History ThatOneLevel / MMORPG

* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can and will find yourself fending off hordes of enemies all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many of hard hitting swings that can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.'' Also most of the dungeon including the arenas for the first and third boss (already noted for their gimmicky mechanics above) is filled with pools that do damage over time if you step in them, making things [[SarcasmMode fun]] for everyone, especially Melee DPS classes.
** Of particular note, a lot of people run this dungeon for the first time with some of their class's artifact armor, which is suitable for the start of the major version's end-game. Except if you run this as an any of the ''Heavensward'' classes before level 50, you're in for a world of hurt, since they don't get artifact armor by then and need a lot of grinding for tombstones to get comparable Ironworks {{magitek}} gear.

* Some dungeons have simply become ThatOneLevel not because of difficulty, but the sheer ''frequency'' of which they show up in the Duty Finder, such as the Crystal Tower, Alexander raids, and the Antitower. They are not seen as "Bad" levels - players just get ''very'' tired of them simply because they are all level 50 and 60 raids and players just want to use their level 70+ toolkits. (Especially for Red Mages. Red Mages do not learn one of their most important class features, Resurrection, until level 66.)

* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can and will find yourself fending off hordes of enemies all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has many of hard hitting swings that can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.''

* Amaurot, the final dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'' is basically known as "screw the melee and caster players" by the community. The entire dungeon has enemies that will spam AOE attacks and due to the chaotic environment, meteorites can also fall at random. There's also a bomb that will tether itself to a random DPS player and will focus on attacking them only while constantly lowering their defense to fire. Naturally, the bombs will explode upon death and if the tethered player has too many fire vulnerability stacks, they will very likely die. There are also dark sprites that will attach themselves to healers and will constantly apply a debuff on them that makes their healing magic significantly weaker. The second boss fight is basically a horde attack of all the monsters you've seen so far and includes the two that attach themselves to players. The final stretch of the dungeon not only has more enemies that will get very AOE spam happy, but the final boss that hangs out in the background will also take potshots at the party with linear AOE attacks that can stretch across the whole map.
* Those that heal in dungeons will note that there are several dungeons (e.g., Bardam's Mettle) that are That One Level for them, as the typical "pull everything to the wall" speedrun strat can and will result in a party wipe unless everyone is at their A-game. That is, the tank is popping cooldowns judiciously, the healer can keep up with keeping the tank alive, and the [=DPSes=] are outputting heavy damage as much as possible.

* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can and will find yourself fending off hordes of enemies all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses require you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has no telegraphs to its attacks[[note]]At least, not in the form of "holographic" telegraphs of the area of effect, which is the case for most other enemies: he still has a "charge" meter visible just above his name. However, given that this is unusual for bosses in this game, it still qualifies as annoying and unexpected[[/note]] and many of his swings can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.''

* What, no mention of the Old Aqueduct? The P3s there may seem harmless alone, but if you ever spot one alone, it'll usually notice you and go fetch some of its buddies SPECIFICALLY to go kick your ass. And don't even get me started on going into the depths of their territory just to take down their commander, which is surrounded by like, dozens of his buddies, a good number of them rank higher than the grunts and therefore even more difficult to kill. And may your deity of choice save you should the area specific event start up, where the monstrous killer space bugs start running around the area at random while you're trying to kill the P3s. Your deity helps you even more if you run into the black or red ones. Or the orangey ones that run up to specifically to suicide bomb you.

* The Space Combat mission called "Taspan Ambush". Where do we even begin? You have to escort a shuttle carrying a Republic defector from point A to Point B. Just like your very first space mission. Sounds easy right? Except for this time, aside from the dozens of starfighters, there are ten ''Republic frigates'' '''chasing''' this shuttle, not just engaged in a brawl with the Imperial fleet sent to recover it. You have scant seconds to disable all of the turrets (all 8 of them) in all of the frigates (all 10 of them) before they leave the shuttle too damaged to survive the massive ambush that awaits in the asteroid belt. What makes this so frustrating is that in most other space missions, success or failure depends solely on your ability to dodge enemy shots, and shoot accurately. But on here, ships ''ignore you'' completely, and focus exclusively on the shuttle. As if this wasn't enough, FRIENDLY FIRE IS ENABLED. That's right, if you don't aim carefully, your own blasters will reduce the health of the shuttle.

* Better question, how is the airship mission not mentioned? This mission, before being nerfed, required several hundred thousand gil (the equivalent of several DOZEN hours of gil farming) and even to this day requires a few dozen thousand per person. To say nothing of the fact that if your setup is not absolutely perfect with exactly the right classes you are nearly guaranteed to fail before you've even begun. There was nothing quite like killing the omega weapon only to run out of liquids with the ultima weapon at less than 50% and wipe. There are several people on every server who have literally done this mission dozens of times and spent millions of gil without a single successful attempt. It's that bad.

** Mission 4-5: Wind Valley 1 is a veritable pain in the tail. Characters in the game travel fairly slowly, but in this level you have to traverse a long canyon of wind pushing you backward, slowing you to the breakneck pace of about half a meter per second. But that's not all, there are occasional cactus enemies who will punch you if you get too close. And some of them are underground (you can't see them). Additionally, there is a constant barrage of miniature cacti that will push you back a huge distance and deal ten damage. While ten damage isn't a huge deal, they'll knock you back a long distance, and when you get KO'd (but not killed) your helpless body will get bombarded by tons of the little buggers! Oh, and guess what: when you reach the end, there's a wall of large cactus enemies that you somehow have to get through/around while the wind is still pushing you back. Thought you were done? Haha, that's so naive of you! Of course you're not done! Last of all you have to compete in a battle with two enormous monsters in an enclosed space, now that you're out of potions and low on health! Hope you don't die! Oh, too bad! Have fun navigating the valley again! RAGE.

* ''VideoGame/GranadoEspada'''s Judgement Day questline, and by extension, Tora's recruitment quest. Both require you to traverse through the insanely high-end Lucifer Castle at least three times, sneaking past enemies and traps that will OneHitKill anyone who isn't invulnerable to damage, meaning that you will need to spam dozens upon dozens of Soul Crystals just to get to the quest point. Worse part? You can't save warps inside, so if you need to get out to talk to an NPC in town, be prepared to walk from the start. Worst part? This is part of the main storyline, meaning if you want to proceed further, you need to finish this questline.

** The last boss has Mythril Verges, ankh-like things that shoot FrickingLaserBeams everywhere. Whilst there's only one at a time early on and they're not as powerful as they were in previous builds, they are replaced more frequently as the boss' health decreases, getting close causes them to erect a barrier that prevents you from getting away until it's dead, and eventually, the boss summons four at once to [[BeamSpam just fire in patterns over the area]]. It can get pretty hectic.

** That arc ended up finishing up -- [b]four expansions later[/b] with the release of the 8.2 Rise of Azshara patch that opened Nazjatar and The Eternal Palace (and, in a way, 8.3 Visions of N'zoth).

** Word of God was that it was completely broken after the Fitness power pool was made an inherent power set on all characters. Due to the Hurdle power augmenting a character's baseline leaping. The geysers were, apparently, tossing characters a set distance based on their baseline value.
* While The Hollows were not as bad, they were visited earlier in the game. They involved mile-long runs long before characters earn their travel powers, and had level 5 missions in level 16 enemy areas. Several updates fixed these problems, including giving characters much earlier access to temporary travel powers and a slight revamp of the Hollows zone to include a hospital, a trainer, and a store, so you don't have to zone back into an adjacent zone every time you die or level. They also changed the mission spawn points so they showed up in areas with enemy spawns appropriate to the player's level.

