History ThatOneLevel / Payday2

* The Biker Heist is notorious for its general unfairness. While day 2 is actually well liked by Crime Spree players, Day 1 is another matter entirely, as it is plagued with a lack of effective cover, a [=SWAT=] turret with an unfair position spanning the whole of the car park, the vehicles you get to ride out on are horrible to handle, and the RandomEvent system feels contrived to what amounts to Padding the heist time. While it's at least ''beatable'' on higher difficulties, it's not one to do if you haven't got much patience.

[[folder:Blaine Keegan]]
* Crude Awakening is surprisingly low on the cop spawns for most of the heist, but the difficulty really spikes near the end where not only are players up against a PointOfNoReturn timer lasting three minutes to get from the top of the oil rig to the tanker, but the cop spawns ratchet up to the max ''really'' quickly, with even brute force not being enough to get through them all, and players being downed among the madness not being an uncommon sight.
[[/folder]]

* The Secret Ending is the absolute epitome of bullshit defense in this game. [[spoiler:It requires four players who've all completed the prerequisite activation of the artifact, which in itself is a confusing, drawn-out, arduous feat. Once you reach the entrance to the resurrection chamber, you have to defend yourself against an infinite army of Phantom Cloakers while trying to decode the language on the door four times. Screw up, you have to decode all the phrases again from the top. The Cloakers won't stop until you open the door, so if no one knows how to decode the door's writing, you're doomed. But wait! There's more! The Dentist will eventually show up at the chamber door holding Locke and Bain at gunpoint; you need to attack and kill the Dentist as soon as he comes into view, otherwise he'll kill his hostages and instantly fail your run. And then it's STILL not over! Once the Dentist is dead, you need to set several bars of gold into the indents around the chamber within a set amount of time in order to complete the heist, otherwise, you guessed it, instant failure. THEN it's over.]] Those who choose to stop after completing the Heist normally are absolutely blameless in the face of this.

* The Biker Heist is notorious for its general unfairness. While day 2 is actually well liked by Crime Spree players, Day 1 is another matter entirely, as it is plagued with a lack of effective cover, a [=SWAT=] turret with an unfair position spanning the whole of the car park, the vehicles you get to ride out on are horrible to handle, and the RandomEvent system feels contrived to what amounts to Padding the heist time. White it's at least ''beatable'' on higher difficulties, it's not one to do if you haven't got much patience.

* The Armored Transport heists (Downtown, Crossroads, Park, and Harbor) have very little cover, and some very high density cop spawns that, due to the confined roads and streets, are ''very'' close to you, meaning you will be under fire with very few breaks in assault waves. Downtown, Crossroads, and Harbor are notoriously infested with snipers, Underpass has fog that may hide the likes of Cloakers, and Park has even ''less'' cover than the others. Not only that but the deposit boxes are random, meaning you'll be carrying either jewelry (the easiest to carry) or Gold (the hardest), making traversing maps harder.

* Brooklyn Bank is pretty similar to the Harvest & Trustee bank heists from the game's early days, in that you bust open the vault, get what you need and get out of there. But that's where the similarities end. The map is one big killzone, as the interior of the bank is cramped and likely to be flooded with cops, the second floor balcony is open to fire from the streets, and the streets has basically no cover. No matter where you go, you'll be under fire from enemies, and the poor weather conditions hides sniper fire quite easily.

!General

!Specific Contractors

Due to the [[FakeDifficulty unfair]] nature of the game, there are a lot of them that rely on [=RNG=]. Some heavily favor one approach over another, making them agonizing if you're using the "wrong" build. Others are easy with an experienced crew but a nightmare with a [[TheLoad poorly-coordinated, inexperienced group]]. A few are just sadistic. Here is a run-down:

!!General:

!!Specific contractors:

* The Armored Transport heists (Downtown, Crossroads, Park, and Harbor) have very little cover, and some very high density cop spawns that, due to the confined roads and streets, are ''very'' close to you, meaning you will be under fire with very few breaks in assault waves. Downtown, Crossroads, and Harbor are notoriously infested with snipers, Underpass has fog that may hide the likes of Cloakers, and Park has even ''less'' cover than the others. Not only that but the deposit boxes are random, meaning you'll be carrying either jewelry (the easies to carry) or Gold (the hardest), making traversing maps harder.
* Train Heist. There is a reason why many players avoided looting the secret blueprints in Armored Transport back in the day. This heist requires players to break through two layers of security to reach the loot. First, you have to drill or hack the train car doors, and assuming you opened a car with a vault in it, you need to open it with a thermal drill which Bain will "helpfully" drop somewhere in the canyon below, requiring a player to retrieve it with cops constantly shooting at them from the high ground. There is also too much loot in too small an area; ferrying ''all 40'' ammo bags on foot to the drop-off point is an exercise in patience, all while being shot at by cops and snipers. The Spring Break 2017 event made this into its own heist, and was made significantly easier in both loud and stealth runs via adding in new asset options.

A majority of the Elephant's missions are notorious even among veteran players, mostly due to the puzzle-like curveballs they come packing with in Stealth, and even ''more so'' once you go Loud.

* Big Oil. This level requires ''total cooperation'' between the party and that's because of Day 2. You need to learn the right intel, and identify which of the several fusion engines is the only correct one, remembering intel and checking info on boards around the basement to figure it out, requiring trial and error to get right (something that was made more difficult, as prior to Update 100, the heist was a Pro Job, which disabled restarting). With no cooperation, players may assume it is a standard heist and begin bagging up all the machines, making the machines impossible to tell apart due to the unmarked loot bags. Making things worse is that it takes ''five agonisingly slow minutes'' to summon the chopper and have the machines checked for authenticity, so you best hold out for long enough.
* Framing Frame Day 3 is quite bad in both Stealth and Loud. It requires stealing gold from a senator (and a case of old wine too if you want [[VideoGame/RAIDWorldWarII Sterling's Beret]]) or, should you fail stealth, uploading incriminating data from his computer to the press. However, the biggest pain arises from the senator's gold vault; should the team ever be discovered, even if they've already secured one or more bags of gold, the rest must be abandoned and the stealth approach must be dropped. Thanks to Payday 2's wonky stealth mechanics, a misstep of one person can leave the team without the achievement and with only a fraction of what they could have stolen, and while you can still zipline the gold you've extracted, you have to abandon the plan straight away. And Loud is not any easier, as even if your team is geared to go loud from the offset, waiting for the hack to finish and dashing back and forth between fuse boxes to protect said hack is very tedious, to put it mildly. And that's not going into the camera spawns, where one can look ''directly at the vault''.
* Rats:
** Day 1 asks you to cook crystal meth as the meth cooks are dead, and you better hope you know Bains' verbal cues, otherwise the meth lab explodes, setting the entire second floor aflame and downing anyone caught by surprise. Bains' fumbling of ingredients or simply not combining names. This was bad enough that this got changed to use dialogue from the Lab Rats event heist, which has him much more certain and uses a more consistent vocal pattern (Simply wait for Bain to speak again after he requests an ingredient, and he will correct himself almost immediately if he's wrong, otherwise he'll say something along the lines of "I'm x% sure" or "Add it").
** If you fail to cook three bags of meth on the first day, you ''will'' have to go through an escape mission. If the trade on Day 2 goes loud (and it will if you failed on Day 1), [[MarathonLevel there's a chance of a ''second'' escape mission]].
** Day 2 is all up to the RandomNumberGod. If you have little to no meth, then the gangsters will open fire and try to burn their intel before you can reach it. If you ''do'' have enough meth, the gangsters may just decide to screw you over... or the cops may get wind of the deal, so you'll have to fight your way to the intel on those occasions.
** Day 3 requires killing the remaining Mendozas and stealing their loot. However, should you fail to defuse the bombs hidden in the bus or lack the intel to do so, then any bags you failed to save will be destroyed, significantly reducing your payout.
* Firestarter Day 2 is a pain in the ass to stealth, mainly because the alarm boxes you must disable are almost always located in well-patrolled hallways, making them difficult to approach. Not only that, but just the act of opening the alarm box can alert nearby guards since their programming results in them always seeing the open box before they see the player and call it in.

* Election Day is a massive pain in the ass if the job goes loud:
** On Day 1, if you didn't tag a truck before being spotted, you're forced to hack a computer containing the shipping info, and to guarantee Day 2 proper, you have to do it ''twice'' at four and a half minutes per hack. The entire map, despite being in a shipping yard, has very little cover and the warehouses themselves are filled with a lot open skylights for the SWAT units to rappel down from. During the hacking process, if the cops shut the power off, you're forced to go outside to restore it via a circuit breaker, forcing yourself to be exposed to snipers, and exiting comes with much the same problems. It's not a surprise that people tend to stealth this day first, rather than do Loud.
** Proper Day 2 is even worse with cover when the heist goes loud. The entire warehouse is full of windows, skylights, and balconies for cops to hit you from every possible angle, and a large number of snipers always spawn near the escape van on the adjacent rooftops, which is several yards away from the main warehouse (so good luck hitting the snipers from that long a distance while the snipers themselves [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard have pinpoint accuracy against you]]). The final step of the mission also has you hacking a computer to delete the surveillance footage, which can take upwards of five minutes of babysitting a computer terminal, while cops are swarming you and snipers punish you the second you crawl out of cover. And even the stealth approach isn't much better, due to the high number of guards and tight corners, luck-based crates that have the ballot machines you're after, the occasionally horrific locations of said crates (some spawn on a shelf two stories high with minimal cover, meaning that if you miss a jump, you'll likely take heavy damage or be downed instantly. Perhaps worst of all, some of the ballot machines can spawn behind gates that either need a randomly placed keycard or being drilled for upwards of a full minute in plain sight of the guards' patrol route). Regardless of whether you're stealthing or not, if you play the level on Mayhem and above, you're also forced to find a crowbar to pop open the shipping crates and said crowbar is in a random location, meaning even ''more'' searching.
** Should you fail to tag the right truck in Day 1, Day 2 is a straight shootout through a strip mall, with basically no break in sightlines or cover that ins't a wall for a hallway. The bank vault you need to drill into is a long, straight hallway that will be camped by snipers on a neighbouring balcony, making drill maintenance hellish.

