Regardless of how well-made your team composition is, or if you have enough money to whale out every possible Servant or Craft Essence, these levels will prove that the path of restoring the Human Order is not going to be an easy task.
Note that due to player-perceived bullshit, 90++ Event Nodes have their own separate section.
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Arc 1: Observer on Timeless Temple
- Orleans during the game's early days. It featured wyverns with high HP, high attack and most importantly, high crit rates in the first real chapter, when most players were still getting used to the gameplay mechanics and trying to figure out everything. It didn't help that there was a dearth of Assassins that were considered good, leading to Kojirou being the most utilized and the Savior of France meme. These days, it's pretty much a walk in the park, as between friend list supports and a plethora of effective low-rarity assassins released since, the wyverns are nowhere near as dangerous as they were back at launch.
- Camelot as a whole, filled with 100,000 HP Mooks and constantly throwing you against all kinds of new enemies with dangerous skills and NPs. All the bosses can and will use their skills to make themselves even more dangerous or fill their NP gauge, while also having active buffs given to them which changes several gameplay mechanics when facing them, and whose gimmick a player must either consult an online guide to figure out or determine by trial and error. Special note goes to the last 3 or so Sections, which include Section 15 (a series of incredibly tough fights against Ozymandias and his huge setup of him, Nitocris, some Sphinxes, and a demon pillar, which you have to fight twice, once with a gimmick that makes him rapidly regain health after taking a certain amount of damage), Section 16 (a boss fight against the three Hassans, each with powerful 3-turn charge NPs, all at once), and lastly Section 17, which includes a Boss Rush against every single one of the Gifted Camelot knights, including the return of Gawain, Tristan, and Mordred, culminating in two fights against Lancer Altria herself.
Arc 1.5: Epic of Remnant
- Act 3: Please do it again, Nutcracker (3/3) from the CCC event has a huge difficulty spike, all contained in one node due to the several fights within. The first fight involves fighting three waves consisting of Sabers, Lancers, Archers, and Riders, which basically means the newly added Alter-Egos are going to be only useful for killing Riders, meaning unless you bring a Berserker, your team will be badly lopsided and at least one Servant will be fighting at a disadvantage to reach the end, ending with a fight against Saber Elisabeth. The second fight is a battle with Passionlip, who had a total of three full health bars to break, all of which give her a buff of sorts and her default health bar gives her any sort of fairness to the player, but even that is offset by her getting an NP charge per turn, with her final health bar giving her a chance to instant kill as well. Then you fight a Demon God Pillar after that! Mind you, Passionlip's fight does give you a buff in the form of a regeneration-per-turn effect, but Passionlip will hit hard enough to offset that and has class advantage over all "support" casters.
- Shimosa is considered to be the hardest chapter of Epic of Remnant, because almost all of the bosses there possess a unique gimmick and you're forced to use an NPC Musashi (who is often considered The Load, save for the very beginning and until near the very end of the chapter) in the frontline for every major boss fight.
Arc 2: Cosmos in the Lostbelt
- As mentioned in the That One Boss category, the fight before facing Old Li Shuwen in Lostbelt 3 is really grueling. You have to fight a bunch of Puppet Soldiers (Rider-class) and Imperial Guards (Assassin-class) in a single wave. This would be easy if EVERY Imperial Guard doesn't boast Guts and 3-times Evade, while all of them may receive attack buffs from time to time. This means, unless you bring buff removal, sooner or later they will grind down your Servants one by one (these Puppet Soldiers can take out your supporting Casters real quick). Having Kiara and/or Amakusa in the team will help significantly, but even they won't be enough to carry this stage.
- Olympus is basically Camelot times twelve and can be named Boss Rush: The Chapter. Your first battle already involves a grunt with a Break Bar and things only go up there. Some of the foes you face including two Gods with two Break Bars each, the resident Lostbelt King with a vastly different battle mechanic, a rematch with the guy who handily defeats you in Atlantis, and even a Beast; suffice to say, this Chapter is full of challenges that even hardcore players find out hard to beat without using Command Spells or Quartz. To show how hard the chapter is, players writing guides for Appmedia completely gave up on a Low Rarity Run
at some point, even stating that "It's impossible for Elementary School students scoring a Home Run against professional baseball players". Part of the difficulty comes from forcing you to use dedicated Guest members at many points, and while they're generally usable, they still obstruct you from using a tailor-made party against hard bosses. - Traum is usually considered to be easier compared to Avalon le Fae due to the shortened length and easier fights, but Act 20 can cause some headaches because in Arrows 2 and 3, you have to defeat 10 enemies within 5 turns or it's an automatic failure. What really puts it into "hard" territory is that the party has an handicap of four servants allowed, and while this wouldn't be terrible enough, you're force to use Siegfried as a story support, and his kit does not contain a NP charge prior to his third Balance Buff, making it slightly harder to kill those servants in 5 turns. Needless to say, these quests was designed to force you to use at least one Command Seal for NP spamming. To top it off, the next two fights are against Kriemhild, who can and will remove all defensive buffs (but thankfully not Guts or offense buffs) from a single enemy before damage from her NP.
Events
- The Archer free quest in the Saber Wars event, since only Sabers gave bonuses to how much Altrium you get from battle and had the attack boost. The boss? Tesla, with a sure-kill, invincibility pierce AoE NP with a chance to stun your entire active party.