* Perez Park was a horror at low levels and a misery at high levels. Most of the zone consisted of a huge, dark, confusing labyrinthine forest filled with large groups of enemies that are impossible to avoid. Even players with higher-level characters hate being sent back there due to the difficulty of navigating its maze. Travel powers weren't very useful in the park either - Flight and Super-Jump are useless in the forest with its thick, rooflike properties, it was too twisty and dark to use Teleport much, and Super-Speed is difficult to use on those twisty paths too, and won't help you much if you just kept getting lost.
** On top of that, there was a wall all around the main park, only one opening, it was not marked on the map, and the walls are too high to jump without Super Jump or Flight, so depending on which Security Gate you come in, you had to run around half the edge just to get in or out of the park, which is itself packed with low-level gangs which are either a bloody nuisance, or a nightmare, depending on your level.

** Many of these zones were part of a now-abandoned design philosophy from much earlier in the games history: they're Hazard Zones, regions of the city that were devastated by one or another catastrophe and essentially evacuated and abandoned. As such, they contained neither contacts to give quests or innocent civilians to rescue, only swarms of villains and monsters usually in groups too large for a single player to tackle alone. The only reason to ever go there was by being sent from another mission elsewhere, and then you try to run to the target as fast as possible. It's a shame, because some of these zones have quite interesting stories as to how they got so bad, but the stories aren't explored no one lives there anymore.

* There's a quest called The Gauntlet, which involves you traveling through an already hard area to a sublevel, touching a statue in the deepest part of the area, and then running back to the entrance while avoiding the huge swarms of nearly impossible-to-defeat enemies. If you die, your only options are to be revived by a crew member (who is probably too busy trying to survive to offer any help), or start the quest over. There have been a fair number of threads in the forums complaining about its difficulty, and people gloat about completing it without any other players helping. Anybody who has had the pleasure of doing this quest immediately realizes why people so often complain about the Otami Ruins area.

** Barton Lake can be really friggin' annoying at times. The Flying Giftbox monsters chase you farther than any other Animated and pretty much kill you instantly, there are elite, tough Grass puffs that follow around giant mommy Grass puffs, except the elite Grass puffs are exactly the same as their weaker counterparts. When you realize some stronger players simply kill the mother Grass puffs and leave the elites, then you're screwed if you mistake it for a normal puff when you're on a quest requiring you kill a ton of them. Plus, the fact that you have to bang trash cans for a long time to ''maybe'' get a Carrion Flower puff to pop out, which immediately attack you... And this isn't even talking about the ''two'' bosses on that level, both of whom are major pains in the ass.
* What, no mention of the Old Aqueduct? The P3s there may seem harmless alone, but if you ever spot one alone, it'll usually notice you and go fetch some of its buddies SPECIFICALLY to go kick your ass. And don't even get me started on going into the depths of their territory just to take down their commander, which is surrounded by like, dozens of his buddies, a good number of them a rank higher than the grunts and therefore even more difficult to kill. And may your deity of choice save you should the area specific event start up, where the monstrous killer space bugs start running around the area at random while you're trying to kill the P3s. Your deity help you even more if you run into the black or red ones. Or the orangey ones that run up to specifically to suicide bomb you.

* The Oculus was the most hated dungeon in the ''Wrath of the Lich King'' expansion due to the dragon-riding segment at the end, which replaced all the players abilities with new controls which many people had no idea how to use. And then comes Malygos, raid boss of the location, featuring final phase with the whole raid riding on dragons (''with different abilities'' from the Oculus ones just in case playes were getting too comfortable) while he blasts you harder than the dungeon boss ever did.

* Vashj'ir in ''Cataclysm''. Many claim the zone is an example of AtlantisIsBoring, but the zone is actually quite diverse, with seaweed forests, massive palaces, deep ravines, underwater caves, and enormous sea creatures. Its status as a ScrappyLevel seems to come mostly from the fact that people just don't like underwater levels. Also when first released it was incredibly buggy, preventing some people from even progressing through it (you can still get screwed on the final quest if you're unlucky), and secondly the whole theme of the zone was a build-up to a confrontation with underwater [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch abominations]] which [[AbortedArc never happened,]] making the whole thing feel pointless.
* Again in ''Cataclysm'': The Dragon Soul raid which was the GrandFinale, with some going as far to call it the worst raid ever. Completely recycled locations, featuring bosses with completely recycled models. Even the trailer which preceded the raid's release was half-assed.

* Also from ''Legion'', Highmountain. The main hub zone is not fun to navigate, elevators are slow, the hall at the bottom and the outer area of it are quite empty. The quests are considered quite bad, ESPECIALLY the escort quests (of which there were a few): either the NPC just stops following or they are slow as molasses, the one with the old tauren mom was just infuriatingly slow. The terrain is incredibly difficult to navigate (especially considering you aren't allowed to fly when you first play there): it must have been a real challenge to put a boulder, a stick, or a blade of grass one cannot pass over into every single nook and cranny so there is only one possible path. Also, a lot of the quests didn't even correctly mark where the items and such were supposed to be, and even when they did, you couldn't tell if the quest giver was on top of the mountain or inside a cave. Finally, there are some points where it's ''obvious'' Blizzard wanted to troll players. A quest involves following a tauren [[spoiler:(actually a black dragon)]] inside a cave, and said tauren eventually jumps off a cliff to a pool of water. Since SoftWater applies in this game, a player would think of doing the same... only it's a smaller target than it appears. There's also a mob called "Gornoth the Lost" that's been compared to the Fel Reaver from ''Burning Crusade'', only worse because he patrols around a very, very enclosed quest zone with trees and the like blocking your view (at least the Fel Reaver patrolled the entire zone so you'd be unlikely to see him for another half hour or so after he passed, and if you were paying attention you could SEE him), can spot you from nearly 40 yards away, never loses aggro even if you get far from him, and to boot he serves no purpose in that quest zone. None. He is there to piss the player off.

* While only a city, Dazar'alor earns an impressive amount of hatred due to both it's sheer size and layout. Half of the city is a {{Mayincatec}} pyramid with most commodities spread out across the various levels and the only way to ascend is to take winding staircases that take forever to ascend. The other half of the city is so far away that it requires a flightpoint to reach in a decent amount of time and once again, everything is spread out across different levels. While Boralus is equally large, everything players are likely to use regularly[[note]]Scrapper, profession trainers, flight point, harbor master, and the ship to Zandalar[[/note]] are all kept close together rather than requiring several minutes of running up and down stairs to get from A to B.

* More of a Scrappy Star System, Jita. The system chat is flooded with scammers, {{Real Money Trade}}r bots and spam trades involving overpriced crappy rare drops. At any given moment, there's 1000+ people in the system resulting in bad lag, sometimes resulting in waits of up to five minutes just to get in or out, and often the shortest route going through Caldari space will pass through it. "[[StarWars A wretched hive of scum and villany]], inside a much larger wretched hive of scum and villany".

* The black Moa quest in factions. It's not a particularly difficult quest, but it does involve having to talk ot four different people in four different areas, and as a result takes a good amount of time longer than other quests in the area.
* Polymock, the favoured pasttime of Tyria's InsufferableGenius race, is much more difficult than ordinary gameplay and is considered a ThatOneLevel by itself; but the polymock questline has its own ThatOneLevel: Blarp. He's the third opponent, and ''should'' be fairly easy... but isn't. Many people give up on the questline altogether when they reach Blarp, or resort to buying a gold polymock piece from other players in order to get past him. Once one finally does beat him, however, the rest of the opponents are relative cakewalks.

