That One Level / Arknights

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• 2-10 is one of the first major difficulty spikes for a new player, featuring what is likely the most complex map they've seen, with 3 lanes to defend; each comes with a Medical Rune to help your units stay healthy, but they also come with independent threats from enemies that are very strong at that point in the game. The top one comes with Senior Casters that can dismantle an early defense if allowed to advance past their lane, the right one has pressure from heavy enemies like Loggers and Junkmen that can easily overwhelm you, and the left one comes with a combo of Casters and Heavy Defenders, along with Skullshatterer halfway through the level, who can single-handedly dismantle your defense with their heavy splash damage and devastating melee attack, letting the others advance. On top of this, several Defender-4 drones are periodically deployed to make the enemies essentially invincible to physical damage until shot down with Snipers, and they also have an annoying tendency to slip through your defenses while they're handling the much bulkier land targets. All in all, it's a level that demands heavy management and multitasking to overcome - when the level description describes it as a test of your skills, you'd be best advised to take its advice to heart.
• 4-7 Normal Mode and its Challenge Mode can be daunting for newer players, especially if they don't have any units capable of inflicting Silence. It's likely the first map many players will experience Infused Originium Slugs, which will explode on death for devastating damage that can annihilate both your low and high ground units, especially on Challenge where their damage is increased significantly. They are fairly fragile too, so accidentally killing them in a bad spot is easy even with the weakest operator. The map already spawns with many of them as soon as it starts, with some near the player base that travel outwards to potentially dismantle the player's defenses from within. The map at the later parts also starts spawning more and more of them along with some Caster Leaders for some assistance at the players, rushing at them before promptly exploding when killed, allow other enemies to just casually stroll into the player base now that there's a convenient hole where your defense used to be. Have you gotten a hang of the timing of redeployment yet? Either this stage will firmly teach you that, or you're not getting that last Base upgrade part.
• 4-10 and the Challenge Mode is tricky with its layout in combination with the enemy/boss spawns for beginner or mid-game players. This will be the first stage where the players encounter FrostNova, and it doesn't disappoint. The stage consist of three ground lanes, two of which the enemy will actively use to enter the player's base, with FrostNova appearing from the top lane and gradually traveling from one lane to another until she reaches her assigned Protection Objective at the bottom right of the map. The hardest part of the map starts as soon as FrostNova enters the second lane from the right, opposite from where the regular enemies enter from the left; meaning the player has to contend with her underlings constantly spawning from the left side and FrostNova on the right side, which is harder than it looks. While the enemies might not be a problem to decently leveled operators, FrostNova herself is a whole other story, with her heavy Arts damage, Ice Nova that slows ASPD and makes it harder to kill her, and her black ice attack that strikes randomly and is an invariable One-Hit Kill on anything. As if those weren't enough, new players may recieve a nasty Victory Fakeout when she revives after death, making you fight her all over again but with significantly boosted ATK. Challenge Mode up the ante by increasing FrostNova's range and ATK, allowing her to potentially wreak havoc from different lanes, earlier than she was supposed to be. It is here in the stage that the players will have to learn how to stall a boss, if not already bursting her down quickly with decently leveled operators.
• While challenge modes are supposed to be deliberately unfair, few come close to the level of insanity that is node 5-7. To elaborate, 5-7 is a map where the enemy Zerg Rushes you with a lot of weak units, along with plenty of drones. In addition, there are three Frost Drones that spawn at the start of the map, which have incredible durability and can severely slow the attack speed of all operators nearby. The main issue is that the challenge condition bans the use of Snipers and Casters, the two classes who are dedicated to countering these enemies. The only solution to this is to bring along Supporters in place of Casters, as well as ranged Guards like SilverAsh or Lappland, and Liskarm if you have her. The problem arises when you realize that none of these classes are equipped to handle enemy mobs, nor are they scripted to prioritize drones over infantry (besides Glaucus, Qanipalaat or Arene, who weren't available on launch) - and this is on top of the Frost Drones crippling their attack speed. This leads to the extremely common case of one or two drones managing to slip past your defenses and entering your base. This being a challenge run, letting one enemy through means an instant defeat. You'd pretty much need to have an Elite 2 SilverAsh specced for True Silver Slash with you if you're even going to stand a snowball's chance in hell to win this, or get lucky and find a friend who will let you borrow him. Ch'en does reasonably well, but she's not a foolproof solution.
• 5-7's predecessor, 5-3 Challenge Mode, is also similarly insane. Every single ranged enemy now can hit half a map away with their arts; even worse, the Spec Ops Caster Leaders cast two spells at once, putting two operators anywhere on the map at risk of being obliterated by defense piercing arts at any given time. And there's already 4 of them at four corners of the map, making deploying operators anywhere unsafe. Players must find a way to bypass the initial stage of the map (AKA putting down the four Spec Ops Caster Leaders) before they could even think of finishing the Challenge Mode. Putting the likes of Fast-Redeployment Specialist, and 1v1 Guards to work, or using Summoners to draw fire away from vital operators to their easier to replace spawns are almost a necessity to complete this map. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that the first enemies to emerge from the red base in the middle are Breakers - as in those 'lightning fast and decently tough unlike Hounds' enemies - which also need to be dealt with before causing a Game Over. Around the 26 kill mark, Casters identical to the aforementioned ones come out of the point at the lower left, who also have this extended range and can still cause a loss even after you have gotten rid of the initially present ones.
• 5-10. It's a Dual Boss against Mephisto and Faust, who come with an entourage of incredibly deadly foes to assist them. There are three lanes to defend, and each of them will be swamped by hordes of Possessed, whose fairly solid bulk and Regenerating Health will be amplified by Mephisto's healing abilities. Furthermore, Mephisto comes with an escort of Spec Ops Casters and three of the newly-introduced Defense Crushers, who have much higher stats than any other enemy at that point and can stun your units to waltz right through your defense. Faust arrives a little later and further complicates things, being able to annihilate most non-Defenders from anywhere on the map while deploying Ballistae to pressure your whole lineup at once and possibly kill them outright unless they have Medics taped to them, on top of being unblockable and decently tanky which allows him to possibly bring the run to an end if you're too busy with the other enemies to focus him down once his invincibility wears off. Simultaneously bringing DPS to handle all of the tanky threats, survivability to manage the devastating attacks, and management of deployment order to draw Faust's aggro are key.
• H5-3 with its Poison Haze gimmick. If the players are familiar with the supply stages AP-1 to AP-5 and the Solid Defense Chip stages, then this one works similar to those. This stage is more tricky due to the early rushes where the players have to place defenses and Medics quickly so the poison combined with the early enemies don't kill off the initially deployed operators and cause leaks. Later on, the Infused Originium Slugs α rocks the stage in huge numbers to test the player defenses while not succumbing to the poison. The final and hardest part starts when several Defense Crusher Leaders enters into the fray along with Crownslayer, both rushing the right and left lane respectively. The Defense Crusher Leaders are especially a problem as they are fairly tanky on top of the annoying stun they are known-for which can't be cancelled without Silence. With all the constant assault, poisoned environment, and Infused Originium Slugs α that explode on the operators for massive damage, players will have to bring more than a few Medics along with more than a fair share of decently leveled operators to keep up with all the instances of damage.
• Most of the latter half of Chapter 6 are remarkably difficult and frustrating without any operator capable of inflicting Silence on-demand. This is due to the theme of the Yeti Squadron being centered around crowd control, with the majority of their units being capable of dealing extra damage to CC-ed operators as well. With the gratuitous spam of Originium Ice Crystals, Glacial Originium Slugs, Yeti Casters, Oneiros and Frost drones, and Yeti Icecleavers, timely micromanagement is crucial here to prevent or at least mitigate the stream of frozen/slowed operators. If not, then get used to dying due to the extra damage or left unable to even heal/retaliate in time. Both results aren't particularly appealing for that 3 star clear.
• 6-16. The stage took inspiration from 4-10, the stage where the players encounter FrostNova for the first time. 6-16 works similarly, with FrostNova on the top lane and common enemies in the bottom. That being said, this being Episode 6, so the bottom lanes are flooded with Yeti Casters, Glacial Originium Slugs and Yeti Caster Leaders that all want to freeze your operators. Complicating the matter are the Yeti Icecleavers that love slapping that minute-long redeployment timer on your frozen operators and the Heavy Defender Leaders that love filling up your block limit to stop you from handling the others. As for FrostNova, underestimating her just because you beat her in 4-10 is a fatal mistake, as her new form as the Winter's Scar is considerably worse than she was in 4-10. Not only does she love to freeze your operators, spam highly damaging ice novas or curbstomp anyone who tries to fight her up close, she also kept her instakilling black ice from 4-10 that bypass invincibility and still has rather random targeting, which also makes following guides unreliable. Oh, and you see those tiles marked with a T near the bottom? Those spawn Originium Ice Crystals when FrostNova's first health bar gets emptied. Take too long and you can't defend because there's black ice everywhere, but bum-rush FrostNova right off the bat with, say, Truesilver Slash, and you won't have the DP or power to hold the bottom thanks to the two Originium Ice Crystals freezing your operators. This is saying nothing about FrostNova Turning Red, at which point her damage output goes through the roof and her Ice Nova basically hits the entire map at once. Oh, and on Challenge Mode, not only do all enemies get +15% HP to make killing them so much more of a pain, Medics are banned, dropping your healing output to almost zero and turning everything into so much more of a threat. Good Luck, because you're going to need it to survive those black ice spikes.