* Big Bank in Stealth is ''very'' tricky. The computer hack you need to do at the start to enable the timelock is a frustration of patience, as you need to find the right computer; if it's upstairs, you may as well restart as the cover for hiding from cameras and guards is considerably weaker and the camera's can't be looped. The atrium is flooded with civilians, more of which constantly spawn in the street and walk in, and cannot be subdued without raising the alarm. When you trigger the timelock, you get a call from Jen at [=GenSec=], who has a random chance of sending over more guards, and another guard may come in from the elevator. Once you get the timelock open you have to contend with the lasers on the vault room entrance (which to be fair, can be disabled with keycards). If you can find, or pre-place, extra keycards and use The Elevator Trick, which can rid of some or all of the lasers. However, if you're going for the "Entrapment" achievement, all that's out the window - you ''have'' to get 12 bags to the default escape out front, and you ''have'' to leave those lasers up. There is a ''very'' good reason this place has never been robbed.
* ''The'' Diamond Heist (not the one from Payday: The Heist) has a final obstacle to the titular loot, which is a puzzle involving a series of pressure plates. Players need to hack a security terminal in the room to reveal the safe path, which, while it can be reset infinitely, still relies on [=RNG=]. Should the player step on an incorrect plate, the alarm immediately sounds, gas is vented into the room, and the Diamond drops into a safe that must be drilled open. The puzzle also resets after a set period of time, and the terminal must be hacked again to generate a new path. This means that if someone takes too long retrieving the Diamond, then they run the risk of the timer resetting while they're still negotiating the pressure plates, and the alarm goes off. Even in loud, the puzzle must still be done, even if the heist goes loud, with players often preferring to deliberately trigger the plates and just drill the safe so that all four players can keep the cops at bay.

** In Loud, it is sniper heaven, something Bain even mentions ("Consider yourself besieged"), as there are windows everywhere, meaning getting hit by a sniper is simply going to happen unless you like hiding behind snooker tables and sofa's.
* Car Shop:
** Like Shadow Raid, this is a stealth-only mission that starts a timer when the alarm is triggered. While the heist overall is fairly straightforward, one sequence that can annoy players is the driving sequence at the end where the players must transport the stolen cars to the docks before a timer runs out. The controls for the car are ''extremely'' bad, and it's not uncommon to lose a lot of time just trying to keep the car from repeatedly crashing into walls. That and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking much like the Art Gallery, the exp/cash payout is quite poor]]. It also briefly enters GuideDangIt territory, as it is not explained ''where'' you need to drive the cars to - all you're told is to plant C4 on the road at one point, the game not bothering to explain that it's to blow a hole through (which you can't see from the car over the dashboard until you're driving into it), which opens up into an abandoned tunnel leading to the docks. On Mayhem and above, this heist only gives you ''90'' seconds to get the car from the shop to the crates (meaning you basically have to make a perfect run at it, with minor collisions; getting detected will basically end the run right there because it takes that long just to open the door to the key storage). Additionally, there can be as many as a dozen guards packed inside the relatively tiny dealership, making movement around the place extremely difficult, and that isn't even counting all the civilians that spawn inside, too! Much of this was made a little easier in Update #157, in which the computer hacking now only takes 60 seconds regardless of difficulty. In addition, the guard that sometimes guarded the manager's office is absent and none of them will patrol the offices anymore.
* The Alesso Heist, bar the whole deliberate ProductPlacement theme, is hated for its confusing layout and overly long bag-moving process, regardless of if you go in loud or stealth. For one, even if you know the layout, it's not uncommon for even veteran players to get lost in the corridors or behind the shops as everything looks the same, not to mention have a lot of trouble reaching the basement for the same reasons. Stealthing this heist in particular can be a challenge as the pathfinding of the guards is bad, and the mission requires going from the lowest floor to the highest, then back again, and then '''[[OverlyLongGag again]]''', making for a frustrating experience. All the while remaining under the radar! At least the various chutes make bag-moving a lot easier, but there's a reason people don't like this heist.

* Meltdown is another heist known for its difficulty. The team goes into the same Murkywater compound from Shadow Raid, taking on soldiers that are a little better armed and armored than the average cops. Then they have to look through the whole place for one container. If you're lucky, the container will be in the main building, the only area with good cover on the map. The rest of the Murkywater compound has snipers everywhere. Then you have to look for crowbars, having to find three just to complete the heist. It used to be if you wanted any extra loot, you'd have to use those crowbars to open the crates beforehand, because there wasn't an extra; a later update added a fourth crowbar, but you still have to look around for it. The loot itself leaves you incredibly slow, and the forklifts around can only carry three at most. They don't move particularly fast, either, nor are they armored, which wouldn't be a big deal except that the route to drop off the loot is a massive shooting gallery full of cops in impossible-to-reach, elevated positions. There are armored police vans with turrets guarding the way on higher difficulties, but any van will randomly decide to block off various paths to the dropoff point. The Longfellow car can make it easier, if it's found and if players bother to use it.
* Goat Simulator. As if the crossover itself wasn't contentious enough, the heist itself is quite notorious for being a pain in the ass to complete:
** Day 1 sees the crew roaming around the city in search of goats, which [[AssShove have had cocaine smuggled inside their rectums]]. Given who the contractor is ([[WeirdnessMagnet Vlad]]), this is entirely believable for him. Your goal? To round up all the goats and escape. Sounds simple? '''It isn't'''. The map is massive by the games's standards, requiring the Longfellow in order to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and the goats could be ''anywhere'' on the map - hidden in buildings, trapped on scaffolding, stuck behind gates or on top of lampposts (requiring the use of a drill or saw respectively), and regardless of difficulty, one is guaranteed to appear at the top of a burning building, which is, of course, swarming with cops. As for the goats themselves, they are a rather unique type of loot in that they have a chance of ''damaging you''. The Longfellow is also intended to help carry the goats, but it can only carry 4 at at time, so you will have to fill up the trunk, get to the semi, drop off the goats, and repeat this loop ''at least'' once more, until you have all the goats. This is made even more frustrating in that none of the goats' locations (aside from the last one), are marked out for you, only revealing themselves as you get close to them, meaning you can spend a good 5 minutes driving around waiting for goats to be highlighted. As with other driving heists, the Longfellow itself can break down if it gets too damaged, and the driving system remains atrocious. And then there is one big problem: '''a severe lack of cover'''. There are several buildings that should be used as functional cover, but they all have very large glass windows, cannot be entered, or are so small as to be ineffective. Clearly, Swan Song was meant to be abused here.
** Day 2 ratchets up the difficultly. The day begins with you having a shootout on the farm with the Honduran cartel who got you into this mess, where the map's problems quickly rear their ugly head -- in that this map somehow has '''even less cover''' than Day 1 did. The farmhouse is barren, and has several holes that you can be shot through, and that's as good as the cover is going to get here. And once the cartel dies down and the police arrive, you're forced to take the goats out of the barn, and set up a fulton skyhook cage for Vlad's brother Bubba to fly in and extract them. And just like on GO Bank, the cage has no protection from the cops stealing the cargo. And if you forget even one of the goats (or it gets stolen out of the cage by cops), you'll have to do the whole process over again, and that's assuming Bubba catches the skyhook first time. Once that's done, you need to unload the Longfellow from the truck, and drive to a nearby bridge. Once you arrive, you'll find that the bridge has been turned by the cops, and you are once again surrounded by them. You have to get into the security room using a drill, or a saw or C4 if you happened to bring them, and just to rub it in, once you get in, you finally get some cover in the form of some shutters! Until you activate the bridge... at which point the shutters raise up, and you are once again a sitting duck. Once the bridge is in place, you can finally get back in the Longfellow and make a run for it, leaving the madness behind you. At least you'll get an above average payday for your efforts.
* Brooklyn 10-10 is a rather nasty heist. The main objective is to shoot down cops that chase after Charon, the person who you are saving. Surprisingly, this is not the hard part. The hard part is having to deal with the swathes of cops that rush in while you watch out for Charon in the last section of the heist. And your movement space in the levels is very, very limited and the cover is woefully inadequate, so finding a safe spot to lick your wounds is often an exercise in futility. A little while in to the heist you have to drill a pair of gates whilst under all the above-mentioned pressure (and the drills jam very frequently, given how short the ETA to completion is). There is also some extra loot that you can get out, but with all the bullets coming at you, you'd be hard-pressed to resist the urge to make a run for it.
* Reservoir Dogs Day 1[[note]]technically the second day gameplay-wise; [[AnachronicOrder it's complicated]][[/note]] is a complete nightmare on higher difficulties, especially if you want to steal all the loot. The mission starts with cops spawning everywhere, and taking all of the loot in the starting section requires you to expose your face to the dozens of cops around you, and on those higher difficulties, a SWAT Turret. If you're playing on Mayhem or higher, there are ''multiple'' Skulldozers in the first waves of the police assault, making it quite likely that the heist will end prematurely if players don't focus on them. The upstairs area will almost always be filled with cops and you have to go up there at least twice to get the C4 to open the safe, and in order to get all the loot and create a zipline to streamline bag securing. The lack of practical cover on the map also doesn't help matters, especially when playing solo.

* The Bomb: Dockyard, for sneaks.

* Simply put, ''Henry's Rock'' is the epitome of Overkill's general failings in level design for Loud heists. It suffers from little to no cover, enemy spawns everywhere, an overabundance of special spawns, objectives that involve a lot of messing about, heavy loot bags you need to shift through open spaces peppered with guards, and everything in-between. You have to hack your way out of one room (which has no cover), then into the main hall (which only has marginally more cover) before exploring two randomly selected rooms. In terms of the four rooms in question, one is somewhat easy and straightforward[[note]]the computer lab simply has you interact with certain computers, then operate a crane with a crowbar in the main hall[[/note]], two are frustrating[[note]]the weapons testing room has one aim and fire an experimental laser cannon with multiple steps and many places the cops can shut it down, while the archeology room is a mini puzzle in and of itself[[/note]] and one is downright infuriating[[note]]the chemical lab has one play reverse-Rats in order to mix a concoction to burn open a shutter door, while having to defend the chemical process from cops messing it up[[/note]]. After that, heave the bag back to the start, hack two turrets on either side of the helipad and then wait for Bile to show up before hoisting the bags into his helicopter... all while turrets rain fire on you, and cops spawn out the wazoo, and the final has - you guessed it - '''no bloody cover!'''. Naturally, the heist is often derogatorily referred to as [[FanNickname Henry's Cock]], because you are going to get ''fucked'' by it.