* The Dunes of Despair bonus objective, especially on Hard mode, is very difficult, even with other players or heroes. You have to defend a single ghostly hero NPC (who does not even attack his aggressors) from increasingly difficult waves of mobs, and constant artillery fire from the siege wurms. You can kill those wurms, but they have a lot of armour and health, and except for maybe the first 2 you can't leave the ghostly hero alone that long. That's the normal mission. The bonus objective requires you to go and leave him and kill 3 bosses sitting together in a fortress with some other mobs. The professions of the bosses is completely random between the original six, with maximum 1 per profession, so if you get a monk boss, you'll have a hard time outdamaging him. You still have to keep the Ghostly hero alive, so you'll probably split up with 2 or 3 defending him, and the remaining 4 or 3 going after the bosses (because at that point of the story line your party size is still limited to 6).
** It's possible with some gimmick tactics to kill the bosses before you trigger the assault on the ghostly hero, but it relies on luck even more so than hoping the enemy bosses don't have a monk amongst them. You basically lure one of the mobs outside of the arena you're in to you (if one happens to wander into longbow range), kill it before it manages to run away (which it ''will'' do if you take too long), and then have one player with a ranged resurrection use a specific Necromancer skill to teleport to the dead mob outside the fortress. The remaining players then equip vampiric weapons that ''slowly'' kill them, and then the one that teleported over resurrects them outside the fortress as well. At this time ''all'' of the level's enemies are clustered around the bonus bosses, requiring multiple, careful pulls to avoid being overrun. If the party can manage this, it's just a matter of repeating the corpse-teleport-death-resurrection gambit ''again'' to get back to the mission. While an EasyLevelTrick, it is anything ''but'' easy or fast.

* The Foundry of Failed Creations in the [[BrutalBonusLevel Realm of Anguish]] is the most difficult of the four sub-zones for a number of reasons. First, the area is separated into small rooms that allow little freedom of movement during battle. Second, mobs don't appear normally but spawn after being triggered which can wipe an unwary group. Third, the mobs themselves are some of the most hated in the campaign and [[AsteroidsMonster spawn new mobs as they are killed]]. And due to how the Realm of Anguish works, a party wipe means you are returned to the outpost and the entire instance resets. It is the region least likely to be completed and the tokens dropped from completing it tend to be higher priced than the tokens from other sub-zones.

** All of Orr, the three endgame zones, are considered this by many players. Hordes upon hordes of Risen, enormous amounts of events which spawn ''more'' Risen, waypoints that are few and far between and often contested due to the enormous amount of events, and the fact that's it's a very bleak place in general, in contrast to 90% of the rest of the game world, which is vibrant and colourful and a joy to explore.

* The Space Combat mission called "Taspan Ambush". Where do we even begin? You have to escort a shuttle carrying a Republic defector from point A to Point B. Just like your very first space mission. Sounds easy right? Except this time, aside from the dozens of starfighters, there are ten ''Republic frigates'' '''chasing''' this shuttle, not just engaged in a brawl with the Imperial fleet sent to recover it. You have scant seconds to disable all of the turrets (all 8 of them) in all of the frigates (all 10 of them) before they leave the shuttle too damaged to survive the massive ambush that awaits in the asteroid belt. What makes this so frustrating is that in most other space missions, success or failure depends solely on your ability to dodge enemy shots, and shoot accurately. But on here, ships ''ignore you'' completely, and focus exclusively on the shuttle. As if this wasn't enough, FRIENDLY FIRE IS ENABLED. That's right, if you don't aim carefully, your own blasters will reduce the health of the shuttle.

* Many, many former Heroic 4 missions could qualify. Almost all of the mobs were elite, could kill in 2-3 hits, and at times it could be very hard to find a group of 4 in contrast to just one other person to run it with you. (To say nothing of how you could often solo Heroic 2s when they still gave their full experience reward if you and your NPC companion had good enough gear or were a couple levels higher.) They got even harder if the group didn't have any healers, as they would have no way to heal without companions, who are of course dismissed once the group is full and had to rely on proper teamwork and dishing out more damage before the enemy mobs killed them.

** For a time Yhoator Jungle was worse. In addition to being a fairly early area to level in, with all of the newness that such a situation it implies, all of the parties would be lined up in the trenches that made up the zone. If one group of the far end unwittingly aggro'ed a Goblin (often too hard to fight with a party at the level typically found in the zone), they'd run it to the zone line. At which point the Goblin would walk back to where it came from, almost certainly aggro'ing another party in the confined space along the way. This cycle could repeat itself all night. Finally, the dev team put out a patch that had mobs despawn and respawn back at their spawn point, solving the problem. Though it's still tedious to get to the zone and most of the inhabitants are still morons.
* The FanNickname Garbage Shittyhell for Garlaige Citadel should sum it up nicely. Once a popular leveling spot to fight bats and beetles, it suffered from the problem that the above mentioned Yhoator Jungle did. Though things were often worse because the camping spots were right beside the zone line, and it wasn't high level goblins that were the problem but too large linked pulls. It would be very common for far too many bats to get pulled to the zone line, and have multiple parties run screaming - yelling at whatever idiot made that pull. Made worse by the fact that each time a person tried to zone in the large group slowly moving away from the zone line would come surging back. People would have to remain dead inside and update their parties when it was finally safe to come back in and start raising. God help you if a new party showed up without dead inside. Of course this was finally solved with the same despawn patch that fixed Yhoator.
* Valkurm and Yhoator are more [[ScrappyLevel Scrappy Levels]] than That One Level. However, pretty much every "dungeon" level of the Chains of Promathia expansion pack was That One Level. And every boss in the Expansion could be [[ThatOneBoss That One Boss]], but that's besides the point. The Promyvion zones below are CoP areas.
** The Phomiuna Aqueducts is a zone with small areas True Sight (can see if even if you're invisible) Tauri mobs in most every hallway, and those mobs can inflict Doom upon targets, which will instantly kill the target when the countdown reaches zero. There's the Cursna spell that is supposed to erase curses like Doom, but it's not guaranteed to work. In fact, it has a very sad rate of working, to the point it's usually easier for the White Mage to let you die and Raise you.

** At NA release, the deodorize/sneak/invisible potions, which make this fairly easy to do, were far too expensive for most players to purchase. It is possible, but very difficult and time consuming, to do it without any of these buffs.
** If you got to Jeuno and didn't look up what items you need for the chocobo quest before hand, you better hope someone was selling them in the Jeuno auction house. Otherwise you needed to run back to one of the starting areas. You needed four items from hares found in very specific areas that you have no other reason to fight (too annoying to fight for experience, no other quests require you to kill them, and they are non-aggressive so you don't need to fight them in self defense).

** And it was made worse by the fact that your first trip into the past dropped you at 1 of 3 random zones, and until you progressed a little further in the story and activated the other warps you could only use that particular warp. Not a problem for 2 of the warps, but the entrance for the 3rd in the present requires traveling through Garlaige Citadel - which has special switch activated doors that need multiple people to open. God help you if you random get dumped at that warp point on you first trip into the past and you die in the past (having to Home Point back to the present) before you're able to activate either of the more accessible warps.

