That One Level / Destiny 2

There are places in the Sol system that even the most powerful Guardians struggle to fight through. Your Light fades away...

• Savathûn's Song, for non-Titans. The main gimmick of the strike is that someone has to pick up a ball of Void Light and deliver it to a pillar in order to destroy a invincible Shrieker, while leaving the carrier with nothing but melee attacks. Which is a bad thing since there are a lot more Ogres than usual in this Strike, who will gleefully melt you with their eye beams. Hell, in one room where you need to deliver it, it's guarded by a Ogre outside the room and two Ogres and a Shrieker inside the room.
• For Solstice of Heroes, the Redux of 1AU, specifically the "Sunside" portion of the level, can be absolutely brutal, especially if you're soloing the mission. The portion in question has you going outside the Almighty and running along a portion of the hull exposed to the Sun's damaging solar winds, where you will take constant damage unless you are in cover. The Redux version of the mission puts a lot of Elite Mooks in your way, gives you less cover to work with, and drops Cabal Drop Pods directly along the paths you are most likely to take to get from cover to cover. The difficulty is massively exacerbated by the fact that you will likely be wearing the Scorched Event Armor the first time you make this run, which gives you only a single point in Resilience and no points in Recovery.
• Niobe Labs became infamous due to a glitch in the first days that made it accidentally unwinnable, leaving out a particular clue on how to solve it. This was rather significant in that this was story-related content that was locked out to everyone until a team cleared. Bungie responded by just unlocking the content manually and later patched the glitch, leaving the puzzle more of a novelty quest rather providing anything important.
• Among the raids, Spire of Stars is far more mechanics focused than any other, requiring tighter and tighter team coordination as you pass each section with a significantly smaller margin of error (even getting the bonus chest can be frustrating). This is before the Harder Than Hard prestige mode. It's also easily the least requested Raid on the companion app, making it that much more difficult to get a team together that is capable of beating it.
• The Dreaming City strike, "The Corrupted", is one of the strikes where you either make or break with your fireteam; on top of sporting copious amounts of Taken mobs (many of which are Demonic Spiders), it features a mechanic that requires you to pass a charge to your teammates in order to efficiently break some elite Taken shields, and has a section where you're constantly being teleported between the Dreaming City and its Ascendant Realm counterpart until you kill both Ogres in their respective realms. Then you get to Sedia, who is a nasty piece of work on her own. Even the most seasoned players who can do the Nightfall Ordeal Grandmaster of other strikes on their first try were driven insane trying to complete it on that difficulty.
• The Bridge of Folly section in the Reckoning (Tiers 2 and above) is easily the most frustrating part of the playlist (and among the worst levels in the game, period), and not without reason: enemies abound from all directions, the front and back of the bridge are teeming with an infinite number of Shadow Thralls and massive Taken elites that pack a ridiculous Shockwave Stomp just to shove you off the plates you need to capture (and most likely off the bridge), and the flanks have platforms in the distance that are infested by Taken snipers.
• "A Garden World" is tied with "The Corrupted" for Season 11's hardest Grandmaster Ordeal strike, given nearly all of the Minotaurs and Hobgoblins featured in an all-Vex spawn are turned into Overload and Barrier Champions, respectively. This significantly amps up the difficulty in an already long trek through Past Mercury, and some rooms feature several Champions at once. Then there's the boss room's lack of reliable cover; things can get out of hand so quickly, no one would judge you if you constantly hid behind the invincible inanimate Minotaurs' calves while wailing away at Dendron.
• While "The Glassway" is a mostly fun strike with lots of enemies to chew on at regular difficulties, the same can't be said when you do the Ordeal version of it, especially the Grandmaster difficulty. The near totality of those enemies suddenly can oneshot you a the tip of a hat, have metric tons of health, and have no conpunctions flanking you. Then there's the boss room, where multiple Champions and Wyverns can swarm you in the side rooms that normally let you hide from Belmon's oneshotting blasts. It's telling when an average Grandmaster completion on this one goes way over the alloted 30 minutes before revives are disabled. It got to the point where Bungie upped the time limit to 45 minutes to this Grandmaster and the following one...
• The Grandmaster version of "The Scarlet Keep" directly competes with "The Glassway" and "The Corrupted" for the longest and most arduous pathway to the boss room, easily taking between 25 to 35 minutes just to get to Hashladûn. Barrier Champions infest the long-winded bridges leading to the top of the tower, and the Acolytes who are equipped with Soulfire Rifles will oneshot you from far away if given the time to charge their attack. Things get even harder on the boss room, where there is virtually no safe spot from the Knights' and Acolytes' constant bombardment. May the Traveler help you if you can't shut down the Unstoppable Ogres in time.
