YMMV / Realm of the Mad God

• Anti-Climax Boss: The pre-rework Shatters bosses (sans the Twilight Archmage) had incredibly high stats and lethal attacks, but were all prone to Good Bad Bugs that made their fights cakewalks, while the Twilight Archmage himself was not bugged but could practically have all but his second phase skipped with enough damage. The Forgotten Sentinel had a glaring safe spot beside it that spared players from the brunt of its firepower provided a decoy for the spam of Blobombs, and not only did the Forgotten King have generous damage windows that allowed for most of the fight to be skipped, his last and hardest phase could be completely bypassed just by standing far enough away from him; on the contrary, trying not to exploit them would make the bosses nearly impossible in turn.
• Awesome Music:
  • Exalt comes with an extended soundtrack (the old game just had one song, The Sorcerer's Tower) that is still heavily work-in-progress, but already quite promising. Of particular note are the themes for the three Oryx battles, which serve as a Call-Back to the original main theme.
  • Passage for Oryx's Castle, a dreary reprise of the main theme that builds in intensity as you lay siege to the Mad God's fortress.
  • "Lost Halls", albeit Soundtrack Dissonance for the dungeon of the same name gameplay-wise, is a somber tune that serves as a Call-Back to the official lore and perfectly captures the pent-up suffering and despair of the enemies trapped in the halls.
  • "BOUNDARY:BREAK" turns this on its head, providing an incredibly frantic techno song that perfectly encapsulates the absolute chaos of High Tech Terror.
  • "The Shatters" serves as a Dark Reprise of the Sorcerer's Tower that brings to mind the Shatters' long history, fall from grace, and insanely dangerous challenges contained within.
  • "Mechanical Machinations" from the Kogbold Steamworks is an industrial-sounding theme laced with suspense and intrigue, fitting for an expedition into a vast factory of mysterious technology and the battles with the lurking machine god and its mechanized servants.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • The Nightmare Colony caught on for having a difficult yet fun battle that incorporates a number of new and unique mechanics, as well as dropping good loot at a fair rate, including three powerful UT Abilities.
  • The Marble Colossus is beloved by fans for having an insanely difficult yet fair fight with its incredible Bullet Hell and lack of cheap mechanics, compared to the rather easy Malus and sometimes unfair Void Entity.
  • The Crystal Worm Mother in the Fungal Cavern, partially for breaking the mold and being the first segmented dungeon boss, and mainly for just being a creative, fun, and extremely difficult boss battle.
  • In contrast to their former reputations as Anti Climax Bosses, the remastered bosses of the Shatters released for Month of the Mad God 2021 are beloved for their complex mechanics, difficult fights, and incredibly well-done visuals, particularly their large number of extraordinarily smooth and lively animations compared to all the bosses that came before them. And then the addition of the dungeon's "Hard Mode" allowed for players to face down even more dangerous versions of them with their true names and some lore bombshells revealed, in exchange for doubled loot and, if the dungeon is fully cleared, a chance at a prestigious and extremely powerful item.
  • All five bosses of Oryx's Sanctuary are widely considered to be some of the best-designed foes in the game. Each of the minibosses offers their own unique mechanics and challenging fights, all of which forces players to bring their A-game and notably teaches you something that will likely aid you with the final boss. Meanwhile, Oryx 3 is a grueling fight that maintains insane difficulty while somehow feeling more fair than most of the other bosses in the game.
  • The F.E.R.A.L. is rather beloved by the community for having one of the most hectic yet fun boss fights in the entire game, a combination of surprisingly fair Bullet Hell and Confusion Fu with its insane attack patterns and bullet functions, and some Awesome Music backing up the fight in BOUNDARY:BREAK. It helps that some of the items it drops are considered extremely powerful, with its staff and bow having extremely high burst damage and its ring being the subject of some hilarious exploits.
  • The Moonlight Village and its dancers quickly became well liked shortly after its release. Despite the grueling difficulty of the Bullet Hell and the fact that players must often survive entire phases severely debuffed, the battle with the dancers turned out to be one of the most fair encounters in the game, with the sheer bullet density and lack of recovery being compensated with low damage per hit and a near absence of potential instakills; this allows players ample time to bail out if they think they're about to die, and as a result makes most deaths from the dungeon entirely preventable instead of feeling cheap. The patterns themselves and the boss mechanics are also some of the most complex in the entire game and break the mold like no other boss does, but are also designed to be immensely rewarding of practice and mastery, making it a uniquely challenging experience.
• Breather Boss:
  • Compared to the other bosses in the Lost Halls, the fight with Malus and his cult is considered to be far easier. They're still plenty powerful, but not only do they have lower stats than the Marble Colossus or Void Entity, their attacks and those of the archdemon minibosses are generally more straightforward and don't amp the Bullet Hell up to the extreme, allowing most players to avoid their attacks with relative ease, even when Malus Turns Red. Arguably the hardest part of the fight is juggling Malus and his minions rather than actually dealing with Malus himself.
  • Within Oryx's Sanctuary, while they're not easy by any definition, Treasurer Gemsbok and Chief Beisa are generally considered to be easier than their cohorts. The former fires his projectiles in very predictable patterns which are relatively easy to avoid, circumventing his enormous damage output and status spam; he can also have most of his fight outright skipped by staggering him in his coin shuffle minigame. The latter has a lot less Bullet Hell than his peers and moves in predictable movement patterns that can be exploited, relying on his organized minion formations that can also be predicted; most of the difficulty of the fight instead comes from the Oryx Elite Falcons which are small and can explode for a One-Hit Kill if you're not careful. This is in contrast with Dammah and Leucoryx, who dial the bullet hell up to eleven while using Status Effects and a devastating Counter-Attack respectively.
• Breather Level:
  • Although its initial reputation was the stark opposite of this, the Nest is now considered by far the easiest of the Exaltation dungeons. The layout is relatively benign, shorter, and more straightforward compared to the others, and the swarming enemies are also so fragile that they usually won't live long enough to pose a significant threat in most groups, with even the large Soldier Bees sometimes being erased before they can go invulnerable. Although the boss can be overwhelming at first due to her status spam and restrictive bullet hell, the Killer Bee Queen is considerably less durable than the other Exaltation bosses, and her large number of phases sometimes works against her, since each phase now requires a relatively low amount of damage to push her out of, with larger groups ending many of them in seconds. It helps that the Nest is also the source of DEX Exalts, one of the two coveted main DPS stats, encouraging many players to grind them out.
  • Relating to Malus under Breather Boss, the Cultist Hideout itself is also this. Compared to the Lost Halls' psuedo-randomized layout and various enemy formations or hazards, the Hideout is a very linear path with much sparser enemy spawns, nearly all of which follow a simple behavior of just running and chasing. The enemies do a ton of damage and can swiftly kill players that get reckless, but any reasonable player will quickly figure out how to kite them, and a reasonably equipped group can steamroll most of the foes in seconds because of how easy it is to lay fire upon them, as opposed to some of the group leaders in the Halls which need to have their reinforcements thinned first.
• Broken Base: On many, many many things. In general, whenever any update or change comes out, expect a lot of divisiveness and/or arguing.
  • Possibly the biggest one is dragging and leeching. A common tactic for poorly-equipped or low-level players when entering a dungeon is to sit in the entrance to the dungeon and wait for the better player to reach the boss room, where they teleport to the boss to try and get some of the loot. In response, some players will collect a large group of enemies and kite them on top of the leeching player, often in far too large groups for the leeching player to deal with. Whether either of these attitudes are justified is a common hot point among fans, so bring it up at your own risk.