** The second boss not only has another monster that must be killed before damaging it (and can be re-summoned multiple times, basically a miniboss version of Titan with the Heart stage on repeat), but tends to ignore standard aggro mechanics and targets whoever it wants. And, while its companion monster is up, it constantly unleashes ridiculous attacks that take off at ''least'' half your health, from a single-target punch that throws you halfway across the room and stuns you as a setup to another attack, to one [=AoE=] that targets ''the entire arena'' that he'll spam in higher numbers as the fight drags on, and several others with fixed cones that are basically guaranteed death.
** The last boss has Mythril Verges, ankh-like things that shoot FrickingLaserBeams everywhere. Whilst there's only one at a time early on and they're not as powerful as they were in previous builds, they are replaced more frequently as the boss' health decreases, getting close causes them to erect a barrier that prevents you from getting away until it's dead, and eventually the boss summons four at once to [[BeamSpam just fire in patterns over the area]]. It can get pretty hectic.
** Last but not least, killing an assortment of dungeon-specific mooks '''and''' either the first or second boss is ''mandatory'' for completing your Rank 2 Maelstrom or Twin Adder GC Hunting Logs respectively, which is in turn mandatory if you wish to ascend to the rank of Second Lieutenant with your Grand Company - woe to non-tank players who don't end up throwing at least one attack at every enemy in a pull and end up having to do the dungeon twice to get all the kills.
* Two-thirds of the dungeon of Cutter's Cry is composed of drab brown rooms filled with the same enemies over and over, with randomly occurring (and irritatingly frequent) environmental ground [=AOEs=]. The first boss is a boring tank-and-spank with adds, while the second is a sandworm that repeatedly vanishes during the fight, returning with a bursting, untelegraphed column AOE, combined with damage-over-time effects from other attacks that will ''kill'' your healer if they're not optimally geared. The dungeon's sole saving grace is its Chimera final boss, but even she has ThatOneAttack: an AOE that either fries everyone in melee range or fries everyone who's ''not'' in melee range, the distinction given by a coded message (its eyes glow violet for the ranged attack or blue for the melee one). In any pick-up-group there will always be ''someone'' who forgets the code under pressure and runs the wrong way, or runs back and forth on the spot unable to make up their mind. Other than that, the dungeon isn't hard -- it's just so damn ugly and boring.
* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can and will find yourself fending off hordes of enemies all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses requires you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up too much. The second boss has no telegraphs to its attacks[[note]]At least, not in the form of "holographic" telegraphs of the area of effect, which is the case for most other enemies: he still has a "charge" meter visible just above his name. However, given that this is unusual for bosses in this game, it still qualifies as annoying and unexpected[[/note]] and many of his swings can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpiders of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.''
** Of particular note, a lot of people run this dungeon for the first time with some of their class's artifact armor, which is suitable for the start of the major version's end-game. Except if you run this as an any of the ''Heavensward'' classes before before level 50, you're in for a world of hurt, since they don't get artifact armor by then and need a lot of grinding for tomestones to get comparable Ironworks {{magitek}} gear.
* Pharos Sirius. Before Patch 2.2, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who got this for their roulette and stayed. While the actual dungeon and bosses aren't so bad, it was the [[ThatOneBoss last boss]] that likely caused many players to rage quit the second they got it due to an annoying add that would immobilize a party member and Siren's constant spam of debuffs that either reduce the healer's healing potency or causes Confusion if the debuff isn't cured in time. The first boss also caused massive issues for many because the adds that spawn in are based on the boss' remaining HP. Since people were naturally attuned to putting the hurt on a boss as fast as possible, it wasn't unheard of to have parties being overwhelmed by the sheer number of adds alone and dying to them rather than the boss himself.

* Come 3.0 and Heavensward, there's now Neverreap. In the first segment, you have to deal with the annoyance of twisters that patrol the area, knocking up anyone who gets sucked into them, messing up combos, cast times, aggro and more. Easy enough though, the tank just pulls the mobs out of the twisters paths. The first boss here isn't too bad, and the second area and boss are quite easy too. But then the third area of the level forces you to fight enemies along a path with randomly spawning geysers, which deal damage over time and completely obscure your vision whether you're in them or not. And then there's the [[ThatOneBoss last boss]] of the level. The twisters that messed with players in the first area? They spawn regularly throughout the fight. And then the boss will frequently spit out a Mist Sprite onto a player, distracting DPS players as it will deal an [=AoE=] if not dealt with quickly. And then after spawning a couple of those, a number of Wind Sprites will spawn, and the boss will be covered in a barrier of wind that inflicts heavy damage to anyone that gets at all close. And it will begin wandering around the small arena until all the adds are dealt with. And the twisters are still knocking players up during all this. And to top it all off, once the adds are dealt with, the boss will charge and release a powerful knock-back blast which can easily kill players by knocking them off the edge of the arena.
* Amaurot, the final dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'' is basically known as "screw the melee and caster players" by the community. The entire dungeon has enemies that will spam AOE attacks and due to the chaotic environment, meteorites can also fall at random. There's also a bomb that will tether itself to a random DPS player and will focus on attacking them only while constantly lowering their defense to fire. Naturally, the bombs will explode upon death and if the tethered player has too many fire vulnerability stacks, they will very likely die. There's also dark sprites that will attach themselves to healers and will constantly apply a debuff on them that makes their healing magic significantly weaker. The second boss fight is basically a horde attack of all the monsters you've seen so far and includes the two that attach themselves to players. The final stretch of the dungeon not only has more enemies that will get very AOE spam happy, the final boss that hangs out in the background will take potshots at the party with linear AOE attacks that can stretch across the whole map.

* Ragnarok Online. Lighthalzen Bio-Labs Level 3. It is home to superpowered ghost versions of the 2-1 transcendents (Lord Knight, Sin X, Sniper, etc) whose normal attacks hit for 4-digit damage. Any and all of them can be your personal DemonicSpider, but among the worst is Kathryne Keyron, the High Wiz. She's ghost type, making her immune to the [[OneHitKill Extremity Fist]] packed by the Monks and Champions who regularly frequent the area. If you're a Sniper, the only other job class that can reliably solo here, fellow Sniper Cecil Damon is around to make your life miserable. Luckily, the usual experience penalty upon death is nonexistent here - for commercial servers, anyway. FreeToPlay players are still out of luck.
** And Freya help you if that Cecil Damon you just shot is actually the MVP Sniper Cecil. The fact that all of the [=MVPs=] look identical to their normal counterparts is particularly frustrating.

** Half-way through the quest "Ratcatchers", you must do a forced stealth mission in order to kill some rats with your cat. However, this part of the quest suffers from heavily bugged AI. Meaning guards will often spot you behind walls, when they're not facing you and often walking out of their patrol routes into places where they are completely unavoidable. Thankfully, a fix has made this quest less frustrating, but god help you if you're doing this quest with only a kitten, as you wills spend hours watching your chatbox filling up with "Your kitten fails to catch the rat".

** Mourning's End, pt. II is another example. The quest revolves around solving several light puzzles inside of a massive underground temple called the [[MeaningfulName Temple of Light]]. While this would be a fair challenge on it's own, the temple is packed with Shadows that are always aggressive and frequently deal up to 130 damage. Worse still is there's also a section where you must use your agility to crawl across wall supports to reach more pieces of the puzzle, which depending on your agility level is a Luck-Based Mission in itself.

** Elemental Workshop III. You're given a huge 8x8 grid, and you're told (via pictogram) that you need to use this grid to charge and operate a machine. It's recommended that when you do this quest, you have a couple aspirin handy, because you WILL have a headache afterward.
** The final part of Some Like It Cold. You're escaping from pursuing seals in a heavily damaged submarine. To defeat the seals, you play a game of Battleship. You know, that game that's heavily luck-based. Meanwhile, the submarine is falling apart at the seams, and you have to assign your crewmembers to hold it together. There's four crewmembers, but five different parts that need to be constantly repaired or the sub's health will decrease. Oh, and every time you get hit in Battlefish, the submarine's maximum health is decreased. It really all boils down to luck.
** A huge part of "Sliske's Endgame" has you go through not one, but ''two'', series of [[TheMaze massive and overly cryptic mazes]] as you make your way over to the Stone of Jas. There's no obvious indication as to which path you need to take to progress, and it's very easy to get lost (even with the minimap maximised as much as possible), costing you a lot of unnecessary wasted time in the process. Even if you're [[GuideDangIt relying on a guide]] just to go through the mazes alone while skipping random encounters with the other participants of Sliske's sadistic games, it can still take an excrutiatingly long time before you finally call the mazes done and dusted.

* ''VideoGame/GrandChase'' has Tower of Disappearance, which is called [[NintendoHard unforgiving]] by articles online. You only get one live. When you die, that's it. Not to mention that items, and revives are disabled. If you were to take too long to clear one area, you'll take damage constantly with no way to stop it until you enter the next area. Have fun reaching Kaze'aze!

** And "Proof is in the Poison" is stated in the DDO Wiki to be one of the most difficult quests in the game and that a party going in needs to be over-powered compared to any other level 4 mission. The [[DemonicSpiders Quickfoot Casters]] on the bridge alone have led to many a TotalPartyKill of an unprepared party, and that's not even mentioning the traps, or the other casters that use Melf's Acid Arrow as their main attack.