• H6-4 is the finale of the Yeti Squadron and throws out a level of insanity matched by few other maps in the game. The enemy spam is absolutely relentless, and almost every enemy on the map is designed to either freeze your operators or exploit said freeze to deal massive damage, on top of the two Originium Ice Crystals periodically sending out freeze waves to make said ice enemies' jobs easier. The Yeti Caster Leaders can already spam their highly damaging freezing Arts enough as it is, but the level will also spam Infused Glacial Originium Slugs that will detonate to deal high area Arts damage and freeze even more of your units, not helped by the fact that their large numbers and tendency to hide in groups of other enemies makes it deceptively hard to just silence them with the likes of Lappland. As the level progresses, it starts throwing out even more threats, like aerial Oneiros drones that will use AoE freeze bombs and can slip through occupied defenses, Mortar Gunner Leaders to dismantle your defenses from across the map, and Yeti Icecleaver Leaders that have insane bulk and can handily one-shot your frozen defenders. At 100 kills, it goes From Bad to Worse as FrostNova shows up, who will gladly abuse her powerful AoE ice Arts and One-Hit Kill black ice spikes to single-handedly demolish your team, even after her support is killed. It doesn't help that it's one of the longest levels in the game, with a whopping 144 enemies to defeat.
• 7-18 takes this cake and runs with it like a greedy glutton, which makes sense since you're going up against Patriot himself. However, the hard part of this stage lies not in the Advancing Boss of Doom himself, although he is obscenely strong and can nuke your entire lineup in a few hits, in addition to significantly beefing up the ATK and DEF of all active enemies. The annoying thing about this map is that, while the initial trickle of enemies is manageable enough even with a small squad, after the seventeenth enemy had been felled and Patriot's first form has been defeated, the floodgates open, starting immediately with an unforgiving onslaught of Guerilla Siegebreakers, both normal ones and Leaders, dropping all over the place. Considering that they already have beefed-up ATK and DEF from Patriot and the fact that he also inspires them to give them another 50% ATK buff, these guys will swarm you and overwhelm your defenses in a matter of moments. Worse still is the presence of Guerilla Mortars that will start to appear on the top right - with their attack speed pumped through the roof from Patriot's inspiration, they will easily pound your operators to paste from across the map as you try to hold together your defenses. In this sense, this map becomes very punishing to play if you can't curb your total amount of kills, which is much harder than it sounds, as if you've managed to come this far, your operators will have been leveled enough that they become too strong for their own good - although if you can take out Patriot's first phase very early, you can actually delay the second wave of enemies until after he dies. Indeed, it's a lot easier to manage the initial stalling with lower-rarity operators, but all pleasantries will come flying out the window when Patriot revives himself, enters Ruination Stance, and starts going to town on your units while his troops swamp you.
• H7-4 has all of the issues that 7-18 has, where you have to deal with Patriot along with large waves of elite Guerilla enemies that are powered up by his presence. However, the main difference here is that you no longer have access to the deployable mines that pierce his Nigh-Invulnerable Marching Stance defences and boost damage dealt against Patriot when triggered. Not only this, but Patriot has a much shorter and direct route to your base, giving the map a soft timer where you have to take down both of his phases before he walks across the map and into your lines. He's also got 8 Shieldguard Leaders with him, which means more trouble as during Marching Stance, Patriot will take hits for his guards, but once Ruination stance hits and Patriot isn't Nigh-Invulnerable anymore, your attacks will be getting drawn to his guards instead. You'll have to stack your team with the best buffers, debuffers, and burst damage dealers you have available to even have a shot at taking down Patriot and clearing the map.
• R8-8 is a really nasty level. The area is infested with Imperial Artillery Targeters, who pretty much have almost all of the ranged tiles within their attack radius (even just a sliver of their attack radius on a tile is all theirs), preventing you from safely taking them down; an allied Talulah the Fighter can attack them, only problem is that she is very slow at doing so, and needs to stop moving in order to attack them, which can waste your time, and you need to take care of them before she gets overwhelmed and killed by their explosives, all while you need to contend with enemies jetpacking onto the stage every so often. You also cannot afford to take your time and deal with the drones one by one, since Talulah enters the level via stepping on an Active Originium tile, meaning that you need to get her to the enemy spawn point before she drops dead from the status effect. You gonna have to use Ranged Guards to even have a plum of a chance of making it through the level, since they can attack the drones from marginally safer areas that ranged units have no access to. To top it off, in order to view EG-1, Talulah needs to make it to the end of the level with more than 50% HP remaining (if she doesn't turn red at all in the level, you're good to go), adding another layer of difficulty to this Escort Mission, since her snail pace won't be able to safely keep away from the drones.
• If you aren't particularly thrilled with dealing with Enraged Possessed Soldiers in the levels that they appear in, how about dealing with an army of them, in M8-6? You'll love it. To summarize, the stage will bum rush you with terrifyingly large numbers of these bastards, more than what you typically see in other levels; attempting to stop them with Defenders is futile, since if they cannot handle blocking even one of them without support, they won't stand a chance against a group of them; the chokepoint that an operator could block their advance is too far away for (most) Medics to reach^note The only Medic that can reach that particular tile without using their skill is an E2 Kal'tsit, who is more geared towards fighting instead of healing, owing to her lower ATK compared to other ST Medics and prioritizing in healing herself and Mon3tr no matter how low other operators' HPs are, making the extra range moot for healing other operators. Even though their route to the blue box is guarded by an NPC Rosmontis and four friendly Guerrilla Shieldguards, this is where the true difficulty of the stage comes up: In order to unlock EG-2, Rosmontis and all four Shieldguards need to survive the entire level. Even though the Shieldguards have high defenses much like their hostile counterparts, they can and will get overwhelmed and killed by the Possessed Soldiers if the player does not intervene, which is rather difficult since said route is relatively isolated from the rest of the map. SilverAsh and Surtr with their S3 will help here, but the Enraged Possessed Throwers that show up later on will quickly dismantle them without help from Medics, and even then, it would just barely be enough. In its Challenge Mode, while you aren't required to defend the Shieldguards anymore, the level compensates by giving all of the Enraged Possessed a major ASPD buff along with some extra bonus stats to top it off, meaning that even with all of the Shieldguards at your disposal, it'll take a lot of effort to stop them from just ripping through everything in their path.
• While all Inferno Mode stages are purposely designed to be Harder Than Hard, H8-4 goes even further beyond and becomes borderline sadistic with how difficult it is. The intial waves of enemies are tolerable, with the main threats being two Imperial Artillery Core Targeteers that will soak up damage and deal severe Area of Effect airstrikes in return, alongside elite armored casters that will attempt to rain hell on you - but they're still manageable. While the level is an Escort Mission, the Too Dumb to Live escortees are thankfully placed pretty far away from the enemies (The bomber drone can reach them, but letting it even get that far is basically a loss already since the blue box is right next to them). This all changes when The Deathless Black Snake appears, with even higher stats than she had in her already notorious boss stage. Not only will she handily dismantle an unprepared defensive line by her lonesome, but she has Deathless Inferno to handily wipe out your entire lineup when she first dies... except because the attack hits the whole stage, it will kill all the civilians as well. Because letting civilians die counts as a life loss, the boss can instantly end a run if her Deathless Inferno kills any of the civilians, not helped by the fact that all her other attacks are also designed to do heavy area damage and global Damage Over Time, letting her sometimes kill the civilians as collateral without you even realizing. The entire level hinges around micromanaging your team to make sure none of the Deathless Black Snake's attacks harm the civilians, which is easier said than done when all of her attacks inflict severe damage and her Deathless Inferno is a One-Hit Kill on nearly anything, meaning that even blocking it might result in the attack wiping out your team, and then killing the civilians. And when you kill her for good, the boss will use a second Deathless Inferno to screw you over in case your defenses have been weakened to the point where they can't defend the civilians from the final wave. And no, Nightingale will not instantly fix your Deathless Inferno problems this time, because the Civilians being spread over an entire column means that her extremely valuable RES buffs simply cannot reach everyone that needs them.