  • As of late, the replacement for this seems to be "parsing", where players will intentionally trigger the Counter-Attack of Oryx 3 or his confidants during the Oryx's Sanctuary battles in order to kill off less powerful/experienced players or force them to Nexus. While this is fervently defended as reducing the number of players by culling the players less likely to contribute to the fight, thus significantly reducing the HP on the enemies due to their quadratic scaling and making the fight much easier/faster for those remaining, it's also commonly seen as incredibly toxic behavior that promotes elitism and justifies intentionally killing those perceived as too weak to do the dungeon (which in turn can make veterans Drunk On Power and start considering everyone else too weak), thus depriving them of experience that could help them actually get better at it. Yet regardless of what side they're on, the supporters of both sides will fight tooth and nail to justify why this is or is not an acceptable mindset to have.
    • Points relating to this are also points of contention. Is adaptive HP scaling the a good mechanic (and possibly the only way) to prevent steamrolling in large groups, or is it an annoyance that forces players to exclusively try to run dungeons in small, optimized squads to avoid hyperinflated boss HP? Are staggers and counters an aspect of fights that make them more dynamic and enjoyable, or do they punish inexperienced groups too harshly to be considered viable?
  • Similar to the above, the community is often divided on "crashing", or the act of purposely intruding on an organized dungeon raid for any reason. Some consider it to be incredibly rude and disruptive of the experience for the people in the run, while others consider it a justifiable Take That! to elitists who think they should dictate how others play the game.
  • The very concept of organized runs by dedicated groups is quite surprisingly a polarizing topic, given that Realm is an MMORPG. Some say that it's the only way to reliably do endgame runs due to the low turnout from Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer and the average team quality of a disorganized group, while others consider the equipment requirements used by the larger groups (which tend to scale hard with dungeon difficulty and a group's coverage) to be a form of toxic gatekeeping that perpetuates the Cycle of Hurting between new players and veterans. DECA's own attempts to nerf the efficiency of organized runs, are likewise, similarly divisive as it typically involves some form of Fake Longevity or an Arbitrary Headcount Limit.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Every single top pet will have Heal and Magic Heal as their first two abilities, and most of the time Electric as a third (although Decoy is often used as a substitute). The former two are absolutely indispensable to improve survivability, and at high levels heal enormous chunks of health and magic every second or so. Electric is used for crowd control, burst DPS, and to escape high-speed chasing enemies better.
  • In organized raids of endgame dungeons, expect to see a lot of Wizards, (especially "4/4 Wizards" that have all 4 of their equipment slots filled with items fully optimized for DPS). Since good Wizards have some of the highest achievable DPS per singular character, they're heavily valued for optimized runs where the squad size is kept small to avoid inflating enemy HP, compressing massive amounts of DPS into each individual, and in larger runs, they're essentially the front lines of a siege to the point where one Oryx's Sanctuary strategy is to storm the chambers with only Wizards, then have The Cavalry flood in for the boss. For fully optimized runs, expect the team composition to be nearly entirely composed of these, with maybe a few buff/debuff classes sprinkled in.
  • In general, the current "DPS Meta" of the game means that a lot of players exclusively use equipment that provides the greatest damage output or offensive stats, forgoing defensive stats for raw damage. If they're not doing this, they're probably going to be stacking HP instead, as HP is the most effective stat in terms of survivability. Similarly, for rings, players generally use ones that give the most DPS, or pure HP rings like the Ring of Decades, with virtually every stat outside of HP/ATK/DEX being considered unimportant to most.
  • When clearing Oryx's Castle, players will seldom opt to go for the Court of Oryx instead of Oryx's Chamber. As sought as some of the UT items in the Court are, Oryx in the Wine Cellar is often considered to have more consistently good drops (particularly his high-tier gear), and groups with the power and Runes to do so can also try their hand at Oryx's Sanctuary after, which provides some of the best items in the game. However, players may also opt to kill Janus the Doorwarden, then skip the Court and enter the Chamber, as Janus is a relatively fast and easy fight that lets players squeeze out some extra loot before facing Oryx.
  • On a more humorous level, players have an unusual tendency to always break into the right side of the Stone Guardians' chamber at the end of Oryx's castle, and then defeat the purple (right) Stone Guardian first. There is no real reason for this, but it's somehow been ingrained into the playerbase.
  • Prior to a patch, the most common "strategy" for the Secluded Thicket was to speedily kill the first boss Tezcacoatl, then just leave the dungeon without engaging El Dorado or Xolotl. This was because Tezcacoatl could drop the Hirejou Tenne, one of the best-in-slot leather armors for meta Glass Cannon builds, while El Dorado and Xolotl's drops were generally considered mediocre or at least less desirable. This changed after the aforementioned patch, where specifically to address players skipping 2/3 of the dungeon, the Tenne was locked behind Xolotl instead.
• Creator's Pet: Many have accused the Summoner of being this for DECA, especially relative to the Sorcerer. Not only does the Summoner essentially Power Creep the Sorcerer in nearly every single regard, she was released with 7 UT/ST Maces on her release, ^note Not counting the joke Machine U Ts or reskins which is not only far more than the 2 classes that released before her, but the same number of UT/ST items that Sorcerer has received over its entire 11-year lifetime. Not helping is that one of said maces is the Incubation Mace (mentioned below under Game-Breaker), which combined with the safety of the Maces made Summoner into a far better long-ranged DPS class than nearly every other class in the game. This saw a resurgence with the Shatters rework, where there was outcry upon the discovery that the leaked Scepter in the files (which would have given Sorcerer his first endgame UT ability) had been Dummied Out...and replaced with an eighth Mace, and the second endgame UT for Summoner.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The first increase in difficulty comes when you reach the Highlands - where most enemies were relatively sedate before, the Highlands can and will see you swarmed under with minions if you aren't prepared, and each of them will be considerably stronger than anything you've seen before. You'll also start seeing Status Effects quite commonly.
  • The Godlands and basic dungeons are more difficult than preceding areas. Surviving in the Godlands isn't easy for a newbie, as the enemies all do ridiculous amounts of damage in a single bullet, and getting swarmed under is easy due to the often ridiculous spawn rates in the mountains. Basic stat potion dungeons such as the Snake Pit and Sprite World are also about this difficulty, and either the enemies or the boss will kill you easily if you aren't prepared.
  • The higher-difficulty common dungeons mark an increase in difficulty as the player starts to farm potions. The Abyss of Demons, the Mad Lab, the Puppet Master's Theater, and the Manor of the Immortals are all very nasty dungeons for the unprepared, and all of them are capable of ripping careless maxed characters to shreds in seconds.
  • There would be another step up in difficulty in reaching for the rarer non-endgame dungeons such as the Epic Dungeons, Encounter dungeons, and Court of Oryx dungeons. While not the hardest, all of them can be very demanding on a less experienced player and will show no mercy to even the strongest characters.
  • A step up from the former are the majority of the Exaltation dungeons (The Nest, Fungal Cavern, Crystal Cavern, Kogbold Steamworks, Lost Halls, Cultist Hideout, and The Void). Unless you're getting hard carried by other players, the dungeons demand a level of skill and understanding beyond anything before, and if you don't know what to expect, you're probably going to die.