** Another nasty one is The Crucible. Early on in the quest is [[TheMaze the Maze of Cunning.]] It's a confusing maze with three crests you have to find, as well as three levers that your party has to stand on, various monsters inside and bow- and magic-wielding gnolls on the walls, the latter of which will happily trip you with Cometfall. Assuming you make it through this section without having to leave the computer, there's two separate portions where you have to send one guy to run through an area with multiple traps, one of which requires jumping and another that's underwater. And if they die, your Cleric probably isn't going to make it in there to resurrect them.

** Mission 4-5: Wind Valley 1 is a veritable pain in the tail. Characters in the game travel fairly slowly, but in this level you have to traverse a long canyon of wind pushing you backwards, slowing you to the breakneck pace of about half a meter per second. But that's not all, there are occasional cactus enemies who will punch you if you get too close. And some of them are underground (you can't see them). Additionally, there is a constant barrage of miniature cacti that will push you back a huge distance and deal ten damage. While ten damage isn't a huge deal, they'll knock you back a long distance, and when you get KO'd (but not killed) your helpless body will get bombarded by tons of the little buggers! Oh, and guess what: when you reach the end, there's a wall of large cactus enemies that you somehow have to get through/around while the wind is still pushing you back. Thought you were done? Haha, that's so naive of you! Of course you're not done! Last of all you have to compete in a battle with two enormous monsters in an enclosed space, now that you're out of potions and low on health! Hope you don't die! Oh, too bad! Have fun navigating the valley again! RAGE.
** Mission 9-6: Shadow God Zera has broken the spirits of many. The level has five shadow crystals that must be destroyed in order to move on, each with at least one clone of Zera next to them that will attack you with Coma (an unavoidable status attack that temporarily sets the player's [[HPToOne HP to 13]]) and Doom (An avoidable attack that [[FixedDamageAttack always deals 300 damage]]) in alternation. Some of the crystals are in aggro range of two Zeras, meaning that you will find yourself constantly running, in fear of a Coma+Doom combo. The place is also littered with several weak Shades that, in this situation can [[CherryTapping Cherry Tap]] you for a cheap kill with their guided projectile attacks. Oh, and if you're playing with friends, missteps caused by lag can easily result in death. Destroying all five will then open the way to the boss arena, which has three more Shadow Crystals, constantly respawning Shades, and ''all four copies of Zera'' in your sight, spamming their Coma+Doom combo. Managed to avoid dying and destroyed all three crystals? Good, now here's another set of them for you to destroy. Do it again. ''Fifteen more times''.
* ''VideoGame/GranadoEspada'''s Judgement Day questline, and by extension, Tora's recruitment quest. Both requires you to traverse through the insanely high-end Lucifer Castle at least three times, sneaking past enemies and traps that will OneHitKill anyone who isn't invulnerable to damage, meaning that you will need to spam dozens upon dozens of Soul Crystals just to get to the quest point. Worse part? You can't save warps inside, so if you need to get out to talk to an NPC in town, be prepared to walk from the start. Worst part? This is part of the main storyline, meaning if you want to proceed further, you need to finish this questline.
** Also, overlapping with ThatOneBoss: Time Paradox, Rose. Main reason why this is ThatOneLevel material is because ''the whole raid will screw the entire squad up'' if anyone in the raid isn't careful. Taking down the boss to certain HP levels will cause it to spawn flowers that will spawn mini versions (though equally as painful) of the boss once their bars become full, or when you kill them, basically SNAFU if you don't lure the boss somewhere far from the patch of are where it spawned the flowers.
* Ask most players of ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'', and you'll find the most frequently despised quest is the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Quest for the Holy MacGuffin]], the level 11 quest. As opposed to the previous ten levels worth of main quests, each of which are fairly self-contained in one area of the game each, the MacGuffin quest has you running all over the Kingdom on six different mini-quests (one to get your father's diary, three for the key to the final area, one to find the final area itself, one to find the MacGuffin), each with its own set of annoying mechanics. Heavy on inventory-clicking? Identifying four otherwise similar spheres by combat results alone, leaving yourself open to attack while doing so? (possibly) Backtracking to a low-level area to waste turns looking for two items to drop? Bouncing back and forth for five turns at a time between the desert and the oasis? It's all there. A shame, too, since that's the most interesting part of the game, just the most annoying game-wise.
** ''Very'' few people like the Level 9 quest revamp. First you have to spend multiple turns gathering parts to build a bridge; while there are ways to speed this up, they're not hinted at ''all''. Once you get through that, there's the Peaks. A-Boo Peak is easiest (you fight ghosts), but the constant bashing of the StarWars prequels and certain parts of the Franchise/StarTrek franchise gets old ''instantly''. Oil Peak can be a pain due to requiring Monster Level adjustments to do it faster. And Twin Peak is utterly ''despised'' - you get only the vaguest hint what you need to get past its tests, and if you fail, you don't get ''any'' hints as to what you did wrong! (There is an AntiFrustrationFeature, but that takes fifty turns to trigger.)
** The Level 12 quest, where you have to [[OneManArmy start a war and finish it all by yourself]] on the [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment Mysterious Island of Mystery]]. Like the previous quest (Level 11, mentioned above), in order to increase the amount if enemies you kill for each victory in the battlefield, you have to do miniquests all around the Island. Some of them are fun (like Defowl the Farm, where you have to beat up a bunch of giant ducks, and there are many different types of them making it pretty interesting), the others not so much, like Recover the Sister's Meat, where you have to beat up 50-100 identical thugs that don't drop anything besides meat, which is taken by sisters anyway. Oh, and it's the only miniquest where you have to be dressed as a War Hippy/Frat Warrior, and those aren't the best equipment sets out there. Or Advertise for the Mysterious Island Arena, where you have to slap flyers on lots of monsters outside the Battlefield. Granted, you can use flyers on monsters from other miniquests, but it's not guaranteed that those will be enough to please your quest giver. Ignoring those miniquests is not recommended, as otherwise you will have to spend ''1000 turns'' in the Battlefield. Oh, and the boss at the end - he's not exactly hard, but has ''tons'' of health, and you may have problems if you're not strong enough.

* If you play ''VideoGame/SpiralKnights'', you will have (soon or later) entered an Arena, where each chamber involves facing multiple waves of enemies according to the elemental type of the level. This can become a major problem when the element happens to be Ice or Electricity (a few patches ago, Fire also counted). One of the rounds will invariably involve 10+ turrets, which in the midgame can fire 3 shots of status-inducing goodness at once. Freeze sticks you in place, ready to be mobbed by the other enemies, while Shock causes you to occasionally pause, spasm and take damage. This can also result in you being mobbed and quickly dying. Ice or Electric Arenas can easily consume hundreds (even thousands) of energy on a particularly bad run.

** Forget about Arena. There's a reason players don't like entering Danger Rooms often, especially one that cost 5 energy to open.