• The entirety of Chapter 10 can be considered this. A majority of the levels in the chapter have the Londinium Defense Cannon, which will target the Operator with the highest block count and will take time to charge. Once the cannon fires, it will deal massive True Damage to the targeted Operator as well as any units friendly and hostile in a massive AOE centered on the target. Only Operators with absurdly high HP or survival skills can survive a hit from the cannon, which is naturally extremely bad when you need to group Operators together, as one stray cannon shot can wipe out your entire formation. Every map with cannons present essentially boils down to placing high block Operators far away from your main formation to bait out cannon hits, but this is complicated further with the presence of special enemies that can increase the block count of the Operator blocking them, which can potentially screw you over if they draw the Cannon away from your original bait unit the second before it fires. This results in many missions being a stressful session of Operator placement and block management, especially since the Reborn Creations featured in the chapter and the boss are extraordinarily difficult to kill without taking advantage of the Cannon's damage.
• 10-11's Adverse Environment stands out among an already difficult chapter. There are two relatively isolated lanes that go in opposite directions, each of which will face ferocious attacks from lots of elite enemies like Chain Casters, Gifts of Magnanimity, and especially Wrathgorgers. All of the ranged tiles are positioned in a way where anything that can support the main force will be left at the mercy of the Chain Casters, and the presence of the Londinium Defense Cannon means that you'll have to be prepared for a periodic burst of damage that may cause a Total Party Wipe, particularly since all of the major melee tiles will have multiple key ranged tiles in the blast. On the other hand, making sure the Cannon takes as many Reborns as possible with it is essential for the later parts of the level, otherwise the hyper-buffed Wrathgorgers will start one shotting everything you can muster.
• H10-3, the last of Chapter 10's Inferno stages. First of all, the level is wide-open with two lanes to defend, all enemies have a substantial HP/ATK/DEF buff as per Inferno stages from Chapter 10 and on, and the level has 114 enemies, not even counting spawned Reborn. Hard-hitting like Wrathgorgers and Gifts of Magnanimity will gleefully one or two shot your units with their buffed ATK, and the sheer number of Reborn necessitates manipulation of the Londinium Defense Cannon to wipe them out before they run you down, especially since the Retrofit ASVs will be buffing their ATK further and making them inflict Necrosis to shut down your skills. Manfred shows up again with buffed stats about halfway through the level, but not only does he now only lose his Military Training for the same time as his stun when hit by cannon fire, he has a new ability that gives every Reborn and rebirthable creature an aura that deals Arts Damage Over Time, which is namely every non-ASV enemy on the map. Considering that the enemies will swarm you in the dozens, the Arts aura can straight up melt your entire team under RES buffs while rendering about 75% of the map unsafe to deploy on, and that's not even counting Manfred laying into you while shrugging off everything unless you abuse True damage or dodge ignore to take him down quickly, which is easier said than done due to his inflated bulk.
• 11-15's Adverse Environment is a 2-lane chokepoint with an isolated side lane to defend, the latter of which has only one deployable tile right in front of the blue box. The initial pressure is manageable, but the level will ramp up quickly - groups of Wither Devourers will run down the middle lanes to collapse those sent in to block them, while multiple elite Self-Propelled Artillery will start rolling down the side lanes at once, turning your operators into paste if you don't have a lot of healing or defensive buffs to patch them up. Five Twigs that Crave will also spawn in the middle lanes to further limit your deployment, but fail to deal with them quickly and the Rot Eaters that spawn from them will usually destroy you at an inopportune time. All of the enemies will also be throwing Corruption all over the place, making getting heals to those who need them even more demanding.
• H11-4 is the last rematch with The Last Steam Knight, who on this map boasts massive stats, 30% damage reduction and no self-stun on his self-buff (and second phase), and a new ability where his missile barrage will permanently seal unoccupied tiles it hits, limiting positioning if your strategy relied on decoy units. The map pressure is also intense - there are two defensible lanes on opposite sides of the map to spread out your healing/DPS, and the level will rush you with Rampaging Rotchasers from the very start, which have incredible stats for their speed and can easily wipe an early setup by themselves. Once the Steam Knight starts actually moving towards the blue box, waves of elite Wither Maws and Wither Tanks will start spawning to assist it - the former are tremendously tanky and can One-Hit Kill the blockers holding the lanes if you can't kill them or feed them a decoy in time, and the latter are heavily armored while being able to barrage the lanes with Corruption-spewing shells, if not ram laneholders to death if they get that far. Compounding things is that the Steam Knight's ATK is now high enough that not only will his Furious Defense be a One-Hit Kill on anything short of tremendous DEF stacking and/or ATK debuffing, its double missile barrage in phase 2 can cause a Total Party Kill if the crosshairs overlap. As the cherry on top, even if you weather the waves and take down the Steam Knight, if you forgot to handle the four Twigs that Crave inconspicuously tucked away in the corners of the map, you'll have four hyper-buffed Rot Eaters running you down together at the end of the level, potentially crushing your weakened defense and snatching your win away.
• 12-19, the penultimate stage of Episode 12, takes almost all of the most infuriating mechanics of the chapter and rolls them into one level. The level will instantly start with two Withering Collector Disciples that will take their sweet time floating all over the map, carpet bombing the map with Seeds of Withering that can easily exterminate an early defense before you've raised your DP cap enough to deploy most of your heavy hitters. It's hard to field a unit that early who can kill both Disciples, and even harder to deploy something that can constantly soak up the Seeds, especially since the Seeds will aggro on any squishies you deploy after the early defense unless you have fast-redeploys or a second tank. The level only picks up from there, with loads of Armed Spies and other disguised enemies approaching from three lanes, pressuring you to pump out as much DP as possible to field units capable of revealing and killing the enemies before they spend too much time hogging your block count. Later in the level, Rebellion Instigators and Agitators will spawn on undeployable tiles and render the Civilians unblockable, meaning that you'll have to either burst them down with ranged physical damage or use ranged units to reveal the Civilians before they can walk past your blockers, both of which are compounded by the two additional Disciples that'll show up halfway in to bombard your defense again. Adverse buffs all the enemy stats, adds in even more Instigators/Agitators, and replaces the second pair of Disciples with their much stronger Decaying variants, making things even more hectic.
• Even compared to the Inferno stages of previous chapters, all of the H12 stages have been noted to be extremely difficult, combining Episode 12's already restrictive gimmicks with the trademark hordes of massively buffed Demonic Spiders and an already powerful boss that gets more powerful with every successive stage.
  • H12-1 comes out swinging with the first rematch against the Damazti Cluster, who boasts much higher stats than their story stage and an extra buff to their Corrosion damage, letting them shred through even the bulkiest of Defenders with alarming speed, and turning their Lifeline Burst attack from dangerous to downright lethal. On top of the Damazti, Sarkaz Greatswordsman Leaders and Absurdist Tyrant Captains will come in waves to siege a frontline likely weakened by the mass Corrosion and physical damage; the latter walk around in circles before engaging, letting you shoot them down, but isolated ranged units are likely to be destroyed by the Damazti's special moves without serious aggro management and healing. Possibly worst of all, the level will also send in loads of Spies with periodic waves of Rebellion Agitators that wait around at three different points (one of which is an isolated side lane), meaning that if you can't simultaneously block or kill all three at once, the Spies will just waltz into the blue box for an instant loss. And just to add insult to injury, two Shadowing Trilby Ashers will appear at the very end just to screw with you, either punching through your crippled defense or dashing past it altogether if you don't have enough firepower left over to kill them after handling the Damazti.
  • H12-2 retires the Damazti for a bit, but similar to 12-19, instantly opens with two Decaying Collector Disciples on opposite sides of the map, along with a Rebellion Agitator. Like 12-19, killing the Disciples with only starting DP and the 20 DP limit is incredibly tough; unlike 12-19, there are even fewer options for killing them due to the extremely awkward positions they spawn in disallowing many deployment options, and the fact that they're split up so you can't nuke both at once. By the time you've taken out one Disciple, the other has likely built up a small army of Seeds, turning that entire half of the map into a death zone. Mustering up a defense is tough when you have to account for the hordes of ridiculously damaging Seeds constantly filling the airspace, and as long as the Rebellion Agitators are alive, you won't be able to verify Civilians to raise your DP cap nor sniff out Spies before they sneak past your lines. The level only gets worse from there: more Rebellion Agitators will start to spawn on undeployable tiles that also happen to be in one of the Disciples' patrol routes, two more Disciples will appear midway through the level to ruin your day if you're already struggling with the first two, and a Trilby Asher will spawn at the very end as a proverbial middle finger to your already pressured defense.