* Framing Frame Day 3 is quite bad in both Stealth and Loud. It requires stealing gold from a senator (and a case of old wine too if you want [[VideoGame/RAIDWorldWarII Sterling's Beret]]) or, should you fail stealth, uploading incriminating data from his computer to the press. However, the biggest pain arises from the senator's gold vault; should the team ever be discovered, even if they've already secured one or more bags of gold, the rest must be abandoned and the stealth approach must be dropped. Thanks to Payday 2's wonky stealth mechanics, a misstep of one person can leave the team without the achievement and with only a fraction of what they could have stolen, and while you can still zipline the gold you've extracted, you have to abandon the plan straight away. And Loud is not any easier, as even if your team is geared to go loud from the offset, waiting for the hack to finish and dashing back and forth between fuse boxes to protect said hack is very tedious, to put it mildly. Abnd that's not going into the camera spawns, where one can look ''directly at the vault''.

** The heist comes with escape sub-missions. If you fail to cook three bags of meth on the first day, you ''will'' have to go through an escape mission. If the trade on Day 2 goes loud (and it will if you failed on Day 1), [[MarathonLevel there's a chance of a ''second'' escape mission]].

* Reservoir Dogs Day 1[[note]]technically the second day gameplay-wise; [[AnachronicOrder it's complicated]][[/note]] is a complete nightmare on higher difficulties, especially if you want to steal all the loot. The mission starts with cops spawning everywhere, and taking all of the loot in the starting section requires you to expose your face to the dozens of cops around you (hope that you don't get tased!) and on those higher difficulties, a SWAT Turret. If you're playing on Mayhem or higher, there are ''multiple'' Skulldozers in the first waves of the police assault, making it quite likely that the heist will end right there if players don't focus on them immediately. Once you hack into the vault area, while defending the vault area is easy, upstairs is another thing altogether. The upstairs area will almost always be filled with cops and you have to go up there at least once to get the C4 to open the safe. This doesn't include going up there in order to get all the loot and create a zipline to streamline bag securing, hope you don't get tased! Talking about the bag securing, if you're doing this solo, it's a complete nightmare because you're forced to run across the lobby and main street, both of which are filled with cops and have little to no cover, again, [[RuleofThree hope you don't get tased!]] Thankfully, securing the bags is much easier when you're playing with other players, as you can just have one player stay at the car to secure the bags while others send them down on the zipline.
* Brooklyn Bank is pretty similar to the Harvest & Trustee bank heists from the game's early days, in that you bust open the vault, get what you need and get out of there. And that's where the similarities end. The map is one big killzone, as the interior of the bank is cramped and likely to be flooded with cops, the second floor balcony is open to fire from the streets, and the streets have no cover whatsoever. No matter where you go, you'll be under fire from enemies, and the poor lighting can render faraway enemies, especially the hard-hitting Snipers, nearly invisible.
** The method of reaching and cracking the vault is randomized every time. To get to it, you have to either saw a shutter open, or cut a circle in the floor of the offices above, and blow it open with explosives. Then to open the vault, you have to either use a thermal drill, or weaken the locks on the door with thermal paste, and use a winch to pull the vault door off the hinges. But it gets worse; if you have to use the winch, there's a chance that the bags to assemble it may not be at the drop point, resulting in the bags being dropped to you via overpass. Then you have to watch out for cops attempting to stop your equipment, and we all know how fun that is.
* Both of the Heists included in the Spring Break 2018 event are brutal, for different reasons;
** Stealth-only heists have been a very mixed bag, and ''Breakin' Feds'' is unarguably the worst. A multi-level, corridor-centric maze ''infested'' with guards and cameras, with more guards spawning in if you kill a few. On higher difficulties, it is entirely possible for '''three''' guards to stand in a single corridor, and chances are you'll run from one guard into a room containing two more. The worst part is Commissioner Garrett. If he spots you at any point, you automatically fail the heist and he can't be killed (doing so will fail the heist as well). You need to move him out of his office, a temporary measure, and finding the box in said office is an exercise in frustration. And then, there's a chance that you won't actually ''find'' the box there, meaning you have to trudge across the map again to find it in the Evidence room. And finally, there's a chance that Twitch will blow up one of the walls as your escape, thus triggering a one-minute point of no return. It makes sense that the FBI offices would be this secure after Hoxton Breakout, but for anyone not 100% versed in ''Payday 2'''s wonky stealth mechanics, it's seriously aggravating and bordering on impossible. At least the objectives are simple and the door to the camera-controlling Security Room is a lockpick job rather than a keycard job.
** Simply put, ''Henry's Rock'' is the epitome of Overkill's general failings in level design for Loud heists: it suffers from little to no cover, enemy spawns everywhere, an overabundance of special spawns, objectives that involve a lot of messing about, heavy loot bags you need to shift through open spaces peppered with guards, and everything in-between. You have to hack your way out of one room (which has no cover), then into the main hall (which also has no cover) before exploring two randomly selected rooms. In terms of the four rooms in question, one is somewhat easy and straightforward[[note]]the computer lab simply has you interact with certain computers, then operate a crane with a crowbar in the main hall[[/note]], two are frustrating[[note]]the weapons testing room has one aim and fire an experimental laser cannon with multiple steps and many places the cops can shut it down, while the archeology room is a mini puzzle in and of itself[[/note]] and one is downright infuriating[[note]]the chemical lab has one play reverse-Rats in order to mix a concoction to burn open a shutter door, while having to defend the chem machine from cops shooting it and you from literally every angle[[/note]]. After that, heave the bags back to the start, hack two turrets on either side of the helipad and then wait for Bile to show up before hoisting the bags into his helicopter, all with - you guessed it - no cover. Naturally, the heist is often derogatorily [[FanNickname referred to as Henry's Cock]], because you are going to get ''fucked'' by it.

* Escape levels are not well liked, and because of this, they didn't survive the first two years of the games' life. For many, they interrupted the flow of the heist, making the session needlessly longer, and oftentimes made little sense anyway (Twitch being replaced by ...Twitch?). Heists after 2014 don't feature them, and even multi-day heists became considerably rarer for the same reasons, as they are consistently unpopular to run.

** In Day 1, the crew must find the control room to lower bollards that are in the way of the armored truck's escape route. There can be many rooms to open, requiring up to 20 seconds of lockpicking, or C4. The bad news is that there is no indication where the control room is, and the rooms are spread out. Pray the control room is in the first door opened...
** With the introduction of the SWAT Van Turret, Day 1 has become a nightmare during the street portion (especially if attempting Tabula Rasa, which requires using no skills and wearing no armor on Overkill difficulty). A SWAT Van Turret has a chance of spawning at every horizontal turn, especially near the parking lot entrance. You could even get a turret spawn on both sides, essentially sandwiching you between two rapid-fire turrets. While there is enough cover to save yourself from one turret, when they spawn on both sides of the road it becomes near impossible to dodge the damage without running in circles. And that's on top of everyone else after your ass.
** In Day 2, there are some tasks that require far more dedication than others. The worst of the lot by far is searching for Witness Testimonies; always located at the very bottom of the level (where the main fighting arena is closer to the top), has a door that must be lockpicked, AND one that must be drilled (though both can be blown up with C4). ''Then'' the crew must search a large archive for the right file. RNG strikes again; it may take a ''very'' long time to find the file, so don't be surprised if the right one is always whichever one you save for last. The worst part is the hostage rescue teams may free hostages while a player is stuck searching below!
** The second worst is the DNA Scan; again, two doors must be opened (one via lockpicking, the other must use a drill), and files marked "Clown Case" must be put through the DNA scanner. Each scan takes half a minute. The one saving grace of this task is that it is actually close to the operations room, and the two doors can be dealt with simultaneously.
** There are four possible ways into Operations, but anywhere between two and four of them can appear. The mission is much harder if only the two side entrances are available - This means any time you have to leave Ops you have to run past the two snipers that are nearly always set up across from you and any assignment you have is going to take longer simply because of the added time it takes to get there.
** On the flipside, if all four ways are opened, it leaves the crew ''very'' vulnerable to enemy invasions from all flanks. Provided that some doors won't spawn it becomes easier and less costly to shut down the doors and save the keycards for objectives.
** The spawn location of the fuse box can also make this heist frustratingly difficult. If the fusebox spawns under ANY balcony, the cops can actually just jump down and instantly turn it off. Each time it's turned off it adds 60 seconds to the hack. If you get this spawn location and don't watch the balconies very carefully, you'll end up staying in that operations room for a VERY long time.
* The sequel to the above, Hoxton Revenge, also has its fair share of frustrations. You have around 8-10 guards patrolling the interior of a fairly tiny house, with very few hiding spaces. This makes traversing the inside a nerve-wrecking job, since a guard could turn the corner at any minute. It also makes accomplishing the objectives difficult, as they require a lot of scavenger hunting through the house. The objectives themselves range from annoying to downright horrifying. The biggest one is the Retinal Scanner, which requires you to bundle up the only civilian on the map (the FBI Boss) and lead him to the scanner. Civilians are not fast, and sometimes he can be on a completely different floor than the Vault (although always relatively nearby). Combined with the amount of guards inside, it is frustratingly difficult at times to get him to the vault without a single guard seeing. Another notable one is the Telephone Pole, which has you shimmying up a telephone pole outside of the house to patch Bain in. This means going outside of the fence, which is surrounded by Murkywater guards. Worse still, they could path right to the base of the pole, making it impossible for you to get down without being seen.
* The Car Shop:
** Like Shadow Raid, this is a stealth-only mission that starts a timer when the alarm is triggered. While the heist overall is fairly straightforward, one sequence that can annoy players is the driving sequence at the end where the players must transport the stolen cars to the docks before a timer runs out. The controls for the car are ''extremely'' bad, and it's not uncommon to lose a lot of time just trying to keep the car from repeatedly crashing into walls. [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Much like the Art Gallery, the exp/cash payout is quite poor]]. It also briefly enters GuideDangIt territory, as it is not explained ''where'' you need to drive the cars to - all you're told is to plant C4 on the road at one point, the game not bothering to explain that it's to blow a hole through (which you can't see from the car over the dashboard until you're driving into it), which opens up into an abandoned tunnel leading to the docks.
** On Mayhem and above, this heist not only gives you ''90'' seconds to get the car from the shop to the crates (meaning you basically have to make a perfect run at it, with minor collisions; getting detected will basically end the run right there because it takes that long just to open the door to the key storage) but it also has a high chance of spawning a guard right in front of the Manager's office, ''that won't move''. You pretty much have to kill him, but he also happens to be in one of the most highly patrolled areas of the map. Additionally, there can be as many as a dozen guards packed inside the relatively tiny dealership, making movement extremely difficult. This isn't even counting all the civilians that spawn inside, too!
** Almost any difficulty but Normal makes the heist a major pain in the ass to even beat it. Because the dealership is tiny, the paths that guards and civilians take can frequently cross each other, making the odds of being spotted or someone seeing a dead body extremely high. Sometimes it's just safer and faster to kill civilians and bag their bodies rather than tying them up and slowly leading them somewhere while running the risk of the hostage or yourself being spotted. Part of the major difficulty the heist presents comes from the amount of guards and civilians alone.
** There is absolutely no substantial reward in completing the mission either. The EXP payout is poor, the monetary payout is poor if only a few cars are secured (there aren't many skilled drivers in the ''Payday 2'' community), and there's no stealth bonus despite the majority of the mission being stealth-based. Much of this was made a little easier in Update #157, in which the computer hacking now only takes 60 seconds regardless of difficulty. In addition, the guard guarding the manager's office is absent and none of them will patrol the offices anymore. [[FakeDifficulty Even then, the driving is still dangerously difficult for the wrong reasons]].
* The Alesso Heist, bar the whole deliberate ProductPlacement theme, is still divisive for its confusing layout and overly long process, regardless of if you go in loud or stealth. For one, an unexperienced players can easily get lost in the corridors or behind the shops, and have a lot of trouble reaching the basement. Stealthing this heist in particular can be a challenge as the layout is still windy, the pathfinding of the guards may change, and the mission requires going from the lowest floor to the highest, then back again, and then '''[[OverlyLongGag again]]'''. All the while remaining under the radar! At least the various chutes make bag-moving a lot easier.
* The Golden Grin Casino is no walk in the park.