** The expansion mission, Operation: Crimson Hammer, is a nasty one. There's plenty of Gremlins, including two new types of Gremlin. Mortafires, gremlins with large shields and mortars, aren't too tough to avoid, but they're very time-consuming to fight, especially solo. Ghostmane Stalkers are ninja gremlins with buzzsaws that can turn invisible. They can't attack while invisible, but they can cause a Death Mark status which lowers defenses. And unless you break their cloak, which is tough to manage without a dedicated haze-bomber, they don't stay visible for long. Aside from these new enemies, the mission itself has some very difficult rooms; a good example is the cramped room with a Battle Pod and various Gremlins and Gremlin Spawners, as well as the particularly nasty Mecha Knights. Finally, there's the boss of the mission, Warmaster Seerus. There's five phases to the fight, two of which involve running around in the boss room dodging rockets, lasers, and respawning Gremlins while waiting for a central Battle Pod's shield to drop. Warmaster Seerus himself runs quickly, drops large-range bombs that deal Shadow damage, and has a hammer that causes four-way explosions when swung. And the entirety of the fight is zoomed out, which is good for watching where you are in relation to the Battle Pods, but also good for hurting your eyes.
** The Shadow Lairs are very difficult. First, it costs 1800 energy just to get the key to enter one; though a full party can split the cost, that's still 450 energy per party member. The Lairs themselves have similar floor layouts to the different boss areas (Gloaming Wildwoods, Royal Jelly Palace, Ironclaw Munitions Factory, and Firestorm Citadel) but the difficulty is highly increased, with more enemies in more cramped areas. Each of the levels gets an extra status theme, too; Ironclaw Munitions Factory keeps its Shock theme as well as the new Fire theme, and Firestorm Citadel has the Carnavon, a Slag Walker with cursed breath and a shield on its back. Each Shadow Lair boss gets the new status and increased abilities (in the Snarbolax's case, an EXTRA Snarbolax is added to the arena, as well as a respawning Silkwing) and a Swarm Seed is added into the boss room. This Swarm Seed generates a large shadowy zone that increases enemies' defenses and slows down Knights inside- and this is while the boss is mauling/squashing/firing at/swinging at the Knights. Finally, once that's done, there's [[spoiler: the [[EldritchLocation Unknown Passage,]] which contains Void-based enemies that don't drop anything, as well as invincible Swarm Turrets and more Swarm Seeds throughout. The final section of the Unknown Passage swarms you with them.]] Make no mistake, you WILL need to energy revive.

* Mabinogi's G2 Paladin storyline. In a game where rushing into a dungeon alone pretty much means suicide, they make a entire chain of quest with 90% solo dungeons. Cue ragequits from pure mages and archers after reaching a certain dungeon with a monster that can't be knocked back.

** "Assimilated", in which you and your crew must work your way through a Borg cube absolutely crawling with huge numbers of drones, searching through hazards and occasional ambushes for a randomly-placed transporter... and then achieve a series of objectives in [[OhCrap a room stuffed with a good fifty or sixty Borg.]] If you fight through it you will probably die. But even if you switch your bridge officers to passive, one ambush in the wrong place can lead to a ZergRush. Suffice it to say this mission drew a lot of screaming on the forums from people running it for the first time. It was RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap by the Season 9 update, which shortened it and made it much easier, and also greatly improved the loot.

** "Hive: Onslaught", especially on Elite, and most certainly if you want the optional. First stage: Dozens of Borg cubes, spheres, and tactical cubes. Second stage: Two Borg unimatrixes, boss ships with an extra OneHitKill attack in addition to their usual one, and the extra one, a plasma lance, can hit you from 30 kilometers away. Also you're supposed to be able to avoid being targeted by staying next to the shielded Borg diamond containing the Borg queen, but sometimes they'll lance you there anyway because of a bug. Final stage: The Borg diamond, easily a match for five player-piloted ships. No matter what you're flying, expect to die at least twice before you're done. Fortunately DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist.

* ''VideoGame/Wizard101'' has an ''entire world'' of That One Level: Azteca (at least pre-2013 nerf). Leading up to it were two easy worlds (Wizard City and Krokotopia), three moderate worlds (Marleybone, MooShu and Dragonspyre [this last one was actually kinda hard before the 2010 nerf], plus an additionl side world [Grizzleheim] that started as level 20 but the areas escalated in level), then a difficulty spike with Celestia, introducing the second arc (also later nerfed, though not to the extent of Dragonspyre, sorta like the Azteca nerf) which slightly changed the way enemies fought (health was now much more dependant on school, hardly any enemies used off-school spells [meaning no more annoying Weakness spam], now they'd use irregular spells [not taught by the teacher in quests or otherwise], they'd start with much more than just one pip [this amount was later nerfed since they sorta went in all-guns-blazing] and would now have a new weakness [in the form of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors] in addition to their antithesis [Ice-Fire, Life-Death, Storm-Myth, Balance with none, but being weak to Life, Death and Myth], these being Life-Storm-Fire and so forth for the schools in the Sun triangle and Ice-Death-Myth for the schools in the Moon triangle [ie. before, Fire enemies would only be weak to Ice and vice versa but Celestia+ Fire enemies would be weak to Ice and Storm and Ice enemies to Fire and Myth], while in turn reducing the percentage of the boost), which was kept for Zafaria, then Avalon kept it mostly the same but started using a health system more akin to WC-DS (health being more dependent on rank that class, thus making Storm enemies more difficult), then Azteca introduced bosses that had mastery over two schools (but only having the weaknesses of one) and it's been suspected that they also started having better stats other than HP. Azteca was pretty hard and grindy, with the high amount of health enemies had, plus being kinda boring and being released at a point where players were going through a nostalgia kick with the first arc and classic [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]].
** Slightly less so, some cheating bosses and postgame towers are this. The boss Jotun was it before his cheats were removed due to a really unfair cheat and having extra bosses helping him in that fight, the dungeon Xibalba is still considered this, though with the added relief of being the final dungeon of Azteca; after it you get to play through the much more enjoyable world Khrysalis, Briskbreeze Tower was pretty hard when it was released but due to level cap increases it's no longer hard, Waterworks Tower was just like Briskbreeze Tower when it was released but it also had the best gear in the game available there, thus it was ran much more often for farming, and it's still really hard to solo these days, and Tower of the Helephant is still this. Even 40 levels later, this tower is nigh impossible for Storm wizards to solo (although 30 levels later it was literally impossible, so at least there's a tiny improvement) and extremely difficult for anyone else.
* ''VideoGame/{{Pirate 101}}'' has the first quests from Book 8 which serve as introduction to Port Regal Skyway, which involve defeating an absurd amount of ships that are quite hard (or take a long time if you board/let them board you and take out the crew) to sink solo, especially with the slightly outdated ship you have at this point (because the next ship available is ''inside'' Port Regal Skyway, unless you have someone teleport you into Port Regal to buy it or did a lot of side quests and grinded ship EXP and have someone to teleport you into Tumbleweed to buy the Bison Galleon [next ship after Marleybone Skiff], which makes these quests much easier). There used to be a glitch where you could access Tumbleweed Skyway [and thus Tumbleweed] from the entrance to it on Big Sky but it has since been patched). Then around five quests later you get to find ten ''more'' ships to sink. Then next quest you get ''TEN FREAKING MORE SHIPS TO SINK!'' At least after that you get to one of the coolest dungeons in the game (which is a little long but still very fun and furthers the plot).

** Like in ''VideoGame/Wizard101'', there's a postgame tower that's considerably hard and requires a good team to fight with you if you don't wanna spend four hours in this damn tower (at least most of the time on ''VideoGame/Wizard101'''s postgame towers you can get by if the others just know how to avoid the cheats/work around them, and don't necessarily have to play very well so long as any one person can carry the team). Add in the fact that there's a badge with a really cool effect for going rogue on the before-before last fight and only one player can go rogue, which means a lot of players only do this tower for the badge and ragequit if someone beats them to the punch on said fight. Not to mention that there's so much good gear up for grabs in this tower that it almost demands you run it a lot of times (plus there's a badge for completing it ''25 times'').
* Ask any player of ''VideoGame/TheSecretWorld'' what their least favourite quest type is, and you'll inevitably hear 'Sabotage'. Much of the time the goal is to complete the mission within a certain time limit, without being spotted, et cetera. While the game does have AntiFrustrationFeatures for some of these (respawning multiple times in one results in a completely abandoned facility), the end result is inevitably getting sent back to the start... over, and over. This crosses with ThatOneAchievement where you have to perform these runs ''perfectly'' to obtain those points.