  • The final and most severe increase in difficulty is the step up to the truly endgame content, namely the last of the Exaltation Dungeons (Moonlight Village, The Shatters, and Oryx's Sanctuary). Intuition and skill alone won't necessarily cut it, nor will a cracked team to carry you - expect to chew through maxed characters just trying to learn them, and suffer sudden losses even after growing accustomed to them. Only through a lot of patience and practice will you be able to consistently claim their spoils.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?:
  • The limited Belladonna's Garden has a rather difficult boss and infamous insta-kill flowers that are hard to spot...but the rewards are only T9 weapon reskins, with a minuscule chance of getting a skin. Its rework in 2020 did add some more loot for its troubles, but also dialed up the difficulty of the boss considerably, keeping this the same.
  • While the Lair of Draconis' rework made it fairer yet more innovative, with more challenging and far more creative boss battles, they didn't change the Lair's already infamously low drop rates. Doing it solo is almost unheard of, not because it's impossible (it's actually not too hard on a reasonably strong character), but because not only are you still fighting five relatively lengthy bosses back to back, the dragons didn't even guarantee potion drops on release, much less the sought-after UT/ST gear. This has been made better since, with the addition of guaranteed Greater potion drops and several updates that streamlined the fights even more to the point where even a public group can slay each dragon very quickly if they know what they're doing.
  • The Lair of Shaitan turned Shaitan from a relatively easily cheesed boss to arguably the hardest of all the Court bosses, with a creative but extremely oppressive fight that pushes most players to their limits. However, while the difficulty was turned up to eleven, the drops were not - the only change from his old ones were the addition of Vitality Potions to his existing Attack Potion drops, both of which are more easily obtained from other sources. To make matters worse, the same update changed the Skull of Endless Torment, making it considerably more niche than it already was. Chances are, the only reason people will do Shaitans now is if they're hunting for some of the exclusive UT or ST items - and even then, that's pushing it considering that none of them are considered particularly good. Several updates buffed this ratio significantly, such as guaranteeing attack potions to everyone, nerfing the boss, and adding life potions to the drop pool, but it remains unlikely that Shaitan will become a viably run dungeon any time soon, particularly since it's also part of the already unpopular Court of Oryx.
  • Although the Tomb of the Ancients used to be the premier sources of the coveted Life Potion, the addition of many more reliable sources of Life Potions and Power Creep outscaling much of its UT gear has turned it into this, given the somewhat disproportionate length and difficulty of the clear and boss fight (both of which are notably padded with copious amounts of Mercy Invincibility), in contrast to the unusually low drop rates on even regular potions.
  • The Third Dimension drops fairly common potions that have many better sources, has no items that are considered to be particularly game changing, and most of its drops tend to get outscaled very quickly. Yet it has one of the longest clears of a dungeon of its tier, combined with very tanky enemies specifically designed to counteract rushers and two boss fights of a fair length as well. Even with the depreciation of in-Realm dungeons, Third Dimensions tend to see even less play than the others.
  • The dungeon's quality aside, considering the brutal Difficulty Spike of the Moonlight Village compared to the rest of the Exaltation dungeons, few seem to actually consider its unique drops worth the trouble. It doesn't help that the best items it offers are rare drops from an even more difficult bonus encounter, that in itself is gated behind both RNG and good performance.
• Fan Nickname: Loads and loads. Most are simple abbreviations, but there are some more creative names.
  • "Shotgun" for a wave of projectiles that spread out, owing to their similarity to pellets being fired out of a shotgun. Getting "shotgunned" is when you get hit by one of these, which of course usually results in you dying. The most iconic is perhaps Oryx 2's massive spray of colorful stars that inflicts various status effects, as it was the single most dangerous attack in the game for much of its older days, and remains a looming threat even now.
  • "Oreo" for the Seal of Blasphemous Prayer because its sprite is a black circle with a rough texture, like a Oreo cookie. The Seal of the Blessed Champion is also called a "golden cookie" or just "gcookie" with a similar line of thinking.
  • "Z Seal" for the Seal of the Holy Warrior, owning to the sideways Z on its sprite.
  • "Potato" or "lemon" for the Magical Lodestone, another food-themed nickname.
  • "Milk" for Baneserpent Poison, because its sprite is a bottle of white liquid that kinda looks like cow's milk. There's a similar line of thinking for Nightwing Venom being called "orange juice".
  • "Pizza star" for the Ballistic Star, because it's a brown and orange disk with red and yellow specks that kinda looks like a pepperoni pizza.
  • The Ancient Stone Sword is often referred to by its unfortunate abbreviation "A.S.S."
  • Soul of the Bearer is sometimes called "Fake Conflict", because it's very similar to the Orb of Conflict in that it's a Mystic orb that gives Speedy and a DPS boost.
  • "Burger King Crown" for the Divine Coronation, because its color and shape resemble the cardboard crowns found in Burger King restaurants.
  • "Spooky boy/boi" for the Spectral Sentry.
  • The Icy Whirlwinds from Esben the Unwilling's boss fight are sometimes jokingly called Cool Ranch Doritos, because they have a triangle shape, like a Dorito chip, and the blue-green color and ice-themed attack remind people of the Cool Ranch flavor.
  • Cheaters (particularly auto-Nexus and direct connection hackers, which are infamous for upsetting Realm's gameplay model and the way dungeons handle excess players respectively) are derisively referred to in an ironic fashion as "gamers."
  • Likewise, a "crasher" or the act of "crashing" refers to joining semi-private dungeons that a player didn't sign up for. It's called such as it ruins runs in the eight Exaltation dungeons due to either locking legitimate attendees (some of which are carrying essential equipment) out of the area, causing the bosses' special quadratic HP scaling to spiral out of control, or setting off hazards that a coordinated group would otherwise be able to avoid, all of which are extremely dangerous to team composition.
• Fanon: Pretty much all of the game's lore was formerly this, until the release of the Cursed Library provided a massive amount of insight on the Realm's backstory.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Spider Den dungeon formerly made it too easy to level up, allowing a player to increase from level 1 to level 10.
  • The best healing spell also used to fully heal everyone on the entire map. One priest could cast it two or three consecutive times without mana potions.
  • Pets, or at least high-level Heal/Magic Heal pets. Levelling the Heal ability to level 100 (The highest possible) results in the pet healing you for 90 HP... every second. This means that many situations that would previously have been lethal are now cakewalks due to enemies simply being unable to kill you faster than your pets can heal them. Magic Heal is similar, if slightly less effective, healing you for only 45 MP per second, but this is still enough to let every single character spam their ability to no end.
    • As a direct result of pets, sword classes (particularly the Warrior and Knight) have become this. Their dangerously low range in exchange for incredible offensive ability previously made them a high-risk high-reward class, with their high defense only allowing them to spend a short time within effective sword range. With pets healing them and refilling their magic, this changed; Knights can now permanently lock enemies in the Stunned status rendering them unable to fight back the second they close to melee range, made easier by the constant healing, and Warriors can permanently buff themselves with the Armoured status by using the untiered Helm of the Juggernaut, skyrocketing their Defense to levels that, augmented by the high Heal power of pets, allow them to simply ignore every single shot that comes their way unless it's an Armor-Piercing Attack. Almost all endgame dungeons now have to be made with pets in mind, and the Pet Stasis debuff is specifically designed to suppress them.
    • Vital Combat somewhat subverted this, severely lowering the rate at which Pets restore HP/MP at if players play too recklessly and take too much damage without trying to avoid it. While a sufficiently high-level pet will still give you an enormous edge over most content in the game, it often won't be enough to give you an easy win as it used to, especially with later bosses now using so much Bullet Hell that even a melee's bulk is no substitute for reckless play.