  • H12-3 brings back the Damazti Cluster with the same buffs as in the first stage, but with a new twist - the Cluster will now summon an extra clone at 75% HP. Not only does the extra clone equal a whole lot more pressure since it's adding a whole extra Damazti's worth of damage and Corrosion (in particular making Derivative Iteration likely to one shot whatever it's targeting), it also means the Damazti will be spending a lot more time invulnerable unless you can reveal them quickly, which is a big problem since the extra clone is also giving the Cluster an additional 20% damage reduction to further amplify its tremendous bulk. The rest of the level is no slouch either, with elite Sarkaz Absurdist Splitcasters and Operatives harassing you from the side lanes, and Absurdist Tyrants circling the middle; the latter are particularly problematic, as their area attacks can devastate operators whose DEF is already weakened by Corrosion, and if your blockers are busy with the Damazti and its clones, they can just walk through them and into the blue box. Finally, unlike H12-1 where the extra Damazti clone in phase 2 spawns in the isolated side lane and stays still for almost the remainder of the stage, the one in H12-3 will instantly start moving, forcing you to defend that lane with something that can at least stall the Damazti until your main defense does enough damage to the other clones to kill it.
  • H12-4 is a horrific melting pot of everything bad from the previous three stages, with the end result being what possibly became the hardest level in the entire game immediately after its release. From the get go, there are three lanes to defend which increases to four if you break the supplies to raise your precious DP cap, and they're pretty far from each other to boot, forcing you to divide and conquer. The level instantly opens with Sarkaz Greatswordsmen and elite Absurdist Operatives to crush early defenses and make it even harder to generate your initial DP, along with Civilians and Spies to take up block. The Damazti Cluster will show up a bit later, with further increased Corrosion damage that is now almost guaranteed to fill the meter in two hits at most, the extra clone from the previous stage (with each clone going down one of the lanes), and a new buff that drastically reduces the cooldown of their Lifeline Burst in phase 2, letting them spam it and decimate your defenses with massive amounts of Arts and Corrosion damage. Once the Cluster shows up, the support also stops playing nice: Decaying Collector Disciples will siege the top and bottom half of the maps, and pairs of Shadowing Trilby Ashers will rush down the bottom two lanes that are also dealing with the Damazti. Once the Damazti enters the second phase, on top of the increased threat from the Damazti and its Lifeline Burst, Rebellion Agitators will spawn with waves of Spies to slip through your defense, and no less than six Shadowing Trilby Ashers led by a genuine Trilby Asher will pop up at the very end to ruin your day if you can't deal with the Damazti while leaving some firepower to spare for the Ashers.
• 13-15 will likely throw a wrench into your campaign. Unlike the other stages in the chapter which had one or two Bloodcalling Altars, there are three (four on Adverse) spread out across the map with the only bomb deployer being on the other side of the map, and they'll be initially protected by Sarkaz Boneguard Captains and Torturers that require you clear them out before delivering the payload. The Captains will release their Blood Ambers when defeated to siege your lines with Bloodborn Spawn, and the Torturers will steadily gain power from the slain Captains and Spawn to undo any damage you tried to do to them, before one-shotting your units left and right once they get moving. There are also three lanes to defend, with the top one only dealing with a steady stream of Spawn, the middle having to deal with more Torturers, and the isolated bottom lane facing a trickle of Boneguard Fluxcasters that will endlessly resurrect themselves until you bomb out the last two Altars, which are the furthest from the bombs even with the checkpoint you get from breaking the first ones.
• H13-2 has four entry points to defend against terrifying amounts of Bloodborn Spawn and the Sanguinarch worms from Episode 10, with the two Bloodcalling Altars protected by an entourage of six Sarkaz Boneguard Torturers that will easily stop any bomb sent their way. The Torturers can withstand an extreme amount of punishment when combining their innate bulk with the fact that killing any one of them will heal and buff the others, and pretty much all ranged tiles that can hit them are in range of their whips, forcing you to use a decoy or one of the comparatively rarer melee units that can dispatch them from further away. Failure to kill them will result in them walking to the top entrance in pairs, where they'll absorb the aforementioned massive swarms of enemies before plowing through everything in their path, if the endlessly respawning hordes didn't overwhelm your blockers before then. On top of that, the stage is pretty stingy with ranged tiles that can reach where they need to be, so you best hope you can deliver support to all four lanes at the same time. As the cherry on top, later in the level, Boneguard Captains and Fluxcaster Captains will siege both the lanes along of Gifts of Magnanimity, which can easily wall and kill units meant only to kill the swarms of weaker enemies.
• H13-4 is the culmination of all the H stages in Episode 13, and the game won't hold anything back. It boasts 3 defensible lanes with extremely cramped tiles and not a lot of safe space for melee and ranged units alike, with a Bloodcalling Altar at the top protected by pre-spawned immortal Fluxcaster Captains, and the Sanguinarch's Throne of Blood at the bottom protected by a parade of Boneguard Captains. The enemy pressure is ferocious on all fronts: the top lanes will be attacked by Heirbearer Scourgers with massive stats and an AoE stun if you try to block them for too long, along with several Boneguard Torturers that will take advantage of their proximity to the Altar to feed off of the respawning Spawn, while the bottom lane faces a constant stream of Heirbearer Annihilators that can obliterate groups of units at a time with their grenades; naturally, all of the lanes will be sieged by practical deluges of of Bloodborn Spawn, with the Altar at the top being able to reach most of the map with its pulse. The Sanguinarch appears for the last time on this stage, with a new ability that lets his Moon-Devouring Bloodmist target two units at once, which sounds deceptively simple until he decides to cover roughly your entire defensive line with mist, crippling them and potentially instantly overwhelming them with the hordes of Spawn that will now instantly resurrect when you kill them. You're required to deliver a bomb to the altar at the top to unlock it as a new deployment point, then direct a second one to the Throne at the bottom, but between the blood mist everywhere and the hordes of ranged threats, you'd be hard pressed to deliver the bombs while there are still active threats on screen. The second wave of enemies is no less tough: more Spawn will start flooding in as Boneguard Captains, Torturers, and Fluxcasters rush the top lanes, and a veritable horde of Annihilators spawns at the bottom to flatten everything in the area. The Sanguinarch's second phase isn't too bad in a direct fight despite his monstrous stats and damage reduction that can only be reduced for a shorter time by the bomb, but his Crimson Edict now spawns over twice the number of Blood Ambers while producing a prolonged blood mist that lasts for a minute (compared to the move's 30 second cooldown), which when combined can result in him instantly overrunning your blockers with as little as a single use of the move, with the only real solution being to bomb him and then try to deplete his enormous bulk within the 10 second window where his damage reduction is down. The hardest part is that all of the above is happening at the same time and at different parts of the map, making it incredibly easy to miss a spot and have your formation pulverized for your mistake, or just fail the level because you weren't paying attention and a single Spawn leaked past your blockers. The silver lining is that if you wipe out all the enemies and Ambers, it's possible to trigger the second wave of enemies before forcing the Sanguinarch into his second phase, letting you handle them in relative peace without the Sanguinarch swarming you.

• GT-HX-3 is the first event stage to cause players trouble due to its large difficulty spike. The enemy spam is absolutely relentless compared to other stages, even the other challenge stages in the event. And it's not slugs, it's Dual Swordsmen and Light-armored Soldiers which are fairly hardened mooks in the early game. On top of the Zerg Rush is a Heavy Defender Lieutenant, which has 40,000 HP, 1,000 ATK, and 1,200 DEF, alongside Big Adam, who is even bulkier and one of the first enemies that can easily one shot your vanguards with his 2,700 ATK. The mook rush keeps the big guys safe from harm while they laugh off your physical attacks. Most strategies that don't abuse high-rarity splash damage units require you to abuse the roadblocks given to separate the Lieutenant and Adam from the horde, or else you will get stomped.
• OF-EX-6 from the Obsidian Festival event is particularly difficult, even for experienced players. The map is extremely open, with few chokepoints and multiple enemy spawnpoints allowing them to attack from all directions. There are also multiple lava fountains present, which limits the safe placement of operators and roadblocks since they cause heavy AoE damage every time they erupt and melt roadblocks in the vicinity. Finally, the map spawns consist of both Sniper Leaders and heavily DEF-buffed Ergate Leaders, which cause a difficult to counter combination where Sniper Leaders will effectively permastun your DPS operators while the Ergate Leaders run straight through your lines. Due to the way the spawn waves are structured, this is actually one of the few maps where SilverAsh cannot reliably carry by himself, since his Truesilver Slash does not last long enough and takes too long to recharge to deal with all of the threats coming his way. As a final proverbial punch to the gut, there's a near hidden spawn at the bottom right of the map that many players may miss if they haven't looked closely at the map's structure prior to entering the stage as it can be hidden by any operator portraits they haven't deployed - and woe betide you if you miss it, since it'll eventually start spawning Agent Leaders.