• The opening Warsat section of the Fallen S.A.B.E.R. strike comes back straight from D1, which means a tedious zone defense made worse by constant Skiff bombardments and enemy Fallen pouring from all directions. It's common to get swarmed by half a dozen Marauders at several points in the strike, and the higher difficulties of the Ordeal version have multiple Champions covering each other. Hope you brought your trusty Riskrunner for this, because you're gonna get shocked constantly.
• The "Proving Ground" strike receives the same treatment as "The Glassway" when it comes to higher Ordeal Nightfall difficulties; extreme enemy density with large open areas that offer little to no cover, forcing you to take your time engaging enemies from a very long distance. Because nearly every Cabal unit can oneshot you if you aren't prepared for it, expect to struggle a lot in the hangar section, where you have to deal with two Goliath tanks and multiple Champions and Interceptors. Then there's Ignovun, who draws similar complaints due to his boss arena being mostly bare and perfect for his Bronto Cannon spam, which, once again, oneshots you with little notice.
• Just when you thought Bungie couldn't stoop to new lows for unfun difficulty design, the Grandmaster Nightfall version of "The Hollowed Lair" comes in, turning the already tedious strike into one of the worst endgame experiences ever. Corrupted Raiders that oneshot you from afar unless you heavily build on resilience and resist mods, Overload Chieftains that do nothing but spam totems of all elemental types and sometimes outright refuse to stay stunned, and mini-Screebs that spawn from any downed Stalker. Suddenly, the Fanatic's boss room becomes a hellhole with the sheer amount of enemies that spawn there.
• Putting every single Grandmaster Nightfall before it to shame is "The Lightblade". This version of the strike has Acute Arc Burn among the modifiers, and nearly every Hive and their mom deals Arc damage here, meaning you're in for a wild ride. The Lightbearer Knights are now upgraded to oneshot any player with their suppressive grenades and shield throws, and they either overlap with each other or are flanked by Barrier Knights. The second section is particularly painful if a Lightbearer Knight manages to bottleneck the entrance and force you to hang back and chip away at it while it keeps spamming oneshot abilities; unless you concentrate fire on them very early or use your own suppressing abilities to keep them from wreaking havoc, the Lightbearer Knights will be a thorn in your run every time one shows up. Then there's Alak-Hul and his colossal health pool, with his long stream of Arc blasts forcing you to stay out of his line of sight, which is easier said than done due to the lack of reliable hiding spots in the boss arena and the hordes of enemies waiting to ambush you. The thing is that even if you are pretty good at killing enemies, the hardest section is when you go into a field with the Weight of Darkness debuff from "Crota's End" that slows your movement to a crawl and removes your double jump, all while being attacked on all angles by exploding screebs and lucent moths.
• Grasp of Avarice is a very long dungeon, easily taking about half an hour and upwards without shortcuts or cheesing. The core mechanic requires you to deposit enough cursed engrams into a crystal to bring down an invincible boss's shields, and you're on a timer while holding those engrams; fail to stand near a crystal or pick up another engram and you die once the timer hits zero. Phry'zhia is particularly tough to fight since its Eye Beams will make you not want to stand out in the open for too long. Then there's the sparrow section immediately afterwards, which tests your speed and ability to quickly spawn new sparrows when the current one takes too much damage (and you will take a lot of damage with all the Fallen sprawling across the map). The final boss, Captain Avarokk the Covetous, takes place in an arena with few safe covers, and you will want to take out R-M80 and Grisprax first in order to lessen the amount of fire you take throughout the fight.
• The opening section of the Vow of the Disciple gets flak for how long it takes to escort the barge all the way to the Sunken Pyramid. It's a longer trip than even Crown of Sorrow's opening encounter, and there's no way around it. The fact that the exact same section is reprised for the Preservation story mission makes completing it for a pinnacle reward a very tedious chore.
• Duality follows the trend set by Grasp of Avarice by being another painfully long dungeon, meaning one death will set you back minutes, if not hours, during a solo flawless attempt. All enemies are Cabal, meaning you'll be tearing your hair if you have trouble with their faction's gamut of Demonic Spiders. For this dungeon, you have a limited time to acquire Cabal standards while in the Nightmare realm, and you need to be fast enough to kill the Incendiors guarding the bell that can warp you back to the physical realm, then haul ass to said bell (which sits in the corner of the map opposite of the Incendiors in both the first and second encounters). The Nightmare of Ghalran gets flak for having way too much health, which translates into multiple encounter cycles unless you come with the biggest Game-Breaker the game has to offer. The Nightmare of Caiatl is also hated for having a colossal health pool backed by a massive amount of flunkies, but things get so much worse since her stomp triggers nearby Incendior fuel tanks that you did not detonate, leading to surprisingly sudden deaths just because you left a few tanks on the ground.
