Rune Scape 3
- There are a number of particularly infamous Dungeoneering achievements:
- The fittingly-named "Up to the Gods" requires you to offer frost dragon bones on an altar. Frost dragons can only show up on the first eleven floors, and are a very rare enemy. There are players that have gone through over a hundred frozen floors and not seen a frost dragon.
- "And I want it now!" asks you to complete a solo floor in under six minutes. This is entirely dependent on the game being nice and putting the boss door close to the starting room, and then giving you a boss that doesn't have Puzzle Boss elements or long invincibility times. Mitigated by the fact that you can do this on a small floor.
- "Port Enter" requires you to make a Portent of Passage V or above, and use it to pass through a skill door you otherwise couldn't. This is easy enough... unless you've got high skill levels, in which case crafting the portent is easy, but finding a door you can actually use it on becomes nightmarish.
- Finally, there's "Kinprovements". This requires you to wear a Ring of Kinship with a fully upgraded role. Maxing out a role takes a humongous amount of Dungeoneering tokens, with over 200,000 being required just for the jump from rank 9 to 10. For reference, if you start at level 1 Dungeoneering and dump all your tokens into ring upgrades, by the time you get enough for rank 10, your level will be in the eighties.
- Beyond Dungeoneering, the Elf achievement tree requires you to go through the Underground Pass and stop by Klank to talk about his gauntlets. Yes, that one, the one filled with more traps than any hunter area in the game, full of multiple examples of That One Puzzle. The kicker? This is an easy task. Somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can complete this while doing the Underground Pass quest in the first place; as long as you use the shortcuts required by the achievement along the way, you'll complete it as soon as you talk to Klank as part of the quest.
- Completing the Hard and Elite Task Lists for the Kharidian Desert requires completing "Nipped in the Bug" and "Sun Shade". Both achievements require an incredibly long grind in the Dominion Towernote , forcing players to slog through a ridiculous number of replays of previously cleared boss fights. While many of the fights are very easy for a player that's a high enough level to be attempting to finish off the Task Lists (including some that should be a Zero-Effort Boss at that point, such as Count Draynor and Melzar the Mad), it's an incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and otherwise not very rewarding process to earn enough wins to finally meet the requirements needed to complete the Tasks. For many players, these Tasks are the very last ones they complete in the entire List.
- Both 3 and Old School have the same medium Karamja task, trading gems for a machete. This requires several gems, some money, and a gout tuber. Gout tubers are only available in one place, a very rare random drop from the Tai Bwo Wannai Cleanup minigame. They have a 1% chance of spawning when chopping jungle patches. Finding one can potentially take hours, and while they're tradeable, they cost a small fortune, especially at the levels you'd usually be doing the medium tasks. As a final fuck-you, the left-click option on a gout tuber isn't Use like most items, it's Eat, meaning one small misclick and you'll devour the thing you've spent a lot of time or money on.
- If you intend to acquire a Completionist cape (or even the trimmed version!), some of the requirements involved certainly count. Special mentions go to the following:
- The Champion's Challenge, dear lord the Champion's Challenge. Thirteen types of monster have a chance of dropping a scroll where the 'champion' of that particular race (from imps to hobgoblins to mummies to lesser demons, all of which have no alternate versions to make getting the scroll worthwhile) challenge you to a fight with certain modifiers— no off-hand weapons, no magic, no inventory, etc. So far so good, right? Except that the scrolls have a 1 in 5000 chance of dropping from that particular monster. That's the same drop rate as most boss pets in RS3 and thousands higher than all but the earliest non-skilling pets in Old School, but unlike those, there's no threshold multiplier applied to the scrolls.note People have literally played the game for over a decade and not seen a single scroll!
- The Shattered Heart Distraction and Diversion. This involves grinding in non-combat skills until you acquire strange rocks, which are needed to construct a Statue of Dahmaroc in the Varrock Museum (requiring 15 pairs of strange rocks to complete), which upon completion explodes and leaves you with a replica statue piece to build a replica of the Statue of Dahmaroc in your own POH, and must be completed again for another replica piece. Before an update in 2021, you could only complete the statue in Varrock Museum once per week, and to fulfill said requirement for the trimmed Completionist cape, you need a total of 15 pairs of replica statue pieces to complete the replica statue; in other words, you need to grind for 450 pairs of strange rocks, and required at least 30 weeks before you can complete the requirement; the aforementioned update finally removed this time gate, over a decade after its introduction. With the release of Prifddinas, there's a second, completely separate version of this, requiring even more rocks, though it has never had a cooldown.