* The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak tends to be this for a lot of people. Not that it's particularly hard, but that it's boring (the second boss, even down to the arena you fight it in, is an almost-exact copy and paste of the first, and while the last boss is more unique, if you like watching mid-dungeon cutscenes you'll be spending five minutes waiting for Lahabrea to stop [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment saying the same two things over and over again]] and finally sic the boss on you), has a needlessly slow last third due to the dungeon being covered in sticky goo that slows you down, and its level cap is under 30, just before where your job skills start getting more interesting and varied.

** The actual final boss fight spews poisonous AOE pools that will quickly overtake the battlefield and leaving the boss on the pools will have its HP regenerate, forcing the tank to pull them around. Fortunately not as bad in more recent patches; unless the party is heavy on melee DPS or Aiatar targets the tank regularly (which he usually doesn't, as randomly targeting the healer [[SpitefulAI usually takes priority]]), the pools are fairly evenly spread and also don't provide too much regeneration.[[note]]In earlier builds, even one pool was sufficient to rapidly regenerate Aiatar's health, and he used the attack very frequently.[[/note]]

** The second boss not only has another monster that must be killed before damaging it (and can be re-summoned multiple times, basically a miniboss version of Titan with the Heart stage on repeat), but tends to ignore standard aggro mechanics and targets whoever it wants. And, while its companion monster is up, it constantly unleashes ridiculous attacks that take off at ''least'' half your health, from a single-target punch that stuns you as a setup to another attack, to one [=AoE=] that targets ''the entire arena'' that he'll spam in higher numbers as the fight drags on, and several others with fixed cones that are basically guaranteed death.
** The last boss has Mythril Verges, ankh-like things that shoot FrickingLaserBeams everywhere. Whilst there's only one at a time early on and they're not as powerful as they were in previous builds, they are replaced more frequently as the boss' health decreases, getting close causes them to erect a barrier that prevents you from getting away until it's dead, and eventually the boss summons four at once. It can get pretty hectic.

* Aurum Vale, which nobody enjoys doing unless it's the first room for EXP. The first room itself has mobs so close to one another and other patrolling mobs that you can find yourself fending off hordes of enemies all at once. The bosses are also very gimmicky; the first and last bosses requires you to eat fruit to dispel debuffs they inflict on you and the stacks cause more damage if you let them build up. The second boss has no telegraphs to its attacks[[note]]At least, not in the form of "holographic" telegraphs of the area of effect, which is the case for most other enemies: he still has a "charge" meter visible just above his name. However, given that this is unusual for bosses in this game, it still qualifies as annoying and unexpected[[/note]] and many of his swings can one shot a tank, let alone anyone else. It is also home to the dreaded Malboros, the DemonicSpider of the Final Fantasy series. ''And they come in packs.''
** Of particular note, a lot of people run this dungeon for the first time with some of their class's artifact armor, which is suitable for the start of the major version's end-game. Except if you run this as an any of the ''Heavensward'' classes before before level 50, you're in for a world of hurt, since they don't get artifact armor by then and need a lot of grinding for tomestones to get Ironworks {{magitek}} gear.

* Amaurot, the final dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'' is basically known as "screw the melee and caster players" by the community. The entire dungeon has enemies that will spam AOE attacks and due to the chaotic environment, meteorites can also fall at random. There's also a bomb that will tether itself to a random DPS player and will focus on attacking them only while constantly lowering their defense to fire. Naturally, the bombs will explode upon death and if the tethered player has too many fire vulnerability stacks, they will very likely die. There's also dark sprites that will attach themselves to healers and will constantly apply a debuff on them that makes their healing magic significantly weaker. The second boss fight is basically a horde attack of all the monsters you seen so far and includes the two that attach themselves to players. The final stretch of the dungeon not only has more enemies that will get very AOE spam happy, the final boss that hangs out in the background will take potshots at the party with linear AOE that can stretch across the whole map.

* ''VideoGame/{{Runescape}}'' possesses one of these in the form of the quest "Ratcatchers", namely around half-way in the quest where you must do a forced stealth mission in order to kill some rats with your cat. However, this part of the quest suffers from heavily bugged AI. Meaning guards will often spot you behind walls, when they're not facing you and often walking out of their patrol routes into places where they are completely unavoidable. Thankfully, a fix has made this quest less frustrating, but god help you if you're doing this quest with only a kitten, as you wills spend hours watching your chatbox filling up with "Your kitten fails to catch the rat".

* The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak tends to be this for a lot of people. Not that it's particularly hard, but that it's boring (two of the three bosses are basically the same), has a needlessly slow last third due to the dungeon being covered in sticky goo that slows you down, and its level cap is under 30, just before where your job skills start getting more interesting and varied.

** You must pick up certain items and use them to tip the scales in order to proceed in the last leg of the dungeon, and the puzzles themselves [[GuideDangIt give absolutely no hints]].

** The second boss not only has another monster that must be killed before damaging it (and can be re-summoned multiple times, basically a miniboss version of Titan with the Heart stage on repeat), but tends to ignore standard aggro mechanics and targets whoever it wants. And, while its companion monster is up, it constantly unleashes ridiculous attacks that take off at ''least'' half your health, from a single-target punch that stuns you as a setup to another attack, to one [=AoE=] that targets ''the entire arena'', and several others with fixed cones that are basically guaranteed death.
** The last boss has Mythril Verges, ankh-like things that shoot FrickingLaserBeams everywhere. Whilst there's only one at a time early on and they're not as powerful as they were in previous builds, they are replaced more frequently as the boss' health decreases, and eventually the boss summons four at once. It can get pretty hectic.
** Last but not least, killing an assortment of dungeon-specific mooks '''and''' either the first or second boss is ''mandatory'' for completing your Rank 2 Maelstrom or Twin Adder GC Hunting Logs respectively, which is in turn mandatory if you wish to ascend to the rank of Second Lieutenant with your Grand Company.
* Two-thirds of the dungeon of Cutter's Cry is composed of drab brown rooms filled with the same enemies over and over, with randomly occurring (and irritatingly frequent) environmental ground [=AOEs=]. The first boss is a boring tank-and-spank with adds, while the second is a sandworm that repeatedly vanishes during the fight, returning with a bursting, untelegraphed column AOE, combined with damage-over-time effects from other attacks that will ''kill'' your healer if they're not optimally geared. The dungeon's sole saving grace is its Chimera final boss, but even she has ThatOneAttack: an AOE that either fries everyone in melee range or fries everyone who's ''not'' in melee range, the distinction given by a coded message. In any pick-up-group there will always be ''someone'' who forgets the code under pressure and runs the wrong way, or runs back and forth on the spot unable to make up their mind. Other than that, the dungeon isn't hard -- it's just so damn ugly and boring.

* The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak tends to be this for a lot of people. Not that it's particularly hard, but that it's boring (two of the three bosses are basically the same), has a needlessly slow last third due to the dungeon being covered in sticky goo, and its level cap is under 30, just before where your job skills start getting more interesting and varied.
* Brayflox's Longstop is the point where the difficulty is kicked up a few notches and tests the players' ability to adapt to changing situations and knowing how to utilize their class properly. All three boss fights take place in pretty tight arenas that leave little room to manuver around when a big AOE attack is coming.

** The actual final boss fight spews poisonous AOE pools that will quickly overtake the battlefield and leaving the boss on the pools will have its HP regenerate, forcing the tank to pull them around. Fortunately not as bad in recent patches; unless the party is heavy on melee DPS or Aiatar targets the tank regularly, the pools are fairly evenly spread and also don't provide too much regen[[note]]In earlier builds, even one pool was sufficient to rapidly regenerate Aiatar's health, and he used the attack very frequently.[[/note]]

** You must pick up certain items and use them to tip the scales in order to proceed in the last leg of the dungeon and the puzzles themselves are a GuideDangIt for many.

** The second boss not only has another monster that must be killed before damaging it (and can be re-summoned multiple times, basically a miniboss version of Titan with the Heart stage on repeat), but tends to ignore standard aggro mechanics and targets whoever it wants. And, while its companion monster is up, it constantly unleashes ridiculous attacks that take off at ''least'' half your health, from a single-target punch that stuns you, to one [=AoE=] that targets ''the entire arena'', and several others with fixed cones that are basically guaranteed death.