** Day 1 sees the crew roaming around the city in search of goats, which [[AssShove have had cocaine smuggled inside their rectums]]. Given who the contractor is (Vlad), [[WeirdnessMagnet this isn't too out there for him]]. Your goal? To round up all the goats and escape. Sounds simple? '''It isn't'''. The map is massive by the games's standards, requiring the Longfellow in order to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and the goats could be ''anywhere'' on the map - hidden in buildings, trapped on scaffolding, stuck behind gates or on top of lampposts (requiring the use of a drill or saw respectively), and regardless of difficulty, one is guaranteed to appear at the top of a burning building, which is, of course, swarming with cops. As for the goats themselves, they are a rather unique type of loot in that they have a chance of ''damaging you''. The Longfellow is also intended to help carry the goats, but it can only carry 4 at at time, so you will have to fill up the trunk, get to the semi, drop off the goats, and repeat this loop ''at least'' once more, until you have all the goats. This is made even more frustrating in that none of the goats' locations (aside from the last one), are marked out for you, only revealing themselves as you get close to them, meaning you can spend a good 5 minutes driving around waiting for goats to be highlighted. As with other driving heists, the Longfellow itself can break down if it gets too damaged, and the driving system remains atrocious. And then there is one big problem: '''a severe lack of cover'''. There are several buildings that should be used as functional cover, but they all have very large glass windows, cannot be entered, or are so small as to be ineffective. Clearly, Swan Song was meant to be abused here.

* Escape levels are not well liked, and didn't survive the first two years of the games' life. For many, they interrupt the flow of the heist, making the session needlessly longer, and oftentimes make little sense anyway (Twitch being replaced by...Twitch?). Heists after 2014 don't feature them, and even multi-day heists became considerably rarer for the same reasons, as they are consistently unpopular to run.

* Train Heist. There is a reason why many players avoided looting the secret blueprints in Armored Transport back in the day. This heist requires players to break through two layers of security to reach the loot. First, you have to drill or hack the train car doors, and assuming you opened a car with a vault in it, you need to open it with a thermal drill which Bain will "helpfully" drop somewhere in the canyon below, requiring a player to retrieve it with cops constantly shooting at them from the high ground. There is also too much loot in too small an area; ferrying ''all 40'' ammo bags on foot to the drop-off point is an exersize in patience, all while being shot at by cops and snipers. The Spring Break 2017 event made this into its own heist, and was made significantly easier in both loud and stealth runs via adding in new asset options.
* Election Day is a massive pain in the ass if the job goes loud.
** On day 1, if you didn't tag a truck before being spotted, you're forced to hack a computer containing the shipping info and you have to do it ''twice'' at four and a half minutes both times if you want to have a greater chance of doing day 2 at the warehouse where the ballot machines are stored. The entire map has very little cover and the warehouses themselves are filled with a lot open skylights for the SWAT units to rappel down from. During the hacking process, if the cops shut the power off, you're forced to go outside to restore it via circuit breaker, forcing yourself to be exposed to snipers.
** Day 2, should you be successful in tagging the right truck from day 1 (or fully hacked the computer), is even worse with cover when the heist goes loud. The entire warehouse is full of windows, skylights, and balconies for cops to hit you from every possible angle and a large number of snipers always spawn near the escape van on the adjacent rooftops, which is several yards away from the main warehouse; good luck hitting the snipers from an extreme distance while the snipers themselves have pinpoint accuracy against you. The final step of the mission also has you hacking a computer to delete the surveillance footage, which can take upwards of five minutes of babysitting while cops are swarming you and snipers punish you the second you crawl out of cover. Stealthing it isn't much better, due to the high number of guards and tight corners, luck-based crates that have the ballot machines you're after, the occasionally horrific locations of said crates (some spawn on a shelf two stories high with minimal cover, meaning that if you miss a jump, you'll likely take heavy damage or be downed instantly, and if you DO make it, you need to protect a machine that might as well be a neon sign), and perhaps worst of all, some of the ballot machines can spawn behind gates that either need a randomly placed keycard or being drilled for upwards of a full minute in plain sight of the guards' patrol route). Regardless of whether you're stealthing or not, if you play the level on Mayhem and above, you're also forced to find a crowbar to pop open the shipping crates and said crowbar is in a random location.
** And should you fail to tag the right truck in Day 1, Day 2 is a straight shootout through a strip mall. The bank vault you need to drill is in a long, straight hallway that will be camped by snipers on a neighboring balcony and cops have no less than four different routes into the bank, which manages to be both cramped and short on good cover at the same time.
* Shadow Raid is notoriously hard since stealth is pretty much required and there is ''zero'' margin for error. If at any point one of the numerous cameras or guards sees you, the alarm will go off and start a one-minute timer that will automatically end the mission once it finishes. If you haven't collected the minimum required loot by that point, which can be up to '''12''' bags of loot, the level essentially becomes unwinnable; even if everyone is at the vehicle with time to spare, it won't leave unless you've loaded enough loot.
** Perhaps the worst part is that you ''cannot'' kill, contain, or otherwise neutralize all of the many, many guards and civilians. You still only have four pagers available, and there are easily at least a dozen guards on the map. They also like to patrol a ''lot'', and while they won't notice things like opened crates or cargo containers, they ''will'' notice if the secured vault is opened. The loot in the vault is four pieces of the samurai armor, with the same weight as gold (no sprinting, no jumping, slow movement), and if you get spotted or a guard notices the vault is opening (and no, you can't close it), you're boned and have to drop everything and run...assuming you even have enough loot to DO that!
** It can become frustrating for players for an entirely different reason. Players who really know the level and are strong with stealth abilities find the level very easy and ''incredibly'' profitable in cash and XP, second only to Hoxton Breakout. If you get in a group with one of these people expect to run Shadow Raid early and often, with the stealther instructing everyone else to just sit back and do nothing for 15 minutes while they effectively solo the heist.
** With enough time and practice, the guard paths are stable enough that a skilled player can avoid almost all of them, with options on just killing the ones that will stay stationary in an inconvenient place. With a little luck and caution, a decent player can basically make the warehouse their playroom. ''Unless'' the helicopter that arrives around the five-minute mark is carrying ''more guards'' instead of an artifact, which means if one of ''them'' turns out to be a camper and picks the right spot, you're not getting any loot in his line of sight without blowing the alarm.
** It ''is'' possible to "force" the chopper to bring a container instead of additional guards by standing near the helipad, 5 minutes after Bain says you should check the Murkywater warehouse for better loot.
* GO Bank is probably the most infamous.
** For starters, stealthing this mission isn't as simple as "stop all the guards, cameras, and civilians in the map". Also, the cameras' operator is offsite (meaning they need to be directly destroyed), and all the people in the building need to be dealt with. Then when the time comes to open the vault, it requires two keycards (located from a large list of potential spots), and takes many minutes for its lock to disengage. During this time the phone constantly rings, using the RNG to determine whether or not the mission will get even harder, and civilians constantly spawn on the street. And that's just scratching the surface.
** Practicing the map helps, but even if you know it inside out there are several hazards players need to account for. Assuming the team has no qualms about killing civilians and/or have a very large amount of cable ties, and can co-operate well enough to answer the phone whilst managing [=GenSec=], police, and civilian spawns, there is still the matter of passing the vault lasers (which are almost always on) and then reaching the escape before things get out of your control.
** The civilians are the worst problem; unlike other maps, they will constantly spawn and, if you were sloppy, spot corpses or hostages in the streets before they enter the playing area. This means you have to kill them or use Stockholm Syndrome's effects, but at times you can't do the former because they're still hidden behind a wall, frantically dialing away at a cellphone. If you DID manage to be clean about everything, there's also a random chance that the civilians will enter the now-deserted bank and ''will not leave''. Considering you have to go through the front of it to get to the vault, this effectively means you must subdue the new civilians, even if you're out of cable ties and bodybags.
** Should Plan A fail, you have to face large amounts of cops with poor cover for yourselves, while assembling a cage and skyhook to collect your loot - which has nothing to stop the police from taking the bags back out of it, should they get to it. When the pilot ''finally'' catches the cage (the Ace Pilot is better, but still not guaranteed), the crew must escape to the van at the parking garage through the sewer maze in a limited time with the cops on their tail.
* Big Bank. There is a ''very'' good reason this place has never been robbed. Both approaches have their own unique challenges, with Loud being a monumental gunfight, but stealth deserves special mention here as it's quite a lot harder. The computer hack you need to do at the start to enable the timelock is a frustration of patience to find the right computer; if it's upstairs, you may as well restart as the cover for hiding from cameras and guards is considerably weaker. The atrium is flooded with civilians, more of which constantly spawn in the street and walk in. Want to use Stockholm Syndrome to get them all down? ''You can't'' - The cameras in the lobby are connected to a control room behind the timelock so you can't disable them when you really want to, making this strategy impossible. When you trigger the timelock, you get a call from our good friend Jen at [=GenSec=], who may send over more guards, and another guard may come in from the elevator. Shoot him inside the elevator, though, and you can't answer his pager, so hope he doesn't see something right away. Once you get the timelock open you have to contend with the lasers on the vault room entrance, then perform a stealth section right out of one of the better ''VideoGame/{{Thief}}'' games just to open it. Once you get inside you better have a silent drill or have found the keybox so you can open the 5-6 doors quietly. If you can find, or pre-place, extra keycards and use The Elevator Trick, you can also get rid of some or all of the lasers. However, if you're going for the "Entrapment" achievement, all that's out the window - you ''have'' to get 12 bags to the default escape out front, and you ''have'' to leave those lasers up.
* The Dentist's ''The'' Diamond Heist has one particular section that makes it challenging. Once you get past the regular security features, your final obstacle to the titular loot is a puzzle involving a series of pressure plates. Players need to hack a security terminal to reveal the safe path. Should the player step on an incorrect plate, the alarm immediately sounds, gas is vented into the room, and the Diamond drops into a safe that must be drilled open. The thing that makes this puzzle frustrating, especially on harder difficulties, is that the puzzle resets after a set period of time, and the terminal must be hacked again to generate a new path. This means that if someone takes too long retrieving the Diamond, there is the risk that the timer resets while they're still negotiating the pressure plates and the alarm goes off. Another frustration with the puzzle is that it still must be done even if the heist goes loud, with some groups preferring to deliberately trigger the plates and just drill the safe.

