If you need to grind for XP and loot, these sidequests will make you earn them HARD.
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Main game
- "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 That One Boss. 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. - "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.
- Cult Following: Eternal Flame requires you to kill fire-resistant enemies with fire weapons. This means beating on them with non-fire weapons until they're almost dead, then switching to a fire weapon to finish them. In most cases, this means painstaking observation of their health bars while you're working them down, hoping you don't accidentally land one hit too many. Worse, this mission is bugged such that, if you restart from a checkpoint, Lilith's advice about how to do it can follow you into other missions!
- "Cult Following: Lighting the Match", in Frostburn Canyon. 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.
- "Arms Dealing", obtained at Overlook (The Highlands) after you return to Sanctuary after it lifted off and left you behind. 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, and another has tons of Threshers, including Wormhole Threshers. 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.
- "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, Mordecai has a tendency to steal your kills and deny Second Winds, so it's highly recommended you tackle this misson after killing Wilhelm and rendevouzing with Mordecai at Sanctuary.
- 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", 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.
- "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.
- "Demon Hunter": 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.
- "Statuesque" in Opportunity, especially in True Vault Hunter mode or higher, is likely a mission to be completed after the Main Story is completed. It's an Escort Mission, 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, Badass Loaders, Super Badass Loaders, and a 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.
- 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.
- "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 Dahl E-Tech Dart Pistol.
DLCs
- "Faster than the Speed of Love", from Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty is a race mission which involves traveling through most of Wurmwater's areas with your Sandskiff in 2:15 minutes. The problem? Sand worms and pirate Sandskiffs infecting the whole area. And the reward is a pitiful bunch of XP and money.
- "Catch a Ride, and also Tetanus", also from Captain Scarlett..., is a Collection Sidequest. 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.
- "I Like My Monsters Rare" from Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt. 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 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!
- "Egg on your Face", also from Sir Hammerlock.... 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.
- "Grandma Flexington's Story", and 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 in 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.