  • Few items in the game are considered absolutely game-breaking, but Summoner's Incubation Mace is certainly considered one of them. The rabbit minions summed by the Mace have deal absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage (reaching into the 5-digit range each) at only a marginally more expensive MP cost compared to the other high-tier Maces, while also providing passive stat boosts to HP and ATT (two of the most important stats) - all while being able to freely attack anything within the user's line of sight. It's telling that this item is single-handedly capable of turning Summoner from merely a solid option to one of the strongest damage dealers in the entire game, especially when paired with other Infinity +1 Sword items like Lumiaire. It's telling that even after the item got a whopping 40% nerf to its damage output, it's still considered the best-in-slot Mace for damage output.
  • Before the Vital Combat update that nerfed it, the Tome of Purification was one of the most overpowered items in the entire game because of its hefty heal and unique ability to cleanse debuffs on everyone in range. With a decent Magic Heal pet, a Priest with the tome (or better yet, multiple) could essentially render a group of players nearly immortal and totally immune to status effects, making endgame bosses like Chancellor Dammah or the Marble Colossus into jokes. However, Vital Combat quickly spelt an end for its reputation, as it was nerfed so that the purification only affects the user, in addition to the overall nerf of Tome healing in large groups.
• Gameplay Derailment: In several kinds.
  • The first is the derailment caused by pets, specifically Heal/Magic Heal ones. With a sufficiently high-level pet, players can just ignore the damage dealt by pretty much anything that isn't an endgame boss, since their pet alone is healing them more than most healing classes can manage, as well as spam their abilities to their hearts' content now that their pet is replenishing their MP bar almost as fast as they can use it up. This is especially evident on melee classes like Knight and Warrior (see above), but if you have a Legendary/Divine Pet, expect the only real challenges in the game to be endgame dungeons like Lost Halls, Shatters, or Oryx's Sanctuary. This is the reason why all future content has to be balanced around pets (despite Kabam having already long since left the scene), why Pet Stasis is so prevalent in any dungeon worth its salt, and why Vital Combat was introduced to dissuade the face-tanking meta at the time.
  • The other is just a simple evolution of the game's playerbase. When the game was in its golden age, the devs were balancing content around the expectations of there only being 4-6 maxed players in a realm at one time, the majority of the players spending time in midlands or highlands levelling up.^note This is, among other reasons, why the Godlands are so small compared to the rest of the realm Now, realms in popular servers are unlikely to dip below a population of 60-70, the majority of which will have at least one stat maxed. This sheer imbalance led to any boss or event that doesn't have HP Scaling or frequent invulnerablity times being steamrolled in a matter of seconds - HP Scaling was introduced to just about every boss in the game as a result of this. And even then in a full realm you likely won't see a lot of bosses live longer than a minute or two, most of which will be because of their invincibility phases.
  • Dungeons also suffer from a similar problem. Most dungeons were meant to be run with reasonably-sized groups of people, but a lot of the game's best loot is locked behind endgame dungeons that can be beaten with small groups or even solo, yet require enough skill to bar beginner players from their content. As a result, using platforms like Discord to stage large-scale raids has become common. While endgame dungeon bosses don't exactly roll over and die as easily as Realm bosses, to paraphrase a DECA Q&A session: no content in the game can be designed to handle a mob of 85+ max-level players, and even after multiple HP scaling changes and player limits, a well optimized team can just overpower the HP scaling with brute force. With just a bit of coordination, even Exaltation dungeons become total jokes, because it's a lot harder to mess up in a massive murderball of players that can instakill nearly everything and nearly permanently keep up restoration buffs as well. It's gotten to the point where the Lost Halls of all things has gained a reputation as a "braindead Discord farming dungeon" that allows even lower-skill players to tag along with a group and nab themselves some top-tier loot and potions. The economy has also suffered as a result, particularly since constant Lost Halls and Sanctuary runs (and chest events) have hyper-deflated the price of Life Potions. On top of all of that, the high-skill aspect of the dungeons has suffered too, since organized runs are considered by most to be the safest (read: only) way to run these dungeons nowadays, and fewer players are actually taking the time to learn how the dungeon works or improve their skills; this also leads to a severe drop in players running dungeons in the actual Realm, as not only does the efficiency of organized runs blow public ones out of the water, most public groups are unable to even beat most harder dungeons. Nowadays, well-organized dungeon raids have a nigh-nonexistent failure rate (although individual failure is another story entirely), with even the hardest dungeons like the Shatters and Oryx's Sanctuary having been subjected to heavy optimization.
  • The testing server, usually only meant for hosting certain events or testing specific changes such as dungeon adjustments and new items, is more often used by players as an "arcade" mode to play any endgame dungeons (often with any new items being tested) without fear of losing everything upon death whenever it is active. DECA is vocally against the use of testing for this, as it causes server instability, but players continue to haggle UGC members (who also have admin powers) for keys and spawns during sessions regardless, assuming Guill isn't already serving up portals automatically.
• Goddamned Bats
  • Formerly, Constructs in the Godlands. They lack the firepower to be a serious threat against most reasonably maxed players, but are nearly impossible to kill because each of them heals one of its companions to full HP every second or so (Rock healed Steel, which healed Wood, which healed Rock). While this was meant to be a showcase of Mystic's potential - and Mystics can handily dispatch Constructs - they're a Godlands-cluttering nuisance for everyone else, and can generally only be killed via overwhelming firepower. However, as of a patch, the constructs became able to be eliminated easily without special abilities or ridiculous firepower, as the Rock Construct no longer heals the Steel one - provided that they are eliminated in Wood, Rock, Steel order, Constructs can now be easily killed by any class.
  • Almost anything that inflicts Confused. Even if the enemy isn't a threat, the mere threat of Confusion forces players to keep an eye out for them, especially if they are present in a boss battle.
• Junk Rare: Some intentionally useless UT items, such as the ones from the Battle of the Nexus. No actual use, but look pretty cool.
  • Similarly, some tiered reskin items such as the Belladonna's Garden reskins or the Halloween reskins. No difference from regular tiered weapons save what they look like.
  • In a similar vein, the Mistake items dropped by the Machine. Some of them, such as the Fools' Prism or Honey Scepter Supreme, can be used for practical jokes or fun effects, but others are so hard to use as to render them useless, like the Helium Trap or Blade of Ages, and other still are so downright detrimental to use that even equipping them is an active liability.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Just about everything related to the Mook Maker-spawning Mook Maker CUBE GOD.
  • Free itens pls. ^note  The stereotypical begging of a player who can't actually play the game and is likely to just get themselves killed with the items by running headfirst into danger. If you use these words seriously, expect a lot of mocking from other players.
  • Lel xD. ^note The fanmade Catchphrase of the Knight, due to the community deeming him such a low-risk high-reward Crutch Character that all Knight players are now labelled as immature numbskulls. Made popular by this video
  • ppe btw ^note Doing a "Pet Player Experience" (PPE) is a popular Self-Imposed Challenge where a player starts with a new character (and a pet) and gets stronger without accepting any items from others. Since it often instills pride and boasting in players, PPE players have since been stereotyped as feeling a need to constantly announce that they are, indeed, PPE. Bonus points if it's a Knight (which, for some reason, seemed to be the most popular class for a PPE at the peak of their popularity), upon which this phrase will be combined with the above to form "ppe btw lel xd" (which has been ascended by the devs a few times as well).