• CB-EX-7 from Code of Brawl. Unlike most stages, the initial trickle of enemies are already a bit tricky due to including Elite Brawlers that will quickly punch your squishy Vanguards to kingdom come and they will only keep spawning from here. Not only that, the map will also have the player handle all three different lanes of varying difficulty, and with the game limiting how many operators maybe deployed, it requires careful balancing as the Medics, Defenders, and powerful DPS can't be placed to watch every lane. When the Rat King enters the stage, things only get worse. Anyone familiar with Rat King knows that careful positioning of operators as well as bringing at least one squishy Fast-Redeploy operator comes a long way when fighting him. Another thing crops up when the enemies starts to spawn through the upper and lower lane, where the Bulldozer travels through back and forth, if this doesn't seem to be a problem, wait until he collides with your Defender and causing enemies to leak, even worse of it's Greytail Leaders, Elite Brawlers or Authorized Caster Leader who can quickly take care of the squishy DPS units behind the Defender or the humble Originium Slugs rushing and making for home base now that the Defender is preoccupied. All that on top of the Rat King constantly initiating his skill to check that the player deployments are on point lest they will get struck down fairly quickly.
• Code of Brawl's CB-EX-8 is a nasty one. This map has multiple open routes in which enemy units can find their way to the blue base. With an unpleasant combination of enemies including Greytails, Bullies/Bulldozer, Fanatics, and of course, Ergate Leaders, making it a hassle to succeed. To make matters worse, your deployment limit is initially capped at 5 before upgrading the Control Terminals, limiting your defensive lineup for quite a while. Its Challenge Mode version, takes the difficulty up a notch, doubling the amount of time needed for the Control Terminals to be activated, in which Bullies have already shown up to ruin your day. A particular saving grace is that the Brawler enemies are the key to an Easy Level Trick by letting them hit Liskarm so that she can generate SP to an adjacent ally, ideally SilverAsh or Mudrock (Eyjafjalla or Angelina can work too, though the tile placements makes it difficult to place them next to Liskarm) so that they can spam Truesilver Slash and Crag Splitter more often than they normally could to solidly deal with the incoming waves. If you have at least one of Liskarm and SilverAsh/Mudrock (allowing the other to be borrowed from a friend, if needed), then good luck. If you have neither, then, good luck.
• Twilight of Wolumonde's TW-8 isn't necessarily extremely hard by itself, but you are required to clear a special mission here in order to access more levels. Said mission? Beat this level with 6 operators in the squad, tops (this includes friend supporters, so if you bring one, you can only bring 5 of your own). Suddenly, capturing all 4 gramophones (which are practically mandatory to kill the Colossi and Mudrock due to their insanely massive HP pools) becomes much harder, and when Mudrock shows up and starts instantly turning Gramophones hostile you get screwed unless you have an extremely well-thought out strategy and extremely strong operators. For reference, this is the level where F2P guides will just tell you to bring a specific 6* (which means borrowing a friend supporter if you don't have them).
• TW-EX-8 of Twilight of Wolumonde fame. The start of the stage up is pretty manageable. The enemy that trickles in are fairly weak, even the Colossi can be taken care of fairly quickly with some Gramophone help. This changes quickly when the first Winterwisp Blood Shaman enters the map and began rushing the player defenses, and they began to appear from time to time from then on, gradually changing into Winterwisp Blood Magistrates. Still sounds easy? Well, that is until Mudrock enters the scene, then the problem starts. Mudrock and the Winterwisp Blood Shamans/Magistrates will both bum-rush the player defenses and start to thoroughly dispatch their operators like hot knives through butter, not to mention potentially hijacking any Gramophone in sight with their skill usage/suicide explosion. Unless the players can burst down Mudrock quickly as soon as they appear and take out the Winterwisps without letting them explode near a gramophone, this stage is a fairly tough nut to crack that requires some timely deployment, redeployment, and skill usage.
• DM-MO-1: The Town of Taba. While on paper it looks nothing as difficult as Annihilation 3, several factors made it particularly micromanagement intensive still.
  • From the start, immediately there are already a whole lane of Sarkaz Bladeweavers, and later, Sarkaz Grudgebearers and Worldcursers respectively at various points in the stage. Everyone knows the drill by now, they act as a sort of soft timer on any Darknight Memoirs stage, so they need to be disposed of one by one. Better do it quick too, before the whole group advances while the next wave spawns. Additionally, their pathing always take them to the lower Protection Objective, where it is much trickier to defend as the terrain is unhelpful and puts the operators in range of the Grudgebearers/Worldcursers, on top of most of the player's effort being focused on the upper Protection Objectives.
  • On the northwest area of the map, it's fairly empty. It wouldn't be much to be concerned about except that Sarkaz Lancers and their Leader version occasionally spawn there and will quickly build up speed uninterrupted. Depending on the player's deployment pattern, they can become either a nuisance or a deadly threat that can handily kill the defending operator of the lower Protection Objective. Since the area is mostly empty except for that, spawn camping would be the most likely solution, but the Incursion Point there also spawns Sarkaz Sentinels and Sentinel Leaders from time to time, possibly sending the entire wave of buffed Sarkaz barreling into your lines if you trigger one while spawn camping. This problem is somewhat solved if the player has Angelina; even then, considering how she works, timing is still fairly crucial.
  • Finally, at the later part of the stage, the game introduces a few surprise Sarkaz Casters whose bind attack can mess up the frontline defending the upper Protection Objectives unless the player is aware of this fact ahead of time. If the player had been focusing too much on managing the other Sarkaz, this is fairly likely, often causing a leak since the final few waves are fairly tanky and come in larger numbers. Better keep those fast redeployment operators handy.
• MN-EX-8 is basically a Boss Rush stage, where you have to battle against Bloodboil and Bladehelm Elites on top of the Withered and Corrupted Knights. Compounding the issue is that the map has very few deployable spaces, and at least half of them are set on the Withered and Corrupted Knights' paths. This means you'll have to creatively rotate your operators' positioning while also having to grab as many stun mines as you can to crowd control the elite knights so they don't demolish your frontline with their extremely punishing attacks. The challenge version of the map makes things harder by restricting even more of the map, forcing you to deploy your operators in extremely vulnerable positions that make it very easy for Bloodboil and Bladehelm Elites to get into melee range of your operators while the Withered and Corrupted Knights can plow through both your ranged and melee operators if they aren't positioned and rotated properly.
• MB-EX-8 can be a real hair-puller, especially if you lack high DPS. To elaborate, the map consistently has tons of enemies around, and although they remain waiting for some time, it isn't too long - when they move, they tend to bum rush you, compounded by the Deadly Caster Prisoners passively beefing up their attack speed. And heaven help you if you can't bust down the Recidivists before they free themselves during these times - and the challenge mode adds one that makes a beeline straight for your base in contrast to the others. Notably, the stage starts with one, and the only way to get it down is by using Arts burst skills like the third skills of Eyjafjalla and Angelina (and even then, timing is still key). This means that it is very easy to immediately free all enemies right when the stage starts. While locking the enemies back up can be an option, the devices need a long time to charge. That said, the map spawns Elite Sniper Prisoners right next to two of them, meaning they'll handily shoot them down if you don't kill them fast, and the Deadly Caster Prisoners will basically instantly destroy them if they get freed by a Recidivist or the boss. The worst part is that keeping all the devices alive is the mission needed for the medal, so one has to keep their eyes and ears open to pinpoint the moments that the ranged enemies spawn. Whereas Jesselton was manageable in the main stage, here he is significantly more dangerous since, as mentioned before, the map makes sure that there are pretty much always a lot of enemies on the field - if you force him to transform too soon, unless you can instantly trigger all the devices at once, all hell will break loose from every single enemy being freed simultaneously, usually at a moment you're busy with the left side of the map...after which he'll quickly kill the operator used to stall him and join his peers to wreak havoc himself. Bycoming issue is that the boss doesn't take two long paths towards your base like in MB-8; here he'll just casually strut in if you don't stall or kill him. Most online guides tell you to bring Eyja and/or Surtr.
• BH-7 brings back the enemies and mechanics from Twilight of Wolumonde, but ramped up immensely. There are a total of 6 Gramophone towers you have to wrangle under control, which you'll need most of to take out the groups of bulky elite enemies sent at you, especially the Hexed Colossi who are basically invincible to everything else. And while the Leithanien Whisperers trying to contest them are annoying, the problem lies in the isolated top lane, where a steady stream of Winterwisp Blood Shamans and Magisters will pour into the main area, tearing through anyone sent to block them with what limited melee space is available before blowing themselves up to deal even more damage and instantly hijack nearby Gramophones. It's manageable at first, but the spam of Blood Magisters gets incredibly painful in the second half of the level, bordering on Zerg Rush with some of them even coming in groups, which is a problem considering each one is a Lightning Bruiser with a massive health bar and high speed. It quickly becomes impossible to block them and difficult for your ranged units to burst them down before they make it into the central area, where they'll almost certainly explode to hijack multiple Gramophones due to their proximity, ruining your chances of taking down the Colossi while also killing anyone in the vicinity. On the challenge mode version of the map, all the Shamans and Magisters had increased movement speed to boot, making copious use of Slow supporters even more essential.