* Big Oil. This level requires ''total cooperation'' between the party and that's because of Day 2. You need to learn the right intel, and identify which of the several fusion engines is the only correct one, remembering intel and checking info on boards around the basement to figure it out, requiring trial and error to get right (something that was made more difficult, as prior to Update 100, the heist was a Pro Job, which disabled restarting). With no cooperation, players may assume it is a standard heist ''and begin bagging up all the machines, making the machines impossible to tell apart due to the unmarked loot bags. Making things worse is that it takes ''five agonisingly slow minutes'' to summon the chopper and have the machines checked for authenticity, so you best hold out for long enough.

* Big Oil:
** What discouraged most players from playing initially was that Big Oil was only available as a Pro Job, meaning players don't really get good chances to learn the mechanics of the heist since they can't restart if they screw up. Update #100 for the PC version (and later updates to the console parts in 2018) removed pro jobs entirely, allowing for trial and error to learn the heist if the need be.
** If you refuse to play on single-player, you ''will'' need either total cooperation between strangers or friends. Playing with neither of these will screw up the entire heist before it's started. Additionally, the heist depends on getting the right intel and identifying which of the several machines is the only correct one.
** Day 1 requires you to steal intel from the Overkill MC. Getting caught before gathering it all means the Overkill MC bikers will try to burn it, and since it tends to be in three/four separate rooms, you need to be stealthy or carefully plan an assault. Failure prevents any sort of bonus in Day 2.
** On Day 2, figuring out the right engine requires remembering intel and checking info on boards around the basement to figure it out. If you're playing with the wrong people, expect someone to assume it is a standard heist ''and begin urgently bagging up all the machines indiscriminately.'' In other words, they begin piling them into unmarked bags (i.e. making the machines impossible to tell apart) and try to charge to the chopper; since it can take around five minutes to summon the chopper and have the machines checked one at a time for authenticity, expect to die or run out of ammo before you find the right one.
** The monitors can also accidentally be broken if someone gets too trigger-happy or a gunfight breaks out in the lab somehow.
* Framing Frame:
** Day 3 requires stealing gold from a senator[[note]]and if you want [[VideoGame/RAIDWorldWarII Sterling's Beret]] from the Aldstone's Heritage Side Jobs, a case of old wine[[/note]] or (should you fail the stealth) uploading incriminating data from his computer. However, the biggest pain arises from the senator's gold vault; should the team ever be discovered, even if they've already secured one or more bags of gold, the rest must be abandoned and the stealth approach must be dropped. Naturally, these can mean a misstep of one person can leave the team without the achievement/trophy and with only a fraction of what they could have stolen. A recent patch finally addressed this by allowing you to keep zip-lining bags of gold if you make it that far, but then the mission logic glitches...
** Even worse, it is entirely possible for the heist to suddenly go loud with no apparent reason other than the reported "Someone saw suspicious activity". What ends up happening is a guard ends up pathing to the secret vault in the apartment... and immediately starts phoning in as if there was coke stashed there, even if you're still working on locating the 5 devices (and thus don't even have the coke bags to put there). And the worst part about it is there is no indication that the guard is doing so unless you are close enough to hear him.[[note]]This is easily handled by closing the ''secret'' vault when you're not using it.[[/note]]
** Going loud on Day 3 not only prevents you from getting the gold, but it is also notoriously hard to complete. Plan B requires you to break open a computer room, which can be behind one of many identical looking security doors. Then you have to hack the computer and wait for the absurdly long timer to count down. However, you can't just camp the computer room, as there are 2 fuseboxes on the level that must be protected, since if the cops reach them and cut the power, the hacking process is interrupted. Not to mention, most players will be geared to do the mission in stealth, so they'll get ripped apart by the relentless waves of cops. Even if your team is geared to go loud, waiting for the hack to finish and dashing back and forth between fuseboxes is just tedious.
** Due to the way the vault and cameras spawn on the map, it is perfectly possible to have a camera spawn ''looking straight at the vault''. And yes, it will instantly aggro the moment you open it. This means you either have to destroy the camera, hope someone has camera loop, or use an ECM every time you want to get inside. Due to the impracticality of all of this[[note]]If you destroy a camera, a guard can later happen upon it and sound the alarm, and you can't kill all the guards on this map. And [=ECMs=] will eventually run out, with the team only having a max of 8[[/note]] most people would just rather swallow the asset costs if they see this combo and restart the map.
* Rats is probably the biggest pain of them all:
** Firstly, the mission comes with escape sub-missions. If you fail to cook three bags of meth on the first day, you ''will'' have to go through an escape mission. If the trade on Day 2 goes loud, and it will if you failed on Day 1, [[MarathonLevel there's a chance of a ''second'' escape mission]].
** Day 1 is easily the hardest day of the three as, upon finding the client's crystal meth cooks are dead, the group has to make meth whilst fighting off cops. Did someone use the wrong ingredient or do anything in the wrong order? ''The meth lab explodes, setting the entire second floor aflame and incapping anyone caught by surprise.'' It doesn't help that Bain can either be confusing with what to put in by fumbling between ingredients or combining names, or he'll say "Fuck me", which is a telltale sign that he's uncertain. Originally, the best way around this was either to wait for Bain to say the ingredient again (which 9 times out of 10 he would be very specific) or comparing what you heard to what other players heard, as Bains' lines were not uniform amongst all the players. Thankfully this has been fixed for a good while, as Bain now uses his dialogue from the Lab Rats event heist, which is much more certain and uses a more consistent pattern[[note]]Simply wait for Bain to speak again after he requests an ingredient. He will correct himself almost instantly if he's wrong, otherwise he'll say something along the lines of "I'm x% sure" or "Add it"[[/note]].
** Day 2 is not much better. If you have little to no meth, then the gangsters will open fire and try to burn their intel before you can reach it. Even if you do have ''enough'' meth, [[LuckBasedMission if the gangsters just decide to screw you over, or if the cops get wind of the deal,]] you'll have to fight your way to the intel anyway.
** Day 3 requires killing the remaining Mendozas and stealing their loot. However, should you fail to defuse the bombs hidden in the bus or lack the intel to do so, then any bags you failed to save will be destroyed, significantly reducing your PAYDAY prize.
* Firestarter Day 2 is a pain in the ass to stealth, mainly because the alarm boxes you must disable are almost always located in well patrolled hallways, making them difficult to approach. Not only that, but just the act of opening the alarm box can alert nearby guards since their programming results in them always seeing the open box before they see the player and call it in.
* Armored Transport:
** All of the variations of the heist has cops swarming in from every which way and they all spawn close to you, meaning you will be under fire a ''lot''. Downtown, Crossroads, and Harbor are notoriously infested with snipers, Underpass has fog that may hide the likes of Cloakers, and Park hardly has any cover. All the maps for Armored Transport require you to move bags of jewelry, money or gold (jewelry is the lightest while gold is the heaviest) across a good distance, so have fun being shot at while trying to move bags. And because the heist is always loud, the game may trigger an Escape level when you try to leave.
** Some players would deliberately avoid picking up the secret blueprints that unlock the Train heist, since that essentially adds an extra day to the heist and players won't get their payout and XP until they finish the second day.
* Train Heist. There is a reason why many players avoided looting the secret blueprints in Armored Transport back in the day. This heist requires players to break through two layers of security to reach the loot. First, you have to drill or hack the train car doors, and assuming you opened a car with a vault in it, you need to open it with a thermal drill which Bain will "helpfully" drop somewhere in the canyon below, requiring a player to retrieve it with cops constantly shooting at them from the high ground. Then, once you set up the thermal drill, there's a 1/3 chance the vault will either contain the mission required turret pieces, or optional ammo. The ammo itself, unlike regular loot, will explode if shot at or if dropped too far, which means if you want to get the maximum payday, you must ferry ''all 40'' ammo bags on foot to the drop-off point, all while being shot at by cops and snipers, of course. Following the Spring Break 2017 event, the Train Heist has been made into its own heist, and made significantly easier in both loud and stealth runs via adding in new asset options.