- 'How Many Games?' was so infamous that it lost its status. To complete 'How Many Games?', you have to show Lanthus a full set of Castle Wars profound decorative armour. The full profound set costs 4,150 gold tickets. For reference, winning a game of Castle Wars (which takes 20 minutes per match) gets two gold tickets. It was formerly a requirement for the Completionist Cape trim, but it was removed from that list because it was too much of a grind even for the trimmed Completionist Cape. Now, it only unlocks a title.
Old School Rune Scape
- There's a Kharidian Desert Achievement Diary task that stands out among the rest: mounting a Kalphite Queen head in your house. The Queen has less than 1% chance of dropping her head, and grinding her for the drop is difficult, with even maxed PvM accounts struggling to get more than a few kills per run. Thankfully, there is a version made specifically for this task that is guaranteed to drop; unfortunately, however, the guaranteed head drop only happens on your 256th Queen kill. Fortunately, this is the only diary achievement that requires a rare drop.
- In addition to the bosses, there's the Wilderness Diary, which requires you to kill every singlenote boss in the wilderness. While the Chaos Fanatic is fairly quick and both the Chaos Elemental and Scorpia are in less frequented places close to a teleport, the other three are all tough, beyond 30 wilderness so you can't teleport out upon seeing someone, frequented by PKers hoping to kill people fighting them, and are all in multi-combat zones. This makes even Venenatis, who is both close to a single-combat zone and can be safe spotted, a problematic opponent if you happen to get unlucky.
- From the Western Provinces section, there's killing Zulrah. This would be fitting as an Elite challenge, but it's a Hard one. The issue with her is that she's one of the first bosses after prayer flicking became meta, so she requires you to move around the arena a lot and punishes you for not following her patterns, and her method of punishing (venom, which stacks far higher than poison and is applied through clouds that you need to stand on tiles to avoid) is very punishing, making learning her much harder than you'd expect from a Hard Diary boss. While a player skilled enough will be able to do multiple kills per trip, a new player will have significant trouble killing her just once even with a guide.
- For something that isn't boss-related, the Western Provinces has several achievements based around killing chompy birds. The elite version requires you to kill 1000 chompies. Hunting chompies requires you to inflate frogs with swamp gas (maximum of 3 at once), then wait for chompy birds to land and shoot them down with ogre arrows. There's no risk whatsoever involved, but it's mind-numbingly dull and repetitive. Even worse, there's a unique chompy pet locked behind the elite diary, so if you want the pet, you have to grind even more chompy birds.
- The Elite Falador Diary requires you to purchase a white 2h sword. This requires you to achieve Master White Knight rank, which is done by killing a minimum of 1,200 Black Knights. Even worse, while 3 has Elite Black Knights that count for twelve kills, in Old School you have to grind it out the hard way.
- The Elite tier also requires you to preform any skillcape emote on the top of Falador Castle. You’ll either need to grind out any skill to 99 or earn the Quest cape to achieve it.
- The Hard Falador Diary requires you to wear a full set of Prospector gear into the Mining Guild. This isn't difficult, but it requires spending a lot of time in the Motherlode Mine to obtain one of the least-useful rewards.
- Hard Ardougne requires you to smith a Dragon Square Shield on a specific anvil in West Ardougne. For regular accounts, this is an extravagant waste of money to obtain a really mediocre shield. For Ironman accounts, this is a hellish grind if the RNG doesn't go your way.
- "Dress Like You Mean It', a hard combat achievement, requires you to fight Tempoross with a full angler outfit equipped. Getting the angler outfit requires you to either grind Fishing Trawler or aerial fishing. Fishing Trawler is a slog of a minigame, and aerial fishing is even worse.
- "Who is The King Now?" Kill the King Black Dragon ten times in a private instance. This sounds trivial, but there's two problems. First, the King Black Dragon has unblockable dragonfire attacks, so you will be taking constant damage unless you can kill him quickly. The second problem is, getting to his lair requires you to run through high-level Wilderness, and the area around the Lava Maze is a player-killer hotspot. Even if you've got a load of high-level gear, it won't help if you get jumped by a gang of player killers and lose it all.
- "The Fremennik Way" requires you to defeat Vorkath without any kind of weapon. Needless to say, you're in for one hell of a fight.