• WR-EX-8, especially in the later half of the map where Indefatigable Blindies and Dazzled Smarties start appearing. Both of these can only be blocked by the operators with same attribute, and the latter can collide to deal massive area damage if you let them. The hard part lies in the fact that you only have two Marks of Hui/Ming available on ground tiles to block these pests, and Free will spawn near the start of the level, using Weft and Warp to change the attributes of said marks if you don't have units placed to bait out the attack, making it easy to accidentally let them through. Furthermore, Unbridled Furies start spawning near the end, each of which has ridiculously high stats and deals devastating damage to operators with opposite attribute, making it even more important that Free doesn't screw you over by suddenly changing the attribute of the Operator blocking them. Free themself also travels along a relatively isolated path where it can't be blocked until near the end of the level, letting it spam its ranged attacks and abilities with impunity, particularly its Break the Chains shield that will effectively one-shot anything in range if you can't break it in time. And in case you thought you could use the Two-Step Firecrackers to counteract all of the frantic attribute changing, the stage only gives you one. Challenge Mode ups the ante even more by significantly reducing the damage your units deal to same-attribute enemies, making it even harder to kill the enemies in time, especially since same-attribute units are needed to block the Blindies and Smarties in the first place.
  • The level is also the home of a particularly annoying medal - the Freeling Medal, which requires you to clear the stage without breaking Free's shield. This not only leaves you vulnerable to the devastating Arts attack that will follow if you don't break it, but also makes trying to burst down Free risky if your timing is poor, lest it summon its shield during said burst and cost you the medal when you inadverdently break it.
• OD-8 is particularly hectic as it is not only a boss fight against the Essence of Evolution, but also a Zerg Rush stage where you have to balance carefully between holding off near endless waves of Mook Maker Originiutant enemies and attacking the Essence of Evolution. The Essence of Evolution is itself a Puzzle Boss that can't be burst down by traditional means thanks to its shifting damage reduction shield and invulnerability phases. In addition, the very map itself is against you as you have to defend three bases spread across the map with practically no defensible chokepoint, and the Originiutant Tumors that start spawning later in the map can cripple melee units sent to block them. You either have to spread yourself thin covering all of the lanes that can lead into your bases, or deploy a number of very powerful ranged operators to blow up the hordes before they get that far; the former option is particularly hard due to the periodic global true-damage shockwave the boss will use, which will kill any fortifications you're mustering if you don't have healing support spread all over the map.
  • Another thing that made this stage annoying was it was notorious for causing FPS drops on phones of the time, usually whenever the Essence of Evolution does its stage wide attack. Since auto play's timing can be affected by the FPS of the game, unless you had a really good phone or tablet that could keep a stable frame rate or had plenty of leeway with the timing of what you did, a stable, repeatable auto play was essentially impossible. And there was good reason to grind OD-8: it was one of the best stages to farm Grindstone.
• OD-EX-8 takes everything bad about OD-8 to another level. You have the buffed Essence of Evolution stationed at the left side of the map surrounded by restricted tiles and a few ranged tiles, making your options for actually hitting the thing limited. Originiutant enemies will appear on the bottom lane to go through two different paths, and Redmark Elite Eradicators will appear to snipe down any Operators or bombs who are deployed on the left side, which is mostly unprotected from the sandstorm. Even though there's a bush on a ranged tile that is safe from both the Eradicators and Essence of Evolution's global-ranged attacks, your operators deployed there will still get hurt from the sandstorm. While thankfully there are reinforced dirt mounds to protect the entire area on the right side, several Redmark Elite Infiltrators will attempt to destroy the dirt mounds on the isolated top lane of the map; should both of the dirt mounds be destroyed, the Originiutant Tumors spawned by the boss will switch to the top lane and waltz straight into the blue box. Trying to kill the Infiltrators will just make them deploy a decoy and become unblockable in the process, meaning you will have to deal with them very quickly. Of course, should you take too long to deal with the Essence of Evolution itself, it will evolve into it's Perfect form with near full health, and unleash the onslaught of it's Originiutant Tumors and nonstop global True damage attacks, the latter of which deal ridiculous damage and can easily overwhelm any defense unless you're packing a lot of AoE healing.
• WD-EX-8, the rematch against the infamous Pursuer. The basic setup is similar to WD-8 with three cramped lanes that converge on a single choke point, but all of the enemies are stronger, featuring an Imperial Artillery Core Targeteer that leisurely floats across the map and carpet bombs you and loads of Imperial Strikers that will bulldoze anything if you don't kill them with Arts. The Pursuer shows up early on, escorted by a vanguard of Strikers and Armored Casters that make it harder to assassinate him, and his Dominion is just as threatening as it was before given the cramped map and his circling path, forcing you to be very careful with how you damage him lest he permanently cripple a crucial part of the map early on, especially if he's caught in the collateral when trying to burst the Strikers or Targeteer. This isn't helped by the Pursuer himself being buffed and being able to easily shoot down your ranged units, especially once he Turns Red upon which his melee attacks become so damaging that tanks will find themselves being one-shotted even outside of Dominion. The entire map will likely be flooded with Dominion by the time the Pursuer is on his last legs, making it harder to finish him off, upon which comes the worst part: once he dies, you'll be beset upon by five Elite Imperial Strikers that will all rush you from different directions at the same time, likely at a time when most of your forces have been exhausted and any survivors will have halved ASPD from Dominion, letting them run you over unless you managed to kill the Pursuer with as minimal deployments as possible, or somehow managed to stall him during his second phase. Sure, the Strikers will also have halved ASPD since the Pursuer is dead, but that's not much of a comfort considering their immense damage per hit and your own healing output being crippled.
• Upon entering Dossoles Holiday, players will learn to hate any maps with High Tide. Basically, if a map has High Tide, it will occasionally flood, making it so that you can't deploy on flooded tiles without specific Stickers (basically equippables exclusive to DH maps). Not enough trouble yet? How about the fact that High Tide induces a massive ASPD penalty to submerged units while also building up Corrosion at an alarmingly fast rate, alongside extra Corrosion when an enemy attacks them. The Corrosion is bad enough since it builds up and can deal massive damage alongside a permanent DEF reduction, but the ASPD reduction and inability to deploy stalling Operators are what makes this a threat to leaking enemies; this is on top of the fact that many high-tier enemy spawns are timed right when a High Tide happens, just to screw players over. While the enemies will also suffer the effects of High Tide, there are an annoying number of enemies who are not only immune to it, but also exploit it, turning them into Demonic Spiders. Sure, some Stickers will allow players to bypass some of the hassles, but the Stickers aren't mutually exclusive to all Operator types, and you can only equip 5 at once.
• Most of the "Tidings Unseen" stages from Dossoles Holiday are extraordinarily difficult even in comparison to the EX stages, and will more often than not take up the majority of your time and effort completing the event. You best hope that you've grinded out a lot of Tier 2 and 3 Stickers, because you will need them.
  • DH-S-1, whose infamy became known almost immediately after the event hit. To start with, it contains High Tide, and that alone will bring trouble. However, the true threat lies in the bare minimum of startup time given on the stage - enemies will start pouring in en-masse almost as soon as the stage starts, including Dockworkers that are very tanky and can stun player Operators to oblivion, if they weren't knocked out first due to the DEF reduction High Tide Corrosion causes. On top of that, the bottom right of the map contains four Dockworker Leader Motorboats, which can screw players over due to two of them starting to move fairly early, likely far before players have any chance to shore up respectable defenses with what little time they have considering that you need both 3-block units and massive damage to kill them. The Challenge Mode ups the risk by making the Dockworker Leader Motorboats pretty much impossible to stall by removing 1 block from all Operators, forcing you to slow them and gun them down with Arts before they stroll into the blue box. Generating DP fast and deploying key ops early are key to success in this stage.
  • DH-S-2 can invoke puke-inducing rage, mostly due to the layout of the map along with its environmental effects, coupled with irritatingly strong enemies to deal with. To start, you need to set up your defensive line quickly, as the high tide that shows up quickly will screw you over if you can't deploy your operators in time, unless you brought certain stickers that ignore the deployment restrictions caused by tides. Your only ranged tiles are boxed around an 8-tile space staffed by respawning Unmanned Heavy Explosive Boats, and their explosions are strong enough to one-shot most of your ranged operators, thus crimping most of your reliable sources of damage and healing. Finally, there is a steady stream of Dockworker Leader Motorboats with very high stats and a fairly short route to the blue box, and they show up one after the other quickly, necessitating the need to kill them as quickly as possible before your Defenders or Centurion Guards get overwhelmed. And while you're dealing with the Motorboats, a steady trickle of Diver Leaders (who will often have invisiblity and inflated ATK from the high tide) and Explosive Boats will come from the left of the map just to throw a wrench into your plans. The Challenge condition ups the ante by doubling the effective fuse time of the Explosive Boats while giving every enemy a large stat boost, making its already glaring difficulty somehow even worse.
