explosive if they kill anyone else with them. Enjoy.

* ''Demon Hunter.'' Let's see-a giant skag who only gets hit if you shoot her in the mouth, a severely limited number of bandits that die before you can even get a Second Wind, an elevator that doesn't work, and absolutely horrible cover. It's so bad that many recommend skipping this sidequest altogether.
* ''I like My Monsters Rare'' from the Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt DLC. Much like the Hyperion Contract achievement above, this is one where you have to kill a lot of enemies, and not just any kind. Not only are you tasked with killing 5 different kinds of enemies, but you are also asked to kill only the rare versions of them. Since the rare versions [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin rarely spawn]], you will have to abuse the reload mechanic for this one, as a single session might not even spawn enough of the creatures at all, much less enough rare ones. On top of this, many of them do not share a common spawn location, requiring you to backtrack along huge swathes of the area to get them in one sweep. The best way to do this quest is to find a Fast Travel Station or area exit close to one of the creature's spawn locations, and endlessly spam the reload button until you see them. Have fun jumping back to the title screen!
* ''Assassinate the Assassins'' doesn't sound so bad on paper (you need to kill four unique named enemies in a single dungeon), unless you try to complete its optional objectives, which require to kill each of the bosses with a specific weapon class. It can be a real pain in the ass depending on your normal build (no elemental weapon because elemental kills will prevent the kill to be registered for the right weapon; also, no spike shield or nova shield for the same reason). Also, while the first assassin is manageable with the handicap if you found a decent weapon (you need a pistol), the second require to fight at short range with a sniper rifle, the third is a burning man who must be defeated with melee attacks (''i.e.'' an enemy who has a huge advantage at melee range), and the fourth is a fast moving who must be killed with a shotgun while he wields one himself. And the worst thing: the area contains suicidal bombers, who can unintentionally kill the targets themselves if they aren't taken care of soon enough.

* ''Egg on your Face''. Have fun running around a huge, expansive area to comb every inch of it for a grand total of ''23'' eggs that are not marked on your minimap, and then running around some more to find that last lousy egg you missed, which is just as tedious and agonizing as it sounds. You don't even get any interesting rewards for finishing it, either, aside from being able to farm a mini-boss for a unique gun which isn't all that good.

* "Medical Mystery" and its second part, "Medical Mystery: X-com-municate", are notoriously painful to complete. First, you have to defeat Doc Mercy, who qualifies for ThatOneBoss. Then, you have to kill 25 bandits with a specific gun given to you for the mission. Unfortunately, the gun in question is a Bandit E-tech assault rifle, which features double ammo consumption for less than 1.5 times the damage output of a normal Bandit assault rifle and reduced critical damage; in other words, it's just plain awful. In normal mode, your ammo capacity won't be very high yet, so you're likely to blow through all of your reserves before you're even done with the objective; in True Vault Hunter Mode and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode, on the other hand, enemies take proportionally more damage to kill, so the weapon's lackluster damage will be the major sticking point instead. Pretty much the only reason to attempt either mission is to unlock the ability to farm Doc Mercy for the Infinity.