* Goat Simulator. As if the crossover itself wasn't contentious enough, the heist itself may well be the hardest in the game.
** Day 1 sees the crew roaming around the city in search of goats, which [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext have had cocaine smuggled inside their rectums]]. Sounds simple? It isn't. The map is massive, requiring the Longfellow in order to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and the goats could ''be'' anywhere - hidden in buildings, trapped on scaffolding, stuck behind gates or on top of lampposts, requiring the use of a drill or saw respectively, and regardless of difficulty, one is guaranteed to appear at the top of a burning building, which is of course going to be swarming with cops. As for the goats themselves, they are a rather unique type of loot in that they can ''damage you''. The Longfellow is also intended to help carry the goats, but it can only carry a set few at the time, so you will have to fill up the trunk, get to the semi, drop off the goats, repeat, until you have all the goats. This is made even more frustrating in that none of the goats' locations, aside from the last one, are marked out for you, only revealing themselves as you get close. The Longfellow itself can break down if it gets too damaged, just to make it worse. And then there is the big problem: a severe lack of cover. There are several buildings that should be used as functional cover, but they all have very large glass windows, rendering them more likely to get you killed. Clearly, this map was designed around Swan Song.
** Day 2 is even worse. The day begins with you having a shootout on the farm with the Honduran cartel who got you into this mess, where the map's problems quickly rear their ugly head - in that this map somehow has even less cover than Day 1. The farmhouse is barren, and has several holes that you can be shot through, and that's as good as the cover is going to get here. And once the cartel dies down and the police arrive, you're forced to take the goats out of the barn, and set up a fulton cage for Vlad's brother Bubba to fly in and extract them. And just like on GO Bank, the cage has no protection from the cops stealing the cargo. And if you forget even one of the goats (or it gets stolen out of the cage by cops), you'll have to do the whole process over again. Once that's done, you need to unload the Longfellow from the truck, and drive to a nearby bridge. Once you arrive, you'll find that the bridge is out, and you are once again surrounded by cops. You have to get into the security room using a drill, or a saw or C4 if you happened to bring them, and just to rub it in, once you get in, you finally get some cover in the form of some shutters! Until you activate the bridge, at which point the shutters raise up. Once the bridge is in place, you can finally get back in the Longfellow and make a run for it. At least you'll get an above average payday for your efforts.

** What discouraged most players from playing initially was that Big Oil was only available as a Pro Job, meaning players don't really get good chances to learn the mechanics of the heist since they can't restart if they screw up. Update #100 for the PC version removed pro jobs entirely (and later updates to the console parts in 2018), allowing for trial and error to learn the heist if the need be.

* Even worse, it is entirely possible for the heist to suddenly go loud with no apparent reason other than the reported "Someone saw suspicious activity". What ends up happening is a guard ends up pathing to the secret vault in the apartment... and immediately starts phoning in as if there was coke stashed there, even if you're still working on locating the 5 devices (and thus don't even have the coke bags to put there). And the worst part about it is there is no indication that the guard is doing so unless you are close enough to hear him.[[note]]This is easily handled by closing the ''secret'' vault when you're not using it.[[/note]]
* Going loud on Day 3 not only prevents you from getting the gold, but it is also notoriously hard to complete. Plan B requires you to break open a computer room, which can be behind one of many identical looking security doors. Then you have to hack the computer and wait for the absurdly long timer to count down. However, you can't just camp the computer room, as there are 2 fuseboxes on the level that must be protected, since if the cops reach them and cut the power, the hacking process is interrupted. Not to mention, most players will be geared to do the mission in stealth, so they'll get ripped apart by the relentless waves of cops. Even if your team is geared to go loud, waiting for the hack to finish and dashing back and forth between fuseboxes is just tedious.
* Due to the way the vault and cameras spawn on the map, it is perfectly possible to have a camera spawn ''looking straight at the vault''. And yes, it will instantly aggro the moment you open it. This means you either have to destroy the camera, hope someone has camera loop, or use an ECM every time you want to get inside. Due to the impracticality of all of this[[note]]If you destroy a camera, a guard can later happen upon it and sound the alarm, and you can't kill all the guards on this map. And [=ECMs=] will eventually run out, with the team only having a max of 8[[/note]] most people would just rather swallow the asset costs if they see this combo and restart the map.

* Firstly, the mission comes with escape sub-missions. If you fail to cook three bags of meth on the first day, you ''will'' have to go through an escape mission. If the trade on Day 2 goes loud, and it will if you failed on Day 1, [[MarathonLevel there's a chance of a ''second'' escape mission]].
* Day 1 is easily the hardest day of the three as, upon finding the client's crystal meth cooks are dead, the group has to make meth whilst fighting off cops. Did someone use the wrong ingredient or do anything in the wrong order? ''The meth lab explodes, setting the entire second floor aflame and incapping anyone caught by surprise.'' It doesn't help that Bain can either be confusing with what to put in by fumbling between ingredients or combining names, or he'll say "Fuck me", which is a telltale sign that he's uncertain. Originally, the best way around this was either to wait for Bain to say the ingredient again (which 9 times out of 10 he would be very specific) or comparing what you heard to what other players heard, as Bains' lines were not uniform amongst all the players. Thankfully this has been fixed for a good while, as Bain now uses his dialogue from the Lab Rats event heist, which is much more certain and uses a more consistent pattern[[note]]Simply wait for Bain to speak again after he requests an ingredient. He will correct himself almost instantly if he's wrong, otherwise he'll say something along the lines of "I'm x% sure" or "Add it"[[/note]].
* Day 2 is not much better. If you have little to no meth, then the gangsters will open fire and try to burn their intel before you can reach it. Even if you do have ''enough'' meth, [[LuckBasedMission if the gangsters just decide to screw you over, or if the cops get wind of the deal,]] you'll have to fight your way to the intel anyway.
* Day 3 requires killing the remaining Mendozas and stealing their loot. However, should you fail to defuse the bombs hidden in the bus or lack the intel to do so, then any bags you failed to save will be destroyed, significantly reducing your PAYDAY prize.

* Armored Transport. All of the variations of the heist has cops swarming in from every which way and they all spawn close to you, meaning you will be under fire a ''lot''. Downtown, Crossroads, and Harbor are notoriously infested with snipers, Underpass has fog that may hide the likes of Cloakers, and Park hardly has any cover. All the maps for Armored Transport require you to move bags of jewelry, money or gold (jewelry is the lightest while gold is the heaviest) across a good distance, so have fun being shot at while trying to move bags. And because the heist is always loud, the game may trigger an Escape level when you try to leave.
* Some players would deliberately avoid picking up the secret blueprints that unlock the Train heist, since that essentially adds an extra day to the heist and players won't get their payout and XP until they finish the second day.

* On day 1, if you didn't tag a truck before being spotted, you're forced to hack a computer containing the shipping info and you have to do it ''twice'' at four and a half minutes both times if you want to have a greater chance of doing day 2 at the warehouse where the ballot machines are stored. The entire map has very little cover and the warehouses themselves are filled with a lot open skylights for the SWAT units to rappel down from. During the hacking process, if the cops shut the power off, you're forced to go outside to restore it via circuit breaker, forcing yourself to be exposed to snipers.
* Day 2, should you be successful in tagging the right truck from day 1 (or fully hacked the computer), is even worse with cover when the heist goes loud. The entire warehouse is full of windows, skylights, and balconies for cops to hit you from every possible angle and a large number of snipers always spawn near the escape van on the adjacent rooftops, which is several yards away from the main warehouse; good luck hitting the snipers from an extreme distance while the snipers themselves have pinpoint accuracy against you. The final step of the mission also has you hacking a computer to delete the surveillance footage, which can take upwards of five minutes of babysitting while cops are swarming you and snipers punish you the second you crawl out of cover. Stealthing it isn't much better, due to the high number of guards and tight corners, luck-based crates that have the ballot machines you're after, the occasionally horrific locations of said crates (some spawn on a shelf two stories high with minimal cover, meaning that if you miss a jump, you'll likely take heavy damage or be downed instantly, and if you DO make it, you need to protect a machine that might as well be a neon sign), and perhaps worst of all, some of the ballot machines can spawn behind gates that either need a randomly placed keycard or being drilled for upwards of a full minute in plain sight of the guards' patrol route). Regardless of whether you're stealthing or not, if you play the level on Mayhem and above, you're also forced to find a crowbar to pop open the shipping crates and said crowbar is in a random location.
* And should you fail to tag the right truck in Day 1, Day 2 is a straight shootout through a strip mall. The bank vault you need to drill is in a long, straight hallway that will be camped by snipers on a neighboring balcony and cops have no less than four different routes into the bank, which manages to be both cramped and short on good cover at the same time.

* Perhaps the worst part is that you ''cannot'' kill, contain, or otherwise neutralize all of the many, many guards and civilians. You still only have four pagers available, and there are easily at least a dozen guards on the map. They also like to patrol a ''lot'', and while they won't notice things like opened crates or cargo containers, they ''will'' notice if the secured vault is opened. The loot in the vault is four pieces of the samurai armor, with the same weight as gold (no sprinting, no jumping, slow movement), and if you get spotted or a guard notices the vault is opening (and no, you can't close it), you're boned and have to drop everything and run...assuming you even have enough loot to DO that!
* It can become frustrating for players for an entirely different reason. Players who really know the level and are strong with stealth abilities find the level very easy and ''incredibly'' profitable in cash and XP, second only to Hoxton Breakout. If you get in a group with one of these people expect to run Shadow Raid early and often, with the stealther instructing everyone else to just sit back and do nothing for 15 minutes while they effectively solo the heist.
* With enough time and practice, the guard paths are stable enough that a skilled player can avoid almost all of them, with options on just killing the ones that will stay stationary in an inconvenient place. With a little luck and caution, a decent player can basically make the warehouse their playroom. ''Unless'' the helicopter that arrives around the five-minute mark is carrying ''more guards'' instead of an artifact, which means if one of ''them'' turns out to be a camper and picks the right spot, you're not getting any loot in his line of sight without blowing the alarm.
* It ''is'' possible to "force" the chopper to bring a container instead of additional guards by standing near the helipad, 5 minutes after Bain says you should check the Murkywater warehouse for better loot.
* GO Bank is probably the most infamous. For starters, stealthing this mission isn't as simple as "stop all the guards, cameras, and civilians in the map". Also, the cameras' operator is offsite (meaning they need to be directly destroyed), and all the people in the building need to be dealt with. Then when the time comes to open the vault, it requires two keycards (located from a large list of potential spots), and takes many minutes for its lock to disengage. During this time the phone constantly rings, using the RNG to determine whether or not the mission will get even harder, and civilians constantly spawn on the street. And that's just scratching the surface.
* Practicing the map helps, but even if you know it inside out there are several hazards players need to account for. Assuming the team has no qualms about killing civilians and/or have a very large amount of cable ties, and can co-operate well enough to answer the phone whilst managing [=GenSec=], police, and civilian spawns, there is still the matter of passing the vault lasers (which are almost always on) and then reaching the escape before things get out of your control.
* The civilians are the worst problem; unlike other maps they will constantly spawn and, if you were sloppy, spot corpses or hostages in the streets before they enter the playing area. This means you have to kill them or use Stockholm Syndrome's effects, but at times you can't do the former because they're still hidden behind a wall, frantically dialing away at a cellphone. If you DID manage to be clean about everything, there's also a random chance that the civilians will enter the now-deserted bank and ''will not leave''. Considering you have to go through the front of it to get to the vault, this effectively means you must subdue the new civilians, even if you're out of cable ties and bodybags.
* Should Plan A fail, you have to face large amounts of cops with poor cover for yourselves, while assembling a cage and skyhook to collect your loot - which has nothing to stop the police from taking the bags back out of it, should they get to it. When the pilot ''finally'' catches the cage (the Ace Pilot is better, but still not guaranteed), the crew must escape to the van at the parking garage through the sewer maze in a limited time with the cops on their tail.