  • DH-S-4 takes this to another level. First of all, the map has a passive condition that makes your units suffer even more severe Corrosion and ASPD penalties from the High Tide and increased Corrosion from any enemy that inflicts them, alongside significantly boosting the stats of every enemy - essentially a Challenge condition that's active all the time. While the initial waves of enemies are tolerable, the first difficulty spike occurs when the High Tide floods your high ground tiles alongside the low ground ones (a rarity among the DH maps), leaving your high ground units at the mercy of the Corrosion and ASPD penalty while the submerged and ATK-boosted Diver Leaders turn them into pincushions. If you survive that, then the map will send droves of Dockworker Leaders on a beeline straight into the blue box, while two Dockworker Leader Motorboats spawn on an isolated side path which, at the point where they arrive, will be covered in water - so if you didn't place a 3-blocker beforehand, tough luck. The icing on the cake is that Unmanned Heavy Explosive Boats will constantly spawn on the side path, which is specifically placed so that their explosions will be able to reach any of the ranged tiles you have. Their inflated stats and amplified Corrosion damage lets them One-Hit Kill your ranged units if you detonate them at a bad time - this also makes blocking the Motorboats harder, as they'll take up your precious block slots and deal enormous Corrosion damage to cripple blockers, leaving them prey for the Motorboats themselves. And believe it or not, the Challenge Mode version is even worse, further increasing the HP of Dockworker Leaders and removing their Achilles' Heel to High Tide to make them ridiculously hard to kill, basically necessitating overwhelmingly high area damage to take them down.
  • DH-MO-1 is the culmination of all of the DH-S stages and the mother of all rages in the event. It's a Marathon Level with a staggering enemy count of 403,^note The same as a full Annihilation, whereas other mini-Annihilation MO stages generally had 200, meaning that you will encounter High Tides numerous times, including ones that submerge your high ground tiles as well. On top of the Erosion from the tides, the level will liberally spam Unmanned Explosive Boats, Tidal Casters, and elite versions of both, which will deal annoyingly high area damage and further cripple your operators with their Corrosion damage. Considering how many there are, this will trigger very often, dealing massive damage and leaving units wide open for physical enemies like the spam of invisible ATK-boosted Diver Leaders and especially the Dockworker Motorboats that will start showing up in disturbingly large numbers later. In particular, the last wave consists of a massive amount of Dockworker Leader Motorboats, Tidal Leader Speedboats and Unmanned Heavy Explosive Boats coming towards you like a tsunami, which will handily dismantle a defensive line crippled by Corrosion or lacking in massive crowd control. It also has a particular trimmed medal that requires no less than 6 Operators retreated or defeated in High Tide, which is problematic when the bulk of the stronger waves arrives during said tide. The only saving grace is that it consumes 0 Sanity, letting you repeat it as many times as you want with no cost but time - real life sanity costs notwithstanding.
• VI-7 is a brutal Boss Bonanza level which forces you into consecutive battles against Faust, Big Ugly, the Corrupted/Withered Knights, and Patriot. Even though the level gives you some downtime between the bosses, each of them has very specific strengths and weaknesses while requiring a specific strategy to bring down,^note Faust needs a tanky unit or fast-redeploys to block his attacks, Big Ugly needs to be killed early with Arts so the High Priest doesn't just run into the base after the mech's death explosion stuns all your units, the Corrupted/Withered Knights are vulnerable to Arts/physical damage respectively and need to be killed at the same time lest one of them enrage upon the death of their partner, and Patriot needs mass debuffs/True damage to break his Marching Stance along with ranged units to bait his spears forcing you to build a single team capable of emulating all of said strategies at once, which is not very easy to do even if you have lots of high-rarity units; Patriot in particular is usually the most problematic part of the level, given how his Marching Stance makes him Nigh-Invulnerable to anything that isn't mass debuffs or True damage while making his attacks a One-Hit Kill, whereas the ones before him have comparatively lower DPS and are fairly manageable by comparison. Further compounding things is the fact that each of the bosses comes with backup from their respective chapters/events, and they generally aren't pushovers, forcing you to divert your attention further; notable are the Defense Crushers in Faust's segment of the level and the Guerilla Heralds in Patriot's. Challenge Mode ups the ante even further by increasing their already glaring stats and massively increasing the redeployment time of Operators, making mistakes even more punishing while reducing your ability to stall them with fast-redeploys, as well as making helidropping strategies with the likes of Surtr much harder to pull off.
  • In Global/EN, the altered event schedule notably allows players to bring Ch'en the Holungday to help out in the fight with her absurdly strong DEF-ignoring skills, which was not possible for CN players due to the fact she originally debuted after Vigilo there. Still, she's not enough to single-handedly win the level, so prepare for an agonizingly difficult battle regardless.
• NL-7 brings up the worst of the main gimmicks of the Near Light event has to offer up to that point. The arena is completely dark and you're only given two Knight Crests to illuminate one tile each for an operator to be deployed on. Scattered throughout the arena are Knight Territory Wanderers who are on standby unless your operators spot them or a certain amount of time has expired. This restricts where you can place your operators early on as these are already Elite Mooks; triggering them too early is certain death. And to cap it all off, two new Elite Mooks who are basically Degraded Boss versions of Roy and Monique show up. They have infinite range, hurt hard, and can cause armor break (meaning they hurt harder). While they still follow the rule of "last deployed operator gets targeted", it means you have to think very carefully about your deployment order. Oh, and there's also a small side lane you need to defend as it also has a home point. It's very easy to screw up this level and have it go downhill fast.
• NL-EX-8 brings a level of insanity unmatched by nearly any of the other maps in the event. There are 3 main paths the enemies can take to the objective, and the entire map is darkened except for a single City Neon in the center, with the lack of Knight Crests forcing you to use your units carefully to reveal the map and make space. The enemies are nothing to sneeze at either: the level almost immediately sends out Nova Knightclub Elites that'll pelt you with Arts and periodically nuke your team with Glimmering Touch, followed by hard-hitting Knight Territory Hibernators that have a tendency to become aggressive at the worst times, and Nightzmora Followers with extremely high stats and the ability to devastate anything that failed to meet their vision requirements. The combination of Nova Elites and Nightzmora Followers in particular can easily cause a Total Party Kill if your positioning isn't up to par, which can quickly become difficult due to the map's restrictive layout. Things go From Bad to Worse once the buffed Blood Knight shows up; not only will he take a ton of effort to kill due to his increased HP, DEF, and Damage Reduction, his ATK is now high enough that he can handily two-shot most defenders even with DEF buffs. Furthermore, he summons much larger groups of Bloodblades that take a direct route to him, making it easy for them to run into him and resurrect him, wasting all your efforts. Even if you can stop the Blades, the Blood Knight will start dishing out One Hit Kills left and right with his buffed attack once he Turns Red, in addition to the spam of Bloodblades potentially healing him faster than you can hurt him if he kills off your blockers. The Challenge Mode takes it even further by significantly increasing the HP and ATK of the Bloodblades, making it disturbingly easy for them to overwhelm your defenses and potentially wipe them out before even reaching the Blood Knight.
  • It's very telling how hard this fight is when many of the "low rarity operator" strategies you might come across require two Game-Breaker 6* operators.
• In the "City Neon" section of Near Light, the Armorless Union stages (3 ~ 5) are quite a difficulty spike compare to the K.G.C.C. and the Adeptus Sprawiedliwi stages due to a combination of the ferociously powerful enemy formations and the more difficult challenge conditions that are active by default.
  • NL-S-3 has 3 routes to the blue box where initially manageable waves of enemies approach from multiple directions. However, shortly into the stage, Knight Crests are automatically deployed on the isolated left side of the stage before members of the Nova Knightclub start appearing, with the stage condition reducing the cooldown of their Glimmering Touch and tripling its range, meaning they can nuke you from across the entire map while you're essentially helpless to retaliate. And they start showing up in concerningly large numbers later, along with the Candle Knight herself (who has heavily increased HP and ATK for the stage), meaning they'll be able to collapse your defensive line in an instant unless you have units to bait them or spawnkill them. The Challenge Mode give the Nova Knightclub greatly increased HP and further reduces the cooldown of their Glimmering Touch to the point where they can basically spam it constantly, making it harder to kill or distract them before they wreak havoc.