- The Assassin free quest in Da Vinci Event, with a lack of offensive Casters available to most players at the time, as they have to face ghosts that constantly drain your NP, stun your party members, or give other ghosts an NP charge, a Soul Eater on the second stage of battle with high HP and crit rate with a particularly nasty NP attack and Carmilla/Bathory constantly spamming their NPs thanks to their small charge bar, while accompanied by aforementioned ghosts.
- The best farming stages for Chaldea Summer 2016 are the 40 AP levels due to the number of enemies, and the rate at which they drop materials, but doing these is considered tedious because they're very unforgiving for Servants that have a bonus drop rate for that stage. And as usual, you're forced to use the event CEs for efficiency. Iron in particular is considered the hardest and most frustrating due to the cavern focusing on Berserker Golems, but abruptly includes the extremely difficult Gazer enemy, a powerful Archer class enemy with a Sure Hit buff, making it one of the most frustrating grinding spots. The event's rerun changed the farming bonuses to be based on class and altered enemy compositions accordingly to address these complaints.
- The "Hell's Kitchen" quest from the 2019 New Year Event is what happens when you take one of the most loathed mechanics and give no runarounds. Almost all party members are story supports, none of them with Craft Essences on initial release, with the only exception being Mash, locked into her Ortinax kit. Most of the enemies are Riders, with precisely zero Assassins to exploit class advantage and a Caster placed into the front line. To top it all off? Everyone but Mash is ??? on the starting screen, meaning you won’t even know who you’re going to use. And even if you do, you won’t know their exact placement in battle either, making switching them around before battle a guessing game.
- The Fate/Requiem crossover event "Board Games of the Apocalypse" is widely viewed as one of the worst events in the game's history, owing to the annoying progression system tied to rolling a dice to progress the event, as the player has to land on specific tiles on the board game to unlock more of the event. The dice rolling mechanic means the player is forced to dedicate a lot of time and resources to getting to the tiles needed to progress, but each tile has multiple events that require landing on it several times to fully complete the event, meaning the player spends most of the event trying to roll the specific amount of dice needed to land on the tiles they need. While the player is given dice that roll different amounts, or specific amounts, to allow for more controllable results, those are essentially a secondary event resource that you have to get by farming, meaning the player has to farm dice to get what they will need to beat the event. The story for the event isn't considered strong enough to at least offset the frustration either, so you do all that work for an okay at best story, with a reward unit who, while not terrible, isn't very consistent in gameplay power, resulting in many players outright hating the event. Notably, the event, even three years after release, has yet to be given a rerun, despite Erice getting a summer alt two years after the event debuted.
Events (90++ Nodes)
Introduced in 2022, these nodes are notorious for not pulling their punches towards players who rely on common farming methods and have brought even whales to their knees, forcing them to find different ways to clear them within a few turns as possible before their team is annihilated. Sometimes this can apply even with a MLB damage boosting CE helping you. Here are some examples:
- The Arctic Summer World Event introduced the game's first 90++ free quest, but that is an understatement regarding the "Casting Experience! Infiltrate! The Mysteries of the Arctic Tower!" free quest. The quest has a 1/1/1 wave setup, which shouldn't be too bad, except the main boss, Enkidu, has a whopping 1,002,150 HP, almost the same amount of HP as Goetia. To add insult to injury, players who opted to wait for the time lock to disappear after getting the required points for the next main quest are in for a rude awakening, as the last copy of this event's damage CE, Ice Warrior, is locked behind 1,750,000 points, meaning that they're stuck behind a CE that provides minimal NP battery and bonus damage to boot. Oh, and if you thought you could use the 50% damage boosted servants, three of them have AOE NPsnote and one of them is a Support Party Member. The only way to reliably farm from this is to get a hard-hitting ST NP servant that can reliably loop, such as Saber Hokusai or Summer Erice, and probably at NP5 as well, but if you don't have enough money or time to raise them up, you're up the creek. To make matters worse, there's incentive to farm this because it has the highest amount of points obtained from this quest.
- Halloween Rebellion of 108 People ~The Young Dragon and Her Adaptation of Water Margin~'s 90++ Quest, "Taichi Twins Simulation Battle" takes the above to ridiculous levels. For starters, it has a 1/3/1 setup, unlike the previous event which had a reasonable 1/2 setup, and since the local Welfare servant, Nine-Tattooed Dragon Elizabeth cannot 3T without a Kaleidoscope unless she gets a very lucky Buster Crit, this severely hinders her damage output, forcing players to rely on other servants that don't have the Event Bonus, such as Berserkers like Arjuna Alter which in turn, makes it harder to clear through because unlike the previous event, there isn't a Event CE that boosts the Servant's damage output. To add insult to injury, the boss of this quest is Dioscuri, meaning that if they aren't dead the first turn you encounter them, you can expect your farming run to go into flames. Even whales have a hard time clearing this with the unusual layout. Some have even wondered if the Challenge Quest and this node was swapped around development, as the Challenge Quest is regarded as easy even by Challenge Quest standards. Oh, and this was released on the very same day the Stargazer's Teapot expired, meaning those who sought the quest for its bond EXP were in for a rude surprise.
- Spiralling Testament World - Lilim Harlot ~The Unapplauded Rose~'s 90+ "Unfinished Horse Reconstruction Plan" also has a 1/3/1 setup, meaning that much like the above quest, Setanta can only 3T if he gets lucky with his layout of cards. The only saving grace is that this time, you have a Craft Essence with a NP battery and Event Damage Bonus, meaning that it's possibly doable with Larva/Tiamat.