* The Bomb: Dockyard, for sneaks. You thought Shadow Raid was bad? Try stealthing this one! You need two keycards to open the docking gate, but on this huge map there will only ever be exactly two keycards which have a large number of potential spawns; these keycards must then be moved to the front of the map. Then you need to find a computer with the Moretta's comm frequencies; these eight computers, in two groups of four, are always in rooms with cameras and the potential for a guard or civilian to spot you while you work. Then you need to make a phone call to the captain from a specific phone, then give him GPS data from a computer, which may be on opposite sides of the map. Wait for the ship to move, which takes a few minutes, and only then can you board and begin looking for the bomb. Making it harder, the map is large and relatively open, with guards on multiple elevations who aren't always easy to spot and can see you from some very unusual angles. Civilians are numerous and strategically placed to ensure there's no easy way to navigate around without killing a few. Also, a surprise to many people, there are two security rooms - This means to take the cameras offline two guards may need to be killed[[note]]It is possible for one of the two rooms to be unoccupied[[/note]], and one of them is in a room with a large glass window in a fairly well-patrolled area.
* Brutal as stealth on Dockyard can be, it is still a stiff breeze compared to the nightmare that is doing it loud. Most of the above tasks are present, though some are modified (you need to wait for C4 to be airdropped in instead of keycards, there's one computer to hack, but the building has a power box on every outer wall that the police will doggedly pursue and force you to repair them and restart the computer). The biggest issue is that the police will send in massive amounts of Snipers who will set up on the buildings on the edges of the massive map, [[TheAIisACheatingBastard who will effortlessly plug you full of holes from distances that you can't even see them, even through the most powerful scopes available to the player]], made worse by the lack of tall enough cover in many places. The helicopter drop and hacking portions takes a very long time, especially if you aren't willing to throw substantial money and favours towards assets that can speed them up slightly. Worst of all, however, is actually moving the bomb parts-- not only are they heavy, and not only are you being shot at from almost every angle, but the path to the escape van is LUDICROUSLY long if you don't have enough favours left over for the pricey alternative escape routes. It's well over 100 meters away as the crow flies, but the actual path itself is full of long, exposed corridors that wind and in some cases require a bit of backtracking. Without a full party of four players, you either have to walk this path several times or keep throwing the bags ahead, making progress agonizingly slow, all the while the police simply do not relent, especially at the end where the assault literally ''never ends''.

* In Day 1, the crew must find the control room to lower bollards that are in the way of the armored truck's escape route. There can be many rooms to open, requiring up to 20 seconds of lockpicking, or C4. The bad news is that there is no indication where the control room is, and the rooms are spread out. Pray the control room is in the first door opened...
* With the introduction of the SWAT Van Turret, Day 1 has become a nightmare during the street portion (especially if attempting Tabula Rasa, which requires using no skills and wearing no armor on Overkill difficulty). A SWAT Van Turret has a chance of spawning at every horizontal turn, especially near the parking lot entrance. You could even get a turret spawn on both sides, essentially sandwiching you between two rapid-fire turrets. While there is enough cover to save yourself from one turret, when they spawn on both sides of the road it becomes near impossible to dodge the damage without running in circles. And that's on top of everyone else after your ass.
* In Day 2, there are some tasks that require far more dedication than others. The worst of the lot by far is searching for Witness Testimonies; always located at the very bottom of the level (where the main fighting arena is closer to the top), has a door that must be lockpicked, AND one that must be drilled (though both can be blown up with C4). ''Then'' the crew must search a large archive for the right file. RNG strikes again; it may take a ''very'' long time to find the file, so don't be surprised if the right one is always whichever one you save for last. The worst part is the hostage rescue teams may free hostages while a player is stuck searching below!
* The second worst is the DNA Scan; again, two doors must be opened (one via lockpicking, the other must use a drill), and files marked "Clown Case" must be put through the DNA scanner. Each scan takes half a minute. The one saving grace of this task is that it is actually close to the operations room, and the two doors can be dealt with simultaneously.
* There are four possible ways into Operations, but anywhere between two and four of them can appear. The mission is much harder if only the two side entrances are available - This means any time you have to leave Ops you have to run past the two snipers that are nearly always set up across from you and any assignment you have is going to take longer simply because of the added time it takes to get there.
* On the flipside, if all four ways are opened, it leaves the crew ''very'' vulnerable to enemy invasions from all flanks. Provided that some doors won't spawn it becomes easier and less costly to shut down the doors and save the keycards for objectives.
* The spawn location of the fuse box can also make this heist frustratingly difficult. If the fusebox spawns under ANY balcony, the cops can actually just jump down and instantly turn it off. Each time it's turned off it adds 60 seconds to the hack. If you get this spawn location and don't watch the balconies very carefully, you'll end up staying in that operations room for a VERY long time.

* Like Shadow Raid, this is a stealth-only mission that starts a timer when the alarm is triggered. While the heist overall is fairly straightforward, one sequence that can annoy players is the driving sequence at the end where the players must transport the stolen cars to the docks before a timer runs out. The controls for the car are ''extremely'' bad, and it's not uncommon to lose a lot of time just trying to keep the car from repeatedly crashing into walls. [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Much like the Art Gallery, the exp/cash payout is quite poor]]. It also briefly enters GuideDangIt territory, as it is not explained ''where'' you need to drive the cars to - all you're told is to plant C4 on the road at one point, the game not bothering to explain that it's to blow a hole through (which you can't see from the car over the dashboard until you're driving into it), which opens up into an abandoned tunnel leading to the docks.
* On Mayhem and above, this heist not only gives you ''90'' seconds to get the car from the shop to the crates (meaning you basically have to make a perfect run at it, with minor collisions; getting detected will basically end the run right there because it takes that long just to open the door to the key storage) but it also has a high chance of spawning a guard right in front of the Manager's office, ''that won't move''. You pretty much have to kill him, but he also happens to be in one of the most highly patrolled areas of the map. Additionally, there can be as many as a dozen guards packed inside the relatively tiny dealership, making movement extremely difficult. This isn't even counting all the civilians that spawn inside, too!
* Almost any difficulty but Normal makes the heist a major pain in the ass to even beat it. Because the dealership is tiny, the paths that guards and civilians take can frequently cross each other, making the odds of being spotted or someone seeing a dead body extremely high. Sometimes it's just safer and faster to kill civilians and bag their bodies rather than tying them up and slowly leading them somewhere while running the risk of the hostage or yourself being spotted. Part of the major difficulty the heist presents comes from the amount of guards and civilians alone.
* There is absolutely no substantial reward in completing the mission either. The EXP payout is poor, the monetary payout is poor if only a few cars are secured (there aren't many skilled drivers in the ''Payday 2'' community), and there's no stealth bonus despite the majority of the mission being stealth-based. Much of this was made a little easier in Update #157, in which the computer hacking now only takes 60 seconds regardless of difficulty. In addition, the guard guarding the manager's office is absent and none of them will patrol the offices anymore. [[FakeDifficulty Even then, the driving is still dangerously difficult for the wrong reasons]].

* The Golden Grin Casino is no walk in the park. When going loud, the crew must erect the BFD[[note]]Big Fucking Drill[[/note]], a plasma cutter that normally requires two power sockets and enough coolant tanks to keep it running. These three factors plus the console itself must be defended, requiring all four members to address each position lest the drill restart over and over due to interference. The drill itself, even when upgraded to cut through the fastest, takes a ''long time''. After that, it's an endless assault!
* Doing it silent is just as difficult. There are many steps in gassing the security room, involving stolen blueprints, finding three briefcases, scanning the guest rooms, and making a guy throw up. Sounds silly, but it's no joke; the guest in question must be fed a ''specific'' drink, which can be located in some of the worst spots imaginable. The guest himself may be surrounded by peeping toms or guards too. Inside the vault The Dentist's mystery loot can only be accessed by bypassing a door and a laser. The laser has a random, but predictable pattern, but the noisy drill will almost certainly attract the attention of a guard, [[FakeDifficulty bringing him to a now breached security room]], which will make him panic. Even the lasers can be a very real problem on the way out with the Dentist's loot, as the loot is considered to be as heavy as the fusion reactor from Big Oil and the artifacts from Shadow Raid, and will slow you down to a crawl. Your timing with getting past the lasers has to be pretty much spot-on if you don't want to set off the alarm.

