YMMV / Armory & Machine 2

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Annoying Timebombs found in the Outskirts. Instead of counting down, each turn their A.I. Roulette will use one of 11 attacks with blazing fast cast time — either a random number from 1-10 that does nothing, OR explode. This turns them into a Luck-Based Mission, and it doesn't help that unlike the other Timebombs in the area that hit for 20 damage, the Annoying Timebombs deal a whopping 50 damage out of your 100 HP if they blow up, and in this game, you can encounter quite a few enemies before returning to base instead of fighting just one. The only good news is that they die in 2 hits from Blast and once you maximize Bang's level, a single use of Blast and Bang will kill them.
  • Zombies have a high 200 HP, take no damage from Blast/Bang and 1/10th damage from explosive attacks. They only have two moves, Wait, which does nothing, and Bite, which deals decent damage and heals the zombie for 50 of their 200 HP as long as it connects, resisted or not. The worst part is that they can spam Bite several times in a row, giving you almost no room for attacking them, and if you are using Bang instead of an Elemental Blast the Bite attack will overrun your cooldown and hit, nullifying 1/4 of your progress.
  • Imps are immune to Bang/Blast, resist explosives, hit hard, can spam their Attack and use a Dodge move which makes your attacks miss while it's active. Green and Blue Imps also have quite a good amount of health too.
  • The Sleepy Orcs and Angry Orcs in the Damp Meadow are again resistant to explosives, and they sport Club Smash, an uninterruptible attack that hits for a huge 40 damage.
  • Forest Nymphs and Swamp Nymphs, found in the Bright Forest and the Swamp respectively. They open up with Protect, which causes Bang, Blast, Detonate, Bomb, and Bunker Buster to heal them and reduces other forms of damage, and this effect lasts for 10 seconds and stacks. If that's not enough, their only damaging move is Leech, a channeled Life Drain move that will heal them for a good bit over time while hurting you. One has to make sure that they quickly interrupt Protect/Defend and Leech, otherwise they become an exercise in frustration.
  • The elemental enemies in the special events. They absorb 80% of Blast and Explosive damage while taking only 20% of untyped damage. You are pretty much forced to use elemental weapons from the Market against them, otherwise you will end up healing them or dealing worthless damage to them.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Outskirts, the second area of the game is far more difficult than the Tower, the first area. It's the first area that has enemies who take no damage from your basic Blast move (but still get interrupted), forcing you to time your Bomb skill when they use their most dangerous ability with a long cooldown, then interrupt with Blast before you get paralyzed. It also introduces far faster or annoyingly randomized versions of the Timebombs that require luck and split-second reaction rate if you want to avoid getting blown up.
  • The Wilderness and its various sub-areas contain a number of enemies and bosses that resist all your previous attacks (Blast, Bang, Bomb, Bunker Buster, Detonate) by 10x, and require untyped or elemental attacks in order to take down quickly. Buying untyped or elemental weaponry from the Market is a must.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Some of the Market items give you defense ups by simply equipping them, making you take less damage from attacks. Any non-shielded arrow gives Basic Defense, which increases your defense by 10% and can stack 5x at a maximum of 50%. Hit, Bash, Bone Breaker and Sore Spot give Better Defense, which increases defense by 25% and stacks twice up to a maximum of 50%. Finally, all of the Shielded Arrow moves give Shield Bow, which increases defense by 30% and does not stack. The main thing that breaks the game is that the defense bonuses from Basic Defense, Better Defense, and Shield Bow all add together. By equipping two non-shielded arrows (10%+10%), two of Hit/Bash/Bone Breaker/Sore Spot (25%+25%) and a Shield Arrow (30%), you will take 100% less damage and enemies will be unable to damage you at all unless they charged their attack power beforehand.
  • The entire Wilderness can be broken in half with only two Market items: Flex, and Bulk Up. Both increase your damage output by 50%, but the latter also makes your cast time and recharge times slightly longer. What's notable is that many Wilderness enemies take 10% damage from explosive weapons like Detonate... but the way attack/defense buffs and debuffs work is additive, meaning that with Flex and Bulk Up, an explosive weapon will do 110% (50%+50%+10%) damage instead. This allows the player to tear through the Wilderness with nothing but interruption moves, Flex, Bulk Up, and the powerful Detonate, which will deal an on-demand massive 165 damage to the supposedly explosion-resistant enemies there. This was nerfed in a following update, where both Bulk Up and Flex only give +25% instead of +50%.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The crabs in the first area have the most tricky attack pattern in the area to manage without taking damage, but still manageable. They always open with Crab Poison, Pinch, and Belly Up, cycling the pattern. Crab Poison doesn't hurt but it makes your next attack do no damage and therefore waste precious ammunition, but you can still interrupt Pinch, while Belly Up has a slow charge time, doesn't do damage, and is when you actually should hurt it.
  • Timebomb enemies. Most of them will do a countdown then use Boom to blow up, damaging the player but killing themselves. Those found in the first area are pretty straightforward, but many of those found in the Outskirts, the second area, take a far shorter time to explode, be it counting down faster (Quick Timebomb) or starting at 5 instead of 10 (Short Timebomb). If the player is late to hit them as soon as they appear by even half a second, they'll more often than not explode.
  • Titans. They are immune to both interruption moves Blast and Bang, meaning that you need to use Bomb to damage it. Compounding things further is that its Smash > Reform cycle is usually faster than Bomb's casting time and will interrupt it, meaning that you have to wait for it to use the slow-casting Earthquake instead of Smash in order to damage it. What makes this annoying is that it might sometimes keep using Smash > Reform over and over again, wasting your Blast ammo trying to interrupt Smash. There's a Difficult, but Awesome technique that allows you to cast Bomb at the exact moment you interrupt Smash causing it to Reform, and if done right Bomb will go off before Smash hits you.