  • RING OF DECADES NOW IN STOCK ^note The Wizard is the starting class in the game. Since most Real-World Trading sites (like those who used the original quote above) don't bother to actually play the game, 99% of all spambots are Wizards. This phrase has now extended to referring to the Wizard Class in general. Once again, made popular by this video
  • Buff Hydra. ^note The T13 Hydra Skin Armor is supposed to be the highest tier leather armor, but is outclassed in nearly every way by most of the other UT armors like Coral Silk or Spectral Cloth. This has left fans begging for a buff for a while now, in often hilarious ways.
    • Now an Ascended Meme, as for April Fools DECA buffed the Hydra Skin Armor temporarily. ^note By "buff", we mean they gave it a +1 MP bonus...
    • Has since moved on to the Dirk of Cronus (Cdirk), until that was buffed as well. Any underpowered item in general is subjected to this meme relentlessly.
  • Ice Adepts and Ice Spheres in general.
  • Calling the Spectral Sentry in the Lost Halls "Spooky Boi", which has been ascended in may ways by the devs. Like the above, he's also become notorious for being literally unstoppable and delivering instant-death attacks.
  • The drop rate of some of the White Bags is so notoriously low (particularly the Wand of the Bulwark and the Shatters/Event Whites) that it's often poked fun at on the subreddit, such as people saying Bulwarks are an extinct species.
  YinYarnsBarn (in Why the Warrior is Stupid): "I'm not even going to talk about the Helm Of The Juggernaut. Why should I? The helmet only drops if the temperature outside is exactly 67 degrees Fahrenheit and the stars are all aligned in the precise order they need to be."
  • Starism^ExplanationEarning fame on characters earns stars, and each player is assigned a star color depending on how many stars they've collected. Stereotyping for each star color and outright discrimination between star colors is commonplace within the community; hence the now commonly-used term "Starism".
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound of a bag dropping. Especially when said bag is a White or Orange one, unless of course it happened to be a Junk Rare.
  • Oryx's No! This cannot be! when he dies. Bonus points if this was your first time killing him. Bonus bonus points if it was Oryx 3.
  • The sound that plays when the Void Entity finally dies.
• Player Punch: Losing your character, especially one you've made a lot of memories with, can elicit strong feelings of grief. Even if you have other characters, or items saved away in your vault, it sets in that your character (and all of their gear, abilities and memories associated with them which made them enjoyable to play) is never going to be playable again.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Necromancer was historically considered a subpar pick due to being a Master of None hybrid between the Wizard and Priest, but with fewer capabilities than either - his damage was lower than a Wizard, his healing couldn't surpass a Priest, and his lifesteal being reliant on multiple clumped enemies gimped him even more. However, he eventually received a series of buffs which increased his ATT to be on par with the Wizard and, most notably, gave his Skulls a passive HP bonus which made him incredibly tanky for a robe class, giving him his own niche as a ranged DPS class who sacrifices only some offense for bulk rivalling that of leather or heavy classes despite his lower DEF.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The majority of Interface Screw debuffs. The most hated one is probably Confusion (rotates your controls 90 degrees), because of its ability to almost instantly screw you over in any fight and getting around it specifically needs you to memorize the confuse controls to avoid running headlong into danger.
  • The Rune system to unlock Oryx's Sanctuary, where a group that clears the Wine Cellar must have three different keys, each an extremely rare drop from a set of difficult bosses. While this was considered a necessity to make the dungeon more exclusive compared to the Wine Cellar, it also raises a slew of problems with the fact that in an unorganized group, the chances of them having all three of the Runes is next to zero, and the chances that they'll want to use such rare items on an unorganized group that may not even clear the dungeon even lower. The scarcity of the Runes has made it so that using third-party groups like Discord or waiting for events where the Sanctuary is instantly unlocked are basically the only way to run the dungeon, much to the chagrin of a large chunk of the playerbase. Thankfully, an update in January 2021 increased the drop rates for all runes, allowed players to exchange the 3 different runes using a Tinkerer quest, and allowed the three rune pedestals to have a low chance of spawning already activated; these buffs combined with a community effort to concentrate rune usage to the USWest4 server has drastically increased the number of public Sanctuary runs.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Agents of Oryx sets as a whole generally have a reputation for being so powerful they are firmly placed next to other high-DPS equipment in terms of being best-in-class. The same cannot be said about the Cursed Spire spell, which can only be placed at the user's feet and must be armed like a Huntress trap, leading to suboptimal DPS that can't even be aimed without sending a low-HP class to their death. Most players regard it as so unbelievably awful compared to the other Agents of Oryx abilities that using it in some organized dungeon runs is a punishable offense, as opposed to simply not counting for equipment requirements.
• So Bad, It's Good: Arachna's sprite is notorious for being abominably done in comparison to the other sprites, complete with zero shading whatsoever and a very wonky-looking body. Yet, it's the very reason why nobody wants it edited, because the awfulness of its design ended up ascending to memetic status. It's even referenced a little in Arachna's lore entry, and even when the 2020 Reconstruction update changed all the sprites for the Spider Den, the original was left in as a very rare Easter Egg.
• That One Attack:
  • Just about every one of Oryx's "dance" phases - and yes, every single one of his incarnations has one. They have variations, but they share the basic mechanics - Oryx traps you in a ring of highly damaging barriers, before proceeding to rain hell. In his first battle, it's a shower of lethal bombs and sometimes a barrage of bullets, with occasional pulses of status stars to neuter your damage. In his second, it's much harder - he fires rings of Quiet stars, deals far more damage with his bombs, and straying too close to the "arena" barriers is far more punishing. Effectively, you're trapped in a constricted space while Oryx is wielding attacks that cover a wide area and deal very heavy damage, which can stack up alarmingly quickly and send you to the Nexus or your grave. Ironically, his third battle's dance phase is less oppressive than the others, as there's far more space to move, and the barrier elements he summons are more of a mobile hazard than something made to box you in.
  • Oryx 2's exploding suns phase. While the other 3 of his special attacks generally have clear solutions to dodge them, no such luck for this one, as he'll be firing a spiral of cluster-bomb suns that fill the screen with deadly armor piercing shots, in such a chaotic pattern that there is quite literally no clear way to avoid them consistently. In a small group or solo, the suns are more predictable since their split shots aim relative to the nearest player (and a cloaked Rogue can stop them from exploding altogether in a solo) - in a bigger group, no such luck.
  • Although Chancellor Dammah's knife walls are notorious for being a run ender for inexperienced players, his "miasma" phase is considered the real kicker of the fight, forcing players to rotate with a spinning cross of portals while navigating through the storm of Sickening shots they create. Having your healing shut down can spell a swift death because of how many bullets you can be hit with at once, and the other shots in the phase will also inflict Pet Stasis and Silence to further neuter your recovery and damage. Speaking of damage, you may be tempted to just focus on dodging, but you'll also need to focus fire on Dammah to actually end the phase faster.