* Day 1 sees the crew roaming around the city in search of goats, which [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext have had cocaine smuggled inside their rectums]]. Sounds simple? It isn't. The map is massive, requiring the Longfellow in order to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and the goats could ''be'' anywhere - hidden in buildings, trapped on scaffolding, stuck behind gates or on top of lampposts, requiring the use of a drill or saw respectively, and regardless of difficulty, one is guaranteed to appear at the top of a burning building, which is of course going to be swarming with cops. As for the goats themselves, they are a rather unique type of loot in that they can ''damage you''. The Longfellow is also intended to help carry the goats, but it can only carry a set few at the time, so you will have to fill up the trunk, get to the semi, drop off the goats, repeat, until you have all the goats. This is made even more frustrating in that none of the goats' locations, aside from the last one, are marked out for you, only revealing themselves as you get close. The Longfellow itself can break down if it gets too damaged, just to make it worse. And then there is the big problem: a severe lack of cover. There are several buildings that should be used as functional cover, but they all have very large glass windows, rendering them more likely to get you killed. Clearly, this map was designed around Swan Song.
* Day 2 is even worse. The day begins with you having a shootout on the farm with the Honduran cartel who got you into this mess, where the map's problems quickly rear their ugly head - in that this map somehow has even less cover than Day 1. The farmhouse is barren, and has several holes that you can be shot through, and that's as good as the cover is going to get here. And once the cartel dies down and the police arrive, you're forced to take the goats out of the barn, and set up a fulton cage for Vlad's brother Bubba to fly in and extract them. And just like on GO Bank, the cage has no protection from the cops stealing the cargo. And if you forget even one of the goats (or it gets stolen out of the cage by cops), you'll have to do the whole process over again. Once that's done, you need to unload the Longfellow from the truck, and drive to a nearby bridge. Once you arrive, you'll find that the bridge is out, and you are once again surrounded by cops. You have to get into the security room using a drill, or a saw or C4 if you happened to bring them, and just to rub it in, once you get in, you finally get some cover in the form of some shutters! Until you activate the bridge, at which point the shutters raise up. Once the bridge is in place, you can finally get back in the Longfellow and make a run for it. At least you'll get an above average payday for your efforts.

* Reservoir Dogs Day 1[[note]]technically the second day gameplay-wise, it's complicated[[/note]] is a complete nightmare on higher difficulties, especially if you want to steal all the loot. The mission starts with cops spawning everywhere, and taking all of the loot in the starting section requires you to expose your face to the dozens of cops around you (hope that you don't get tased!) and on those higher difficulties, a SWAT Turret. If you're playing on Mayhem or higher, there are ''multiple'' Skulldozers in the first waves of the police assault, making it quite likely that the heist will end right there if players don't focus on them immediately. Once you hack into the vault area, while defending the vault area is easy, upstairs is another thing altogether. The upstairs area will almost always be filled with cops and you have to go up there at least once to get the C4 to open the safe. This doesn't include going up there in order to get all the loot and create a zipline to streamline bag securing, hope you don't get tased! Talking about the bag securing, if you're doing this solo, it's a complete nightmare because you're forced to run across the lobby and main street, both of which are filled with cops and have little to no cover, again, [[RuleofThree hope you don't get tased!]] Thankfully, securing the bags is much easier when you're playing with other players, as you can just have one player stay at the car to secure the bags while others send them down on the zipline.

* The method of reaching and cracking the vault is randomized every time. To get to it, you have to either saw a shutter open, or cut a circle in the floor of the offices above, and blow it open with explosives. Then to open the vault, you have to either use a thermal drill, or weaken the locks on the door with thermal paste, and use a winch to pull the vault door off the hinges. But it gets worse; if you have to use the winch, there's a chance that the bags to assemble it may not be at the drop point, resulting in the bags being dropped to you via overpass. Then you have to watch out for cops attempting to stop your equipment, and we all know how fun that is.

* Stealth-only heists have been a very mixed bag, and ''Breakin' Feds'' is unarguably the worst. A multi-level, corridor-centric maze ''infested'' with guards and cameras, with more guards spawning in if you kill a few. On higher difficulties, it is entirely possible for '''three''' guards to stand in a single corridor, and chances are you'll run from one guard into a room containing two more. The worst part is Commissioner Garrett. If he spots you at any point, you automatically fail the heist and he can't be killed (doing so will fail the heist as well). You need to move him out of his office, a temporary measure, and finding the box in said office is an exercise in frustration. And then, there's a chance that you won't actually ''find'' the box there, meaning you have to trudge across the map again to find it in the Evidence room. And finally, there's a chance that Twitch will blow up one of the walls as your escape, thus triggering a one-minute point of no return. It makes sense that the FBI offices would be this secure after Hoxton Breakout, but for anyone not 100% versed in ''Payday 2'''s wonky stealth mechanics, it's seriously aggravating and bordering on impossible. At least the objectives are simple and the door to the camera-controlling Security Room is a lockpick job rather than a keycard job.
* Simply put, ''Henry's Rock'' is the epitome of Overkill's general failings in level design for Loud heists: it suffers from little to no cover, enemy spawns everywhere, an overabundance of special spawns, objectives that involve a lot of messing about, heavy loot bags you need to shift through open spaces peppered with guards, and everything in-between. You have to hack your way out of one room (which has no cover), then into the main hall (which also has no cover) before exploring two randomly selected rooms. In terms of the four rooms in question, one is somewhat easy and straightforward[[note]]the computer lab simply has you interact with certain computers, then operate a crane with a crowbar in the main hall[[/note]], two are frustrating[[note]]the weapons testing room has one aim and fire an experimental laser cannon with multiple steps and many places the cops can shut it down, while the archeology room is a mini puzzle in and of itself[[/note]] and one is downright infuriating[[note]]the chemical lab has one play reverse-Rats in order to mix a concoction to burn open a shutter door, while having to defend the chem machine from cops shooting it and you from literally every angle[[/note]]. After that, heave the bags back to the start, hack two turrets on either side of the helipad and then wait for Bile to show up before hoisting the bags into his helicopter, all with - you guessed it - no cover. Naturally, the heist is often derogatorily [[FanNickname referred to as Henry's Cock]], because you are going to get ''fucked'' by it.

** If you refuse to play on single-player, you ''will'' need either totally cooperative strangers or friends. Playing with neither of these will screw up the entire heist before it's started. Additionally, the heist depends on getting the right intel and identifying which of the several machines is the only correct one.

** There is one more hiccup you may encounter when getting the info for the right machine. The pressure information is found on various computers on Day 2. If the texture quality is set too low, ''the monitors are unreadable''. They can also accidentally be broken if someone gets too trigger-happy or a gunfight breaks out in the lab somehow.
* Another thing that discouraged most players from playing is that Big Oil was only available as a Pro Job, meaning players don't really get good chances to learn the mechanics of the heist since they can't restart if they screw up. Update #100 for the PC version thankfully removed pro jobs entirely, allowing for trial and error to learn the heist if the need be.

* Train Heist. There is a reason why many players avoid looting the secret blueprints in Armored Transport. This heist requires players to break through two layers of security to reach the loot. First, you have to drill or hack the train car doors, and assuming you opened a car with a vault in it, you need to open it with a thermal drill which Bain will "helpfully" drop somewhere in the canyon below, requiring a player to retrieve it with cops constantly shooting at them from the high ground. Then, once you set up the thermal drill, there's a 1/3 chance the vault will either contain the mission required turret pieces, or optional ammo. The ammo itself, unlike regular loot, will explode if shot at or if dropped too far, which means if you want to get the maximum payday, you must ferry ''all 40'' ammo bags on foot to the drop-off point, all while being shot at by cops and snipers, of course.
* Following the Spring Break event, the Train Heist has been made into its own heist, and made significantly easier in both loud and stealth runs via adding in new asset options.

* Big Bank. There is a ''very'' good reason this place has never been robbed. Both approaches have their own unique challenges, with Loud being a monumental gunfight, but stealth deserves special mention. The Big Bank has generally taken over from GO Bank as being the hardest stealthable mission in ''Payday 2''; it's flooded with civilians, more of which constantly spawn in the street and walk in. Want to use Stockholm Syndrome to get them all down? ''You can't'' - The guards inside the vault room will hear you too and call the police from complete safety. The cameras in the lobby are connected to a control room behind the timelock so you can't disable them when you really want to. When you trigger the timelock, you get a call from our good friend Jen at [=GenSec=], who may send over more guards, and another guard may come in from the elevator. Shoot him inside the elevator, though, and you can't answer his pager, so hope he doesn't see something right away. Once you get the timelock open you have to contend with the lasers on the vault room entrance, then perform a stealth section right out of one of the better ''VideoGame/{{Thief}}'' games just to open it (which may sometimes alert a guard or two). Once you get inside you better have a silent drill or have found the keybox so you can open the 5-6 doors quietly. Then you need to move the loot out past the guards and lasers all over again, though one of the Escape Plans you can elect to utilise is specifically tailored for stealth runs (The Elevator Trick), and involves moving the loot a shorter distance from the vault to secure it. If you can find, or pre-place, extra keycards, you can also get rid of some or all of the lasers. However, if you're going for the "Entrapment" achievement, all that's out the window - you ''have'' to get 12 bags to the default escape out front, and you ''have'' to leave those lasers up.

* The Alesso Heist, bar the whole deliberate ProductPlacement theme, is still divisive for its confusing layout and overly long process. For one, an unexperienced players can easily get lost in the corridors or behind the shops, and have a lot of trouble reaching the basement. Stealthing this heist in particular can be a challenge as the layout is still windy, the pathfinding of the guards may change, and the mission requires going from the lowest floor to the highest, then back again, and then [[OverlyLongGag again]]. All the while remaining under the radar! At least the various chutes make bag-moving a lot easier.
* The Golden Grin Casino, the last of The Dentist's jobs, is no walk in the park. When going loud, the crew must erect the BFD[[note]]Big Fucking Drill[[/note]], a plasma cutter that normally requires two power sockets and enough coolant tanks to keep it running. These three factors plus the console itself must be defended, requiring all four members to address each position lest the drill restart over and over due to interference. The drill itself, even when upgraded to cut through the fastest, takes a ''long time''. After that, it's an endless assault!

* Brooklyn 10-10 is a rather nasty heist. The main objective is to shoot down cops that chase after Charon, a protectee of yours. Surprisingly, this is not the hard part. The hard part is having to deal with the swathes of cops that rush in while you watch out for Charon. And your movement space in the levels is very, very limited and the cover is woefully inadequate, so finding a safe spot to lick your wounds is often an exercise in futility. A little while later, you have to drill a pair of gates whilst under all the above-mentioned pressure (and the drills jam very frequently, given how short the ETA to completion is). There is also some extra loot that you can get out, but with all the bullets coming at you, you'd be hard-pressed to resist the urge to make a run for it.

* Brooklyn Bank is pretty similar to the Harvest & Trustee bank heists from the game's early days, in that you bust open the vault, get what you need and get out of there. And that's where the similarities end...
* The map is one big killzone, as the interior of the bank is cramped and likely to be flooded with cops, the second floor balcony is open to fire from the streets, and the streets have no cover whatsoever. No matter where you go, you'll be under fire from enemies, and the poor lighting can render faraway enemies, especially the hard-hitting Snipers, nearly invisible.