* Two-thirds of the dungeon of Cutter's Cry is composed of drab brown rooms filled with the same enemies over and over, with randomly occurring (and irritatingly frequent) environmental ground [=AOEs=]. The first boss is an boring tank-and-spank with adds, the second is a sandworm that repeatedly vanishes during the fight, returning with an bursting untelegraphed column AOE. The dungeon's sole saving grace is its Chimera final boss, but even she has ThatOneAttack: an AOE that either fries everyone in melee range or fries everyone who's ''not'' in melee range, the distinction given by a coded message. In any pick-up-group there will always be ''someone'' who forgets the code under pressure and runs the wrong way, or runs back and forth on the spot unable to make up their mind. Other than that, the dungeon isn't hard -- it's just so damn ugly and boring.

** Of particular note, a lot of people run this dungeon for the first time with some of their class's artifact armor, which is suitable for the start of the major version's end-game. Except if you run this as an Astrologian or Dark Knight before level 50, you're in for a world of hurt since they don't get artifact armor by then.
* Pharos Sirius. Before Patch 2.2, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who got this for their roulette and stayed. While the actual dungeon and bosses aren't so bad, it was the [[ThatOneBoss last boss]] that likely caused many players to rage quit the second they got it due to an annoying add that would immobilize a party member and Siren's constant spam of debufs that either reduce the healer's healing potency or causes Confusion if the debuff isn't cured in time. The first boss also caused massive issues for many because the adds that spawn in are based on the boss' remaining HP. Since people were naturally attuned to putting the hurt on a boss as fast as possible, it wasn't unheard of to have parties being overwhelmed by the sheer number of adds alone and dying to them rather than the boss himself.
* As of Patch 4.2, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium became this for making the cutscenes unskippable. This was due to complaints that new players were forced to skip them in order to keep up with other players, usually those just grinding the dungeon for the daily bonus and wanted to get through it as fast as possible. This means for either, the time spent in the dungeon practically doubled or tripled.

* Amurot, the final dungeon of ''Shadowbringers'' is basically known as "screw the melee and caster players" by the community. The entire dungeon has enemies that will spam AOE attacks and due to the chaotic environment, meteorites can also fall at random. There's also a bomb that will tether itself to a random DPS player and will focus on attacking them only while constantly lowering their defense to fire. Naturally, the bombs will explode upon death and if the tethered player has too many fire vulnerability stacks, they will very likely die. There's also dark sprites that will attach themselves to healers and will constantly apply a debuff on them that makes their healing magic significantly weaker. The second boss fight is basically a horde attack of all the monsters you seen so far and includes the two that attach themselves to players. The final stretch of the dungeon not only has more enemies that will get very AOE spam happy, the final boss that hangs out in the background will take potshots at the party with linear AOE that can stretch across the whole map.

** To a degree, The Pit. While not a paticularly difficult quest if run with a healer, The Pit is ''massive.'' The tasks it requires you to take on include a wheel puzzle where the clues are all over a very large room, a puzzle that sees you pulling over 50 levers while dodging lightning bolts, a puzzle that, when complete, turns on deathraps in the rest of the dungeon, four other puzzles of various descriptions and, in one area, running over an elaborate system of pipes, broken platforms and acid jets, knowing full well one mis-step will send you back to square one, all the while dodging fireballs from invincible fire elementals. You have to do that last one ''three times.'' Not for nothing does the wiki denote it the game's longest quest if unprepared. (Under no circumstances even ''think'' of taking this one on at Reaper difficulty.)

* The first campaign had many of these, like Thunderhead keep, but most of them are fairly easy now due to new/update skills, and mainly the introduction of Heroes.
* The Dunes of Despair bonus objective, and especially on Hard mode, is very difficult, even with other players or heroes. You have to defend a single ghostly hero NPC (who does not even attack his aggressors) from increasingly difficult waves of mobs, and constant artillery fire from the siege wurms. You can kill those wurms, but they have a lot of armour and health, and except for maybe the first 2 you can't leave the ghostly hero alone that long. That's the normal mission. The bonus objective requires you to go and leave him and kill 3 bosses sitting together in a fortress with some other mobs. The professions of the bosses is completely random between the original six, with maximum 1 per profession, so if you get a monk boss, you'll have a hard time outdamaging him. You still have to keep the Ghostly hero alive, so you'll probably split up with 2 or 3 defending him, and the remaining 4 or 3 going after the bosses (because at that point of the story line your party size is still limited to 6).
** It's possible with some gimmick tactic to kill the bosses before you trigger the assault on the ghostly hero, but it relies on luck even more so than hoping the enemy bosses don't have a monk amongst them. You basically lure one of the mobs outside of the arena you're in to you (if one happens to wander into longbow range), kill it before it manages to run away (which it ''will'' do if you take too long), and then use one particular spell to teleport to its corpse. Then, you all kill yourself through vampiric weapons which give you a small amount of degeneration, and then the one that teleported over uses a teleporting resurrect to get you on his side so you can use all 6 of you to kill those bosses.

* ''VideoGame/Wizard101'' has an ''entire world'' of That One Level: Azteca (at least pre-2013 nerf). Leading up to it were two easy worlds (Wizard City and Krokotopia), three moderate worlds (Marleybone, MooShu and Dragonspyre [this last one was actually kinda hard before the 2010 nerf], plus an additionl side world [Grizzleheim] that started as level 20 but the areas escalated in level), then a difficulty spike with Celestia, introducing the second arc (also later nerfed, though not to the extent of Dragonspyre, sorta like the Azteca nerf) which slightly changed the way enemies fought (health was now much more dependant on school, hardly any enemies used off-school spells [meaning no more annoying Weakness spam], now they'd use irregular spells [not taught by the teacher in quests or otherwise], they'd start with much more than just one pip [this amount was later nerfed since they sorta went in all-guns-blazing] and would now have a new weakness [in the form of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors] in addition to their antithesis [Ice-Fire, Life-Death, Storm-Myth, Balance with none, but being weak to Life, Death and Myth], these being Life-Storm-Fire and so forth for the schools in the Sun triangle and Ice-Death-Myth for the schools in the Moon triangle [ie. before, Fire enemies would only be weak to Ice and vice versa but Celestia+ Fire enemies would be weak to Ice and Storm and Ice enemies to Fire and Myth], while in turn reducing the percentage of the boost), which was kept for Zafaria, then Avalon kept it mostly the same but started using a health system more akin to WC-DS (health being more dependant on rank that class, thus making Storm enemies more difficult), then Azteca introduced bosses that had mastery over two schools (but only having the weaknesses of one) and it's been suspected that they also started having better stats other than HP. Azteca was pretty hard and grindy, with the high amount of health enemies had, plus being kinda boring and being released at a point where players were going through a nostalgia kick with the first arc and classic PvP.

[[folder:Final Fantasy XIV]]

** "Devil's Choice", the final mission of the Elachi storyline for the Romulans, was this at first; fighting ''three'' Sheshar dreadnoughts and dozens of Monbosh battleship escorts, all using crowd-control abilities and ''Scimitar''-esque one-shot kill weapons. Ostensibly it should've been relatively easy in the tanky ''D'deridex''-class warbird you're scheduled to get right before reaching it, but the preceding much zippier and more fragile ships in the Romulan lineup don't in any way properly prepare you for flying the ''D'deridex''.[[labelnote:*]]Cryptic got lazy and gave the Romulans access to their allies' ships through Tier 4 to fill out their lineup rather than going to the extra work of giving them a full array of warbirds, but they forgot that ''almost nobody buys pre-Tier 5 C-Store ships'', and CrackIsCheaper than buying non-C-Store ships with dilithium.[[/labelnote]] Elachi mobs got hit with the {{nerf}}-bat later.