  • Oryx 3's celestial phase/desperation attack, which has been single-handedly responsible for mass graveyards of players and remains one of the most common sources of death in his battle. He's guaranteed to use it at least once during his fight, but can start pulling it out as a normal attack later on. To put it simply, Oryx will be circling the room and flooding the place with incredibly lethal armor-piercing bullets, while four portals will fire inward spirals of shots to cause further damage and limit movement, all while barrages of holy beams constantly strike the arena for massive area damage. Not only does this leave virtually no safe space in the arena, every single attack here deals absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage, to the point where taking more than one hit in the span of a few seconds will often lead to a rapid death. And to make it worse, healing isn't even an option outside of the limited supply of consumables you might have brought - it permanently Silences all players for its duration, and the portal shots inflict Pet Stasis to render your pet useless if you take one too many hits. While there are gaps in the portal bullets' spiral to dodge through, they just make it easier, not harmless - and the number of people that can consistently rotate through those gaps are less than the people who can't, to put it simply. On the bright side, he'll always leave himself wide open for a while if you survive the attack, making it a great damage opportunity for those skilled enough to dodge it.
  • The Twilight Archmage's Fire and Ice Finale attacks. The former is a relentless barrage of deadly flaming waves that rotate around him in rows, forcing you to weave between them while also avoiding his thrown Fire Bombs. The latter isn't as fast-paced, but it still involves an enormous storm of massively damaging ice bullets that come from all directions with no real pattern, along with periodic exploding Ice Spheres to further mess with you.
  • The Forgotten King's desperation attack - roughly half a minute of extremely precise micrododging where horizontal and vertical shots slowly flood the arena from all sides, and the King's Shades add additional rings of shots while periodically following you to make you run through the network of bullets. The worst part is that all players are permanently Sickened and Silenced for the entire duration of the attack - while the damage from the shots is rather low, the damage will start to build up at an alarming pace since you can't heal in any way, making it so that if you're reduced to low health at any point during this attack, your only options are to die or Nexus. Add this to the fact that he'll use this in the tail end of his already lengthy fight (which is part of an notoriously lengthy dungeon), and players whose concentration is waning will have their runs ended here.
• That One Boss:
  • The Avatar of the Forgotten King. It has extremely dangerous attacks which make it hard to approach, deadly firebombs thrown to mess with ranged classes, and several phases filled with lethal minions, which already surpass those of all other Event bosses. However, the thing has a massive 150,000 HP on top of the Scaling that Realm bosses get (10% per player), pumping its HP through the roof, along with an effective 135 base DEF which heavily reduces the damage you can do. Combine the three and you have a solid reason to why this was historically the game's premier Marathon Boss. Unless someone has the Shield of Ogmur, expect to take a lot of time trying to kill it.
  • The Killer Bee Nest. Until a recent update that nerfed the HP of its minion colonies, it was easily the most annoying Event Boss in the game - and it still holds a position of high difficulty among them. To start off, it is in an arena filled with Killer Honey (imagine Magma + Quicksand) and has a number of durable Nest Colonies to fire at you and heal the boss for faster than you can damage it. The Nest Colonies also make Nest Colony Guardians, who will gleefully gang up on anybody that approaches them while healing the Nest Colonies. To make matters worse, the Nest Colonies can respawn the Guardians at half HP, almost always healing them back up to full health. All of this is made harder by the spam of Status Effects - almost every bullet the Boss and its minions fire inflict all manner of debilitating debuffs. While the boss itself isn't too hard once you dispose of its Nest Colonies, once it takes enough damage it will delegate the fight to the Red/Yellow/Blue Beehemoths; massive bees that embody the unholy combo of Wolfpack Boss and Lightning Bruiser with a passion. Each Beehemoth is incredibly powerful, very fast, and when you kill one, the others will just get madder and larger., culminating with the Nest fully healing and souping up the last Beehemoth alive for a final showdown. While a series of nerfs and reworks have made it reasonably doable, it still remains as one of the hardest Realm bosses.
  • The Rock Dragon post-rework. While it was already quite powerful before, the lack of scaling and crowd control immunity on its segments made it easy to lock it in place and shred it. However, its rework turned this on its head - now, not only do the segments have a respectable amount of HP thanks to their scaling, every part of the Dragon is now immune to Slow and Paralyze - meaning you'll have to deal with its astounding mobility and erratic movement the hard way. Since it only gets faster as you damage it, soon it'll be flying around the arena faster than you can keep up, dealing immense damage through its spam of flaming bursts. And that's not getting into its second phase, where it respawns its body segments - which now have more health and can unleash Beam Spam. Its exploding body segments and the explosive, slowing bats that constantly spawn are the icing on the cake. It says something when the Rock Dragon is the Event Boss responsible for the most player deaths by a huge margin.
  • The Dwarf Miner event that sometimes shows up in the Realm. Instead of a single boss, the event pits you against a legion of Fungal Cavern enemies that swarm you in waves that gradually increase in difficulty. The dungeon being a Brutal Bonus Level as it is, the hordes of enemies are ungodly bulky and deal immense amounts of damage, often filling the screen with bullets in the process. Since all of the enemies have HP scaling, killing them becomes an arduous task if you don't have a large enough group - and even then, the danger of being swiftly killed still stands. Ironically enough, when the boss itself shows up, it's less of a threat than the minions that came before it - but it still threatens with massively damaging storms of bullets and lethal armor-piercing mushroom turrets, the latter of which have an annoying tendency to spawn on top of you.
  • The Lost Sentry. He has a towering 125,000 HP on top of the standard HP scaling for Event Bosses and throws out more projectile spam than pretty much any other Event Boss in the game. To make matters worse, each bullet does tons of damage and hammers you with status effects, meaning a stream of them will swiftly kill just about anyone. To make matters even worse, there's an invincible enemy called the Spectral Sentry which orbits him while firing lethal shotguns that shred through armor. The Spectral Sentry can also sometimes charge through the middle of the arena to surprise unwary players. However, his drops are rather good (able to drop up to 3-4 Stat Pots and a rare chance at a powerful UT Cloak).
  • Bes, Nut, and Geb in the Tomb of the Ancients. Each of them brings something different to the table, Bes being the Mighty Glacier with high HP/DEF and attacks that can stun and break armor, Nut being the Support Party Member who can heal the others and fire countless status-inflicting shots, and Geb being the Long-Range Fighter with rapid, wide-area barrages of extremely dangerous shots and bombs designed to shred players instantly. They each provide a unique role in the battle and strategy is key to defeating them, especially due to the presence of Quicksand which slows you down and makes dodging much harder if you don't have a keen awareness of your positioning. Unfortunately, in a "public" tomb, coordination is almost nonexistent and 99 times out of 100, the plan for killing them goes out the window and turns into "shoot anything that moves". If this happens, unless you have players with high-level pets permanently locking the Tomb gods in the Stunned and Paralyzed status, prepare for a chaotic mess of a boss battle that is a lot harder than it should be, which is especially alarming considering each of the bosses were already hard to begin with and don't have a very clear pattern to their attacks. Their Ice Tomb Variants (Frimar, Polaris and Glacius) are even worse, considering that they have all of their strengths while packing higher HP and the advantage of being fought in a slippery arena that impedes movement.
  • Post-rework Shaitan the Advisor. He has a ton of health, which is made worse by the legions of minions he spawns, spews a massive amount of bullets that either inflict huge damage or Status Effects, and is fought in a constricted arena surrounded by lava. Fighting him requires a fairly maxed character at least, as any other character will likely not be able to handle the minions he spawns, much less push Shaitan out of his phases before he overwhelms them. And his attacks only escalate as he gets lower on health, making his gigantic health bar even more of a threat. As for the rewards...see Dude, Where's My Reward? above.