• For the PvP experience, Disjunction is a source of bottled-up rage for many, due to a number of factors related to how absurdly large it is (it was built to be a Rift map that also takes advantage of the Dark City's architecture, but ended up overextending in that regard.) On modes with objectives like Control and Rift, spawns are always the farthest from the nearest objective, even compared to Convergence, and the length of the map means the average waittime between firefights is also longer than other maps because of all the running it takes to get anywhere near each other. If the sheer lack of momentum (outside of, funnily enough, Momentum itself) during a regular match doesn't put you to sleep, the amount of people willing to back out of Disjunction and try again for a smaller, denser map or pre-made fireteams exploiting the architecture and Crucible mechanics to spawn-trap your team will make sure of that. Season of the Seraph later makes the bizarre decision to double down on all of these problems by allowing it to appear in Competitive 3v3, effectively rendering everything wrong with the map twice as painful since there's only half as many people to keep a match going. That, and there isn't an option to back out without getting anything more than a slap on the wrist.
• Seraph Station in Season of the Seraph is regarded as a fairly fun romp... on Normal. On Legend? It's an utter nightmare. While there's only a few additional modifiers, it's still a pain to get through because enemies are a lot more aggressive and powered-up, meaning you WILL be struggling against the onslaught. There's little room for error if you die in Darkness zones - an instant fail if you do it solo, and limited tokens if you're in a fireteam, with a strict wipe timer. On top of this, you're forced to do it multiple times to upgrade Revision Zero fully by finding dead Exos aboard the station that only appear on Legend. And if you happen to miss them and go too far? Sucks to be you, because there are multiple points where you're unable to backtrack, forcing you to run the entire mission all over again just to get that goddamn last body. This is on top of the multiple Warmind nodes you're not likely to get all of on a first run, as well as the drones that need to be destroyed with Revision Zero, meaning you won't get everything done in one runthrough.
• The Mars Heist Battleground from Season of the Seraph was already seen as an annoying level in the game, but the Nightfall version introduced in Season of Defiance makes it worse. By far the worst part is the opening section, where you have to raise 3 Escalation Protocol towers while being attacked on all sides by huge numbers of endlessly-spawnung enemies, forcing you into firefights with little cover and even less room to maneuver. Add onto that Nightfall modifiers and Champions and even the Hero-level version (which imposes a -5 power delta in favor of the enemies, the exact same difficulty as the Playlist from Season of the Seraph) can feel like a brutal slog.
• Node Avalon in Season of Defiance has issues similar to Seraph Station on Legend, with beefier enemies, additional modifiers (including one that makes enemies even stronger to match fireteam size) and an active power delta. This is on top of there being far more platforming being involved, where whiffing a single jump or not mantling when you should have been able to can completely ruin attempts at Flawless runs just because you miscalculated for a moment. You also have to regularly input codes in the correct sequence while dealing with constant enemy reinforcements, and if you break the wrong object, you have to do that sequence all over again. The two bosses in here are jacked up considerably, especially Brakion, who is already very nightmarish on Normal. And just like Seraph Station, you have to do this over and over to get the catalysts for Vexcalibur.
• The Whetstone, the Exotic Mission for Season of the Deep, will truly grind your teeth. Its primary gimmick is that boss enemies take Scratch Damage unless you have three stacks of the Deathly Sharp buff, acquired by killing special Minotaurs in the arena. The Minotaurs have spawns that are easily figured out in only a few plahtroughs, so finding them isn't the problem, nor is killing then. The main problem is that the final boss of the mission, Omen, has a truly monstrous pool of health and needs around five minutes of non-stop damage from the buff to go down. Not only is the mission timed, letting said timer run out ends the mission and returns you to orbit, as opposed to just restarting from a checkpoint. The fact that the buff lasts only one minute and fifteen seconds, and is lost on death just makes the mission more unbearable. What truly makes the mission so teeth grinding, though, is that it's buried inside the Deep Dive activity, and can only be unlocked by acquiring broken blades that require you to catch exotic fish. The sheer number of hoops you have to jump through to get to the mission are seen as being almost as hard as the mission itself.