  • Bear Traps in the Damp Meadow subarea in the Wilderness. They do not have any damaging moves (all their moves are some form of "Attack!" being shouted out) but counter all damage dealt to them twofold. The only time they will not damage you back is after their A.I. Roulette uses a very specific move ("Attachch!"), and even then the vulnerability period only lasts for 3 seconds.
• Goddamned Boss: The Bulky Flesh Eater and the Royal Swamp Monster. Both of them have relatively easy-to-interrupt attacks that aren't too painful. However, like the other bosses in the Wilderness, they take no damage from Bang/Blast and heavily reduced damage from Bomb/Detonate. The annoyance comes from both of them having evasion moves that you're forced to wait out — The Bulky Flesh Eater's Hide is randomly used after Drool and gives it heightened evasion until its next move, while the Royal Swamp Monster has Swim followed by Dive, if Swim is not interrupted it will get heightened evasion during Dive.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Encounters in each area are entirely random, including the noncombat encounters. This can cause runs to be wasted with several screens of "Continue Exploring". Worst of all is the fact that getting the boss encounter choice in the Wilderness sub-areas also boils down to random chance, and you might simply exit an area without even encountering a boss. This makes it irritating to obtain the research options from first encountering them and the Upgraders from defeating them.
  • Most of the offensive abilities in the Market have miss chances, especially the more powerful ones. Those abilities do not any indicator of their hit rate (they're just described as "inaccurate" or "focal" or "scoped", and some of them don't have any descriptor), leading to attacks like Beam missing around half the time. Worse still, these attacks are mostly needed to tackle the Wilderness area, where many enemies there resist Blast, Bang, Bomb, Bunker Buster and Detonate.
• That One Attack:
  • The Snake and the JrBot have "Paralyze", which permanently stuns you until they kill you with their attacks. The good news is that it has a long charge time to interrupt and is a great opportunity for you to use Bomb on them. The Wild Snake's Paralyze fortunately doesn't do this, only stunning you for 8 seconds.
  • "Crab Toxin" and "Poison", used by the Giant Crabs and Toxic Slimes respectively in the Wilderness. Unlike the regular Crab's Crab Poison which merely lowers the damage of your next attack by 5, these two inflict an actual poison status that lasts 30 seconds (even after the battle ends) which halves all your damage and deals 2 damage to you every few seconds while interrupting you. Players who assume that they can simply take this Poison as lightly as Crab Poison will be in for a very rude awakening.
  • The Zombie's "Bite". It isn't a very painful move, but the Zombie can spam it if the A.I. Roulette chooses to, and if the attack connects (due to overwhelming your Bang/Blast cooldowns) it will heal the zombie for 50 of its already-high 200 HP, effectively wasting 1/4 of your efforts in killing it.
  • The Forest Nymph's "Protect". Not only does it come out extremely fast, but it will provide a damage shield to the Nymph, and they use this almost every alternate turn. Said damage shield makes the Nymph absorb all damage from Blast- and Explosion- type moves and lasts 10 long seconds, plus they couple it with a Life Drain move that prolongs the fight. If they manage to pull this off once, you're as good as dead if you lack any physical or elemental attacks.
  • The Hostile Spirit and Crazed Hostile Spirit's "Frenzy" deals 30 damage to you and comes out very quickly. It also tends to come out randomly, and sometimes chained in with its other more manageable and less damaging attack Screech.
  • The Sleepy Orc, Angry Orc and the Sleepy Guardian Orc have "Club Smash", which deals a huge 40 damage to your 100 HP and it's the first long-casting attack in both games that cannot be interrupted. The Sleeping Orc's "Snore" does the same thing, just with a different name. This enforces you to have both a healing move and a way to increase your dodge or defense, and if it's used multiple times in succession to overrun your Regen use, you're out of luck.
  • All of the Dragons' attacks except Roar are these, either hitting hard (Scratch, Fireball), hitting multiple times (Fire Breath, Frost Breath), or buffing themselves so they can hit twice as hard (Inhale).
• That One Boss:
  • The Ancient Dragon in the Wilderness is one of the hardest-hitting bosses over there, and certainly one of the trickiest to fight. It will use one of two attack cycles. The first is Scratch, which hit for a huge 33 damage, followed by Roar which does nothing for a few seconds. The second is Inhale which gives itself a Status Buff that briefly doubles its attack if uninterrupted, followed by either a powerful Fireball or a Fire Breath that is used three times — if Inhale was not interrupted, the triple Fire Breath attack becomes very painful.
  • The Sleepy Guardian Orc is one of the toughest bosses among the Wilderness. Its main difficulty comes from "Club Smash", an uninterruptible attack that hits for a whopping 40 damage and you only have 100 HP maximum. If you're unlucky, it can use this more than twice in a row, bypassing your Regen cooldown which can kill you quickly unless you have a decent amount of defense or dodge buffs.
• That One Level: The Damp Meadow sub-area in the Wilderness is by far the toughest of the Wildeness' sub-areas. It contains Bear Traps (Goddamned Bats who auto-counter all your attacks until its A.I. Roulette uses a specific move which makes it vulnerable for 3 seconds), Vicious Plants (another irritating enemy), Sleepy Orcs and Angry Orcs (Demonic Spiders that take little damage from explosives and have the uninterruptible, highly damaging Club Smash), and the Sleepy Guardian Orc boss also uses Club Smash and tends to spam it. If you're really unlucky, you might come across a Green Orc, who has more HP than the area's boss and hits hard.