  • The Calamity Crab that appears in the Deadwater Docks. It'll spawn in a random location and traverse the dungeon in search of players - and you better start praying if it finds you. The second it detects you, it'll barrel after you like a freight train on crack, spewing out an omnidirectional barrage of shots that each deal insane damage and potentially inflict DEF-shredding status effects, making you take even more damage. It doesn't matter how tanky you are, if you let it get close to you, you're dead. Since Deadwater Docks is set up as many platforms surrounded by hazardous liquid and connected by narrow corridors, escaping the Crab can prove to be difficult if you make any missteps, especially if there are still enemies nearby, and it's alarmingly easy for the Crab to corner you if you get slowed by the water. And almost nothing stops this thing - it has a boatload of HP, can't have its movement hindered normally, and can even destroy walls in case you thought hiding behind terrain was a good idea. It can be temporarily stunned by Exposing it, but It Only Works Once. On the bright side, it'll give up if you run far enough, and a reasonably prepared group with a pre-cleared space can kite it around and kill it for some nice rewards without too much issue.
  • The Crystal Worm Mother is gigantic, fast as hell, reasonably bulky, and hits like a freight train with its constant barrages of attacks. Players are forced to chase down the worm and take out its segments one by one to expose the head to damage for periods of time, which is a perilous task that often puts the player at risk of being sat on. But the worst part of the fight is when she summons the Crystal Worm Father and Child, both of which can flood the screen with complex barrages of lethal projectiles, all while the invincible Worm Mother continues circling and taking potshots at players. And as you damage it, the arena will gradually shrink to further accentuate the Worm Mother's increasing speed - good luck dodging its barrages once you bring it to its last legs.
  • While the Crystal Entity has a habit of getting rolled over in large groups, fighting it with a smaller group (or alone) is a different story. First of all, at specific points in the fight, players have to contend with three of the five Crystal Guardians, powerful minibosses that more often than not flood the screen with complex patterns of deadly bullets. Woe betide the player if they get the Crystallised Scorpion as one of their three bosses - it hits extremely hard (its shard attacks hitting for 225 a bullet) and packs a Doppelgänger Spin phase where the fakes explode for potentially instakill damage. Regardless of which Guardians you face, the Entity itself is going to be using an array of deadly, screen-filling attacks - including a telegraphed fractal bomb that fills the whole screen with bullets and incurs absolutely massive damage if it catches the player in it. And whenever the Guardians are slain and the Entity is exposed, players find out the hard way that the Crystal Entity embodies Bullet Hell with a passion, filling the screen with red crystals that launch themselves at players to cause even more mayhem, with the barrage only getting faster on it's last legs.
  • The Marble Colossus and Void Entity from the Lost Halls. The former is a massive tank of a boss with at least 17 distinct phases that soaks up and deals immense amounts of damage, fills the screen with enough bullets to put every other boss to shame, and boasts several survival phases that forces players to target orbiting minions while avoiding his attacks - and that's not counting his last phase where he regenerates to full and requires you to deplete his HP again. The latter is a ridiculously tanky, status immune, Time-Limit Boss that fills the screen with all manner of instakill attacks, floods the screen with deadly evolving minions, can divide the arena, clones himself, and flies around the stage at ridiculous speeds.
  • Oryx the Mad God 2. Packing very high HP and a strong 60 DEF, he is equipped with a brutal long-ranged shotgun of multicolored stars that deals enough damage to instantly shred any class in the game and also inflicts Confused, Slowed, Blind and Quiet. Since he spams this shotgun constantly, it is almost impossible to get close to him, and is made even harder by the fact that he constantly spawns Henchmen of Oryx that can confuse you into his shots, while also spawning their own minions and generally getting in the way. Oh, and he also employs omnidirectional, rather hard-hitting attacks and can spawn Monstrosity Scarabs to bomb you. After players found ways to steamroll him and complained about how easy he was, Oryx returned with a vengeance in a balance patch - he now pulls out several massive attacks over the course of his fight, all of which spam obscenely damaging shots and are incredibly difficult to avoid, all while he's immune to Stun, unlike his other phases. It somehow gets even worse when he Turns Red and begins to chase players while utilizing nigh-unavoidable attacks that severely cripple attacks and abilities.
  • All of the bosses from the Shatters are this and then some. The Bridge Sentinel is a Lightning Bruiser with devastating attacks, an enormous amount of bulk, and the ability to gradually spawn in hordes or Blobombs to swarm players while he attacks. The Twilight Archmage is a Stationary Boss, but pumps out more Bullet Hell than almost any boss before him (particularly his infamous Finale attacks), and has several Puzzle Boss and Shielded Core Boss mechanics that force you to tactically target secondary objectives while still dodging him. However, the Forgotten King combines titanic amounts of health, ridiculously difficult bullet hell, and rapid movement alongside multiple different attacking stances to throw you off - and he has a Superpowered Evil Side that makes things even more absurd once he starts cloning himself and launching even deadlier attacks, especially when he launches That One Attack listed above.
  • Several of Oryx's confidants in his Sanctuary are particularly infamous, and are the reason why many people never even make it to Oryx 3, much less beat him:
    • Chancellor Dammah controls dozens of portals to form various Bullet Hell patterns of highly damaging shots, inflicts debilitating statuses if he hits you, and packs a ton of HP to ensure that you can't burst him down. He also periodically sends dense waves of crisscrossing knives down both sides of the room, which inflict huge DEF-piercing damage and silence players, killing most who haven't mastered the appropriate dodging technique. He'll start improving his attacks later down the line too - including That One Attack where he forces players to rotate alongside his portals as they fire a dense network of Sick shots that deny healing. And if players attack him during his opening speech (which they will 95% of the time, since it triggers on any damage taken), he'll not only start with his knife attack, but Sicken all players for its duration.
    • Archbishop Leucoryx floods the screen with insanely damaging projectiles, uses advanced wide-area patterns that are difficult to predict and avoid, controls secondary entities to further pump up the bullet spam, and also utilizes orb minions that he can consume to unleash counterattacks with his holy beam strikes, which deal absurd armor-piercing damage in a large area. While the orbs have low HP normally, in larger and more inexperienced groups, they will both have far higher HP while players may not know to kill them - and his first phase counter in particular strikes the whole map with rows of beams and Paralysis stars, which can instantly wipe out a chunk of a party in a snap. It gets worse halfway through the fight, where he turns into his chaos form - his patterns remain the same, but he hits substantially harder, which is a disaster considering how much damage he did already.
  • Oryx the Mad God 3, who will make sure you know he earned his position as the True Final Boss. With insane HP, insane damage output, all manner of Bullet Hell to throw at you, recurring Shielded Core Boss mechanics where the shields can fight back, a Break Meter system that punishes unwary players, and surprising amounts of mobility, he can instantly wipe out less powerful or experienced players in a snap, and even veterans will still have a hard time taking him out. Once he enters his Exalted phase, just about every attack he has becomes a One-Hit Kill if you're unwary, and half of his moveset can now qualify as That One Attack, including his infamous Celestial attack. And as you whittle him down, he'll start pulling out more and more tricks, including invincible portal enemies that inflict ludicrous damage and Pet Stasis, a dance phase akin to his second incarnation, barrages of holy beam strikes, teleportation, and even sweeping walls of holy light.
• That One Level
  • The Abyss of Demons. Compared to the other Godlands dungeons, it's way longer, borderline mazelike in how convoluted the map generation is, claustrophobic because of the tight corridors and lava flooding most of the map, and filled with enemies that die quickly but do insane amounts of damage as well; dying from struggling through lava and getting jumped from around a corner by a squad of demons isn't uncommon. Navigating the dungeon can easily wear out your HP from dealing with the demonic hordes and constant lava damage, and it's painfully easy to hit dead ends, forcing you to backtrack through the lava-filled corridors and try another path. Ironically, the actual boss battle against Archdemon Malphas is generally agreed to be easier than getting to him in the first place.
  • The Toxic Sewers for a similar reason. While there's no lava and it's less claustrophobic, most of the dungeon is filled with poisonous sludge that slows you, nullifies healing and sometimes pushes you with the flow, forcing you to the sides of the corridors or the metal bridges provided. The enemies in the sewers have more health than those in the Abyss while dealing similar amounts of damage, and unlike the Abyss demons, they love abusing Status Effects, which can easily lead to sticky situations combined with the anti-heal of the sewer sludge. And while the dungeon layout is often less confusing than the aforementioned Abyss, it's still very lengthy. Like Malphas, Gulpord isn't considered as hard as the path to his chamber.
  • All three of the post-Reconstruction Epic Dungeons:
    • The Woodland Labyrinth has a confusing layout much like the original Forest Maze. Unlike the Forest Maze, it's staffed by enemies that are decently tanky and hit like trains (especially the Mecha Squirrels), and is jam-packed with invincible turrets that are somewhat difficult to see and spew out volumes of status shots. The boss is a 3-stage evolving menace with multiple extremely damaging attacks, groups of flunkies that spam Status Effects, and a notorious dash attack that can One-Hit Kill players at the slightest provocation in its final stage as the Murderous Megamoth. And unlike the other Epic dungeons, the treasure room isn't just a guarded chest, it's an actual boss with extremely lethal area-denial attacks and a group of bodyguards that will run you down along with the boss if you aren't careful and activate both at once.
    • The Crawling Depths, being a Spider Den remake, is much more linear, but is infested with an absurd number of spider enemies that will gleefully dogpile you when you disturb their eggs. Most of them have rather low health, but inflict massive damage along with multiple debuffs, and the large spiders do away with the health weakness at the cost of being solitary. Not helping are the webbed tiles that make up most of the map, slowing your movement if you try to walk through it. The Son of Arachna at the end is also a tough boss whose strength, defense, surprising speed, and ability to summon large spiders can only be removed one at a time due to its Puzzle Boss mechanics, during which you'll be restricted by a slowing (and later damaging) web like the one from the original Arachna fight and constantly at risk of being sat on by the boss, especially once it starts switching up its movement patterns.
    • Deadwater Docks takes the layout of the Pirate Cave, replaces the water with damaging Dead Water that makes it near impossible to venture off the platforms for long, and turns every enemy into either a Lightning Bruiser or a Long-Range Fighter that can gun you down in a few hits. Furthermore, the dungeon is also filled with hazards like invincible cannons and explosive barrels, as well as the wandering Calamity Crab making it so you are at a very high risk of dying at any given point in the dungeon. If you can beat your way through all of that, you'll have to take down Jon Bilgewater, who brings a very hectic fight where panicking can lead to a swift death, especially once the room becomes saturated with armor shredding cannonballs from his cannons opening fire on you.
  • The Sulfurous Wetlands was made to stand beside the Epic Dungeons in difficulty, and certainly succeeded at that. It's one of the most rusher-unfriendly dungeons in the game - take the general structure of the Deadwater Docks, fill all the platforms with holes exposing the hazardous slowing water, and stuff every platform to the brim with enemies that are almost all capable of a near instakill if you try to run past them, as well as some that intentionally blend in with the background or straight up don't reveal themselves until it's too late. All the enemies are either stationary turrets that can't be kited and force you to fight on their terms, aggressive chasers that can be kited but will gleefully run you through an obstacle course of Acidic Swamp Water, or enemies that only start fighting back once you're in kill range, but can't be hurt at all until you're in that range. Not helping is that on top of the slowing water, almost every enemy abuses liberal debuff spam, the movement-impairing ones of which can lead to a swift death if you're being chased or in a bad spot. Although the dungeon will ease up a little bit once you make it to the boss, underestimating the Heart of the Wetlands is still a bad idea, as its bullet patterns are a step above even Jon Bilgewater and in particular are extremely hard to counter if you haven't seen them before.
  • The Shatters was formerly infamous for having an easily cheesable layout, but the 2021 rework completely turned this on its head. The dungeon is now a Marathon Level taken to its logical extreme - each of its three segments are long and difficult enough to pass as entire dungeons by themselves, and all of them are staffed by enemies that have titanic amounts of health, often high defense, and complex attack patterns that can swiftly kill even a maxed player without much effort. And that's not even getting into the bosses, described under That One Boss above. To elaborate:
    • The Derelict Village has you hunt down 8 switches which are not only invisible on the minimap, but are placed in completely randomized positions and cannot be harmed unless you're near them, possibly putting you in harm's way as you try to hunt them down. Said village consists of obstacle-laden forests stuffed with enemies waiting to jump you and buildings with even more enemies. Of particular note are the Stone branch of enemies, which have ridiculously high defense which can be bolstered even more if a Stone Monolith is present, and the Stone Idol, a totally invincible threat that stalks the village and will mercilessly hunt you down if you bump into it.
    • The Royal Castle is an Escort Mission where you have to drag three Untempered Magic flames from the castle wings back to the center. Each wing is jam-packed with Mages and Nobles that deal obscene amounts of damage while having the hitpoints to match, and a large chunk of them will be Accursed enemies that can respawn indefinitely after you kill them. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the enemies couldn't attack the conductors you use to escort the flames to contest them, possibly causing the flame to explode and get reset to the beginning, undoing all your work; if you kill an Accursed enemy and it respawns on top of one of the conductors, you best hope you can kill it or lure it away in time. The icing on the cake is that some of the flames will outright attempt to hinder your escort with auras that give status effects or, in the case of the blue flame, outright attacking you.
    • The Grand Hall is a gauntlet-type battle where you must destroy 5 Tablets of the Monarchy while being assailed by the Royal Guard. The problem arises with the fact that the entire guard is composed of Elite Mooks with insanely hard-hitting attacks, good bulk, and difficult attack patterns - combined with the fact that they'll Zerg Rush you with glee, even the strongest of groups can find themselves overwhelmed. You'll have to focus the Tablets to not get overwhelmed, but that's made more complicated by the facts that they aren't squishy and have periodic invincibility times to stop you from instantly killing them.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Shatters rework in August 2021, while initially praised for its shaking up the enemy variety, extending and modernizing the layout/aesthetic of the dungeon, adding a colossal amount of hidden details and lore, and requiring players to actually put effort into killing the new and exceptional bosses, eventually fell to scorn as it was soon realized that the new sequences and bossfights piled up into an unhealthily long Marathon Level.^note Complicating issues is the fact that this is also tied to ATK Exaltations, requiring 75 completions per character for 100% Completion. To say exalting even one character is a ridiculous time investment is a bit of an Understatement. Not helping matters is the difficulty melee classes have in dealing damage due to the increased emphasis on Bullet Hell, and the fact that Oryx's Sanctuary is meant to remain harder yet only has to deal with a smaller number of enemies and two bosses of comparable difficulty back to back rather than three separated by long stretches of powerful enemies (while having comparable or better loot), leading to the realization that DECA may have let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. DECA seems to have realized this, as they immediately started pushing a series of balance patches designed to reduce the length of the clear and make it more worthwhile, including significant nerfs to enemy HP and number and increased loot chances and tiers.