  • NL-S-4 is difficult for similar reasons as NL-EX-8. It's another rematch with the Blood Knight, this time packing a new entourage of enemies designed to throw wrenches into your plans - Armorless Assassins who will sit in the dark until their ATK is high enough to blow up a target already blocking the Blood Knight, Knight Territory Hibernators that spawn in annoying positions and will waltz right into the blue box once woken, a Nightzmora Follower that'll destroy anyone without proper vision and deliver crippling blows to your lines, and Viviana near the end who can decimate a struggling defensive cluster using Glimmering Touch. What really seals the deal is that the stage condition gives every enemy a hefty buff to their HP and DEF - considering the Blood Knight is already a Damage-Sponge Boss, this renders him effectively immune to physical damage while still being able to soak Arts and even True damage like no tomorrow. The HP and DEF buff also makes it harder to stop the onslaught of Bloodblades during the intermediate and second phase of the fight - if they make it to the Blood Knight, they'll effectively make him immortal due to how much health each one heals him for given his inflated HP. While the Challenge Mode condition isn't too bad at first, ^note More Bloodblades spawn in the boss' first phase, which usually leads to their healing being wasted given most strategies don't even try hitting the boss that early on this is one of the stages where the passive Challenge Mode buffs to HP/ATK/DEF really start to hurt, as they'll stack with the stage condition to make the boss and his minions ridiculously strong. If you don't have any high-rarity units capable of doing wide-area DPS, good luck.
  • If you didn't like fighting the Armorless Third and Cleanup Squads before, then NL-S-5 takes them up a notch. The map is fairly simple, albeit with Roadblocks that enemies will periodically break to change their pathing. The initial waves of Armorless Assassins and Crossbowmen are manageable, but the level quickly starts sending in elite Third and Cleanup Squad archers; these are annoying as is, but the real threat is the stage condition that gives them a whopping +50% Corrosion damage, meaning they'll be able to fill any Operator's Corrosion meter in about two hits, turning their defenses into paper in the blink of an eye. And they'll start stacking up later on, compounded by the appearance of Roy and Monique who have much higher stats than in their story appearances - if four are on screen at any given time, next to nothing will stop them from vaporizing whatever Defender is tanking the arrows, necessitating decoys to take aggro off of your units. The Challenge Mode somehow makes it worse by increasing the attack speed of every Third and Cleanup Squad member (including Roy and Monique), making it even easier for them to annihilate whatever poor soul they happen to be targeting at the time.
    • An optional daily task you can take for this stage is to complete the level without having more than one roadblock be destroyed; the two roadblocks closest to the enemy spawn points are fairly isolated very deep in darkness towards the western side of the map. One can wonder how a player is supposed to do so when the level is already daunting enough as is. Furthermore, one specific enemy wave will just walk right through the western set of roadblocks (and there is no way to deploy anyone to block them before they can reach it, due to the tiles west of the roadblocks being undeployable) and instantly destroy them.
• IW-EX-8 initially appears to be a fairly standard EX level, being a rematch against a buffed Sui-Xiang and elite Weregeists on a slightly more complicated map. However, the true difficulty lies in the Medal for the stage, Awaken from a Long Dream; to get it, the player must defeat no more than 50 Wisps, which decreases to 30 if you're trying to trim the medal. Suddenly, Sui-Xiang becomes a lot more problematic since you have to reduce your firepower between the boss phases lest you kill too many Wisps, leaving you vulnerable once he or his minions arrive. In addition, since there are 70 Wisps in total, this forces you to let him absorb at minimum 40 of them, which will increase his already towering HP by up to double and feed him SP for his Omnidirectional Breath; given his buffed stats and extremely powerful area damage, him dragging out the fight will almost certainly let him decimate your team, if not end the fight outright from his 9 minute time limit. Hope you brought lots of DPS or a tactic to burst down the boss, because you will need it. An Easy Level Trick involves killing the Heartbillows and leaving the Paperweights they spawn in a way that the level thinks the paperweights are Wisps, making Sui-Xiang spawn early and become unable to absorb the Wisps to gain health. However, this is still very precise and somewhat inconsistent, so caution is still needed.
• TB-8 brings back the worst of Twilight of Wolumonde with a wide-open map that has two Gramophones to contest and a horde of obnoxious enemies to make capturing them a living hell. Mudrock Matterlurgists and Zealots will pound unfortified defenses trying to capture the Gramophones, while Leithanien Whisperers spawn from the bottom red boxes and can contest the Gramophones from half a map away. Worst of all is the stream of Winterwisp Blood Shamans that will come from all paths but the top one, taking paths that make them liable to slice through chokepoints before exploding to instantly capture the Gramophones. Trying to kill them early will lead to the bottom Gramophone being constantly captured, while killing them late will result in the top Gramophone being taken instead. And woe betide you if you don't have both Gramophones captured by the end of the level, otherwise the two Hexed Colossi will plow right through your defenses without any opposition. Challenge Mode increases the speed at which the Whisperers capture the Gramophones, often letting them capture them without the Blood Shamans even doing anything.
• SN-10, the final battle stage for "Stultifera Navis". While the boss's gimmicks are relatively manageable in spite of having 4 phases, the problem comes from the stage integrating all of the new Sea Terror mooks along with the boss, each of which are Demonic Spiders in their own right. Nethersea Predators have a whopping 80% evasion that lets them simply shake off damage over time and a good majority of physical and Arts damage, requiring a debuffer to even make them manageable. Some of the enemies will also create Nethersea Brands that can spread out to every single deployable ground tile and can easily take out your operators via the Nervous Impairment debuff and HP drain if you aren't careful with your Operator placements. Moreover, if you don't have the Little Handy module that can help you clear off the Nethersea Brands, you'd be forced to see it spread all over the deployable ground tiles and take out all your ground Operators, which is also a problem considering that that many of the enemies will gain buffs when on the Brand. While True Damage can neutralize the threat of these enemies traits, the debuffs that can affect them are far and few with Silence (Can be cast by Lappland and Podenco's S2, Jaye's S1, Ceobe's S3 for some examples) and Freeze (Can be cast by Kjera and Gnosis) being the most effective debuffs against the new enemies. And even then, not every player has those operators that can help them in this stage. It's to the point that this stage trended on Twitter with players talking about their struggles with this stage and/or asking for other players for strategic help to clear it safely.
• SN-S-1-A tends to catch many players off guard due to its special condition, which increases the attack speed of Nourished Spewers and gives them Invisibility, made worse by the fact that they spawn on tiles that cannot be deployed on, allowing them to shoot down your Operators standing on Nethersea Brands from global range with impunity until they slowly begin to walk towards your base. There is one tile close to where the Spewers spawn that allows SilverAsh, whose talent allows him to reveal stealth, to cut them down with Truesilver Slash before they begin to move, but without copious amounts of Medic support he is more likely to get shot down by the Spewers before Truesilver Slash even has time to charge up. The saving grace is that there's an Easy Level Trick using Hoshiguma with her second skill to trivialize the Spewers by making them kill themselves on the recoil damage, but those without a leveled Hoshiguma or struggling to find a support one with her second skill equipped are in for a rough time.
• FC-EX-8 follows the usual pattern of throwing all of the event's enemies in some form or fashion; Reeds which can hide operators until they catch fire and spread it if an operator isn't on the tile to put it out, Mire tiles that slow down operators' attack speed (but also enemies), and enemies that turn into invisible mooks that must be hit a certain number of times to stop them from reviving with full health. There are also Dublinn Cannoneer Captains that have infinite range and splash damage, as well Dublinn Flying Squad Leaders that bypass your operators unless you can stun them (which takes them down). Eblana will also appear as the boss backed up by the Brigadier, the latter of which is a Mini-Boss tier threat who can carve up melee units without enough DEF, while the former can disable and decimate clustered defenses while soaking up damage with her barrier. On top of this, you have two home points to defend, and both of them will generally require something more than a single operator with a medic to hold the line, especially the right lane where Eblana travels. Coupled with the various hard hitting attacks and having reeds set on fire messing with the targeting priority of the ranged mooks (especially once Eblana Turns Red and ignites the entire map), this map is extremely chaotic: you're likely never going to have a run go the exact same time even if you're diligent on deployment timing. Challenge Mode makes this worse by having key tiles you would've put operators on already on fire, while giving all enemies a hefty stat buff.
• Where Vernal Winds Will Never Blow features Yumen Catastrophe Defenses where your ranged operators gain additional damage to ground enemies and take less damage from them. The catch is that enemies can climb up the ranged tiles using the ladders throughout the maps to make their way to the objective points, while decimating your ranged operators as they have low defense with a block count of one. And most of the paths will be filled with tiles where you can't deploy your ground operators except Push Stroker/Hookmaster Specialists and Instructor Guards with Module Y, leaving them at the mercy of enemies if you can't block off the ladders.
• CW-EX-8 is a rematch with Kristen, but so much worse than the relatively easy first meeting. First of all, the map now contains 4 Planetary Debris of 3, squarely located in every corner of the stage to make placement near them unsafe once Kristen turns them into Star Rings, and they have short paths which make them less useful for hitting enemies; there are also now four blue boxes which are each near one of the Debris instead of one easily defensible chokepoint. Second, she also comes with rather tanky backup all at once in contrast to how it was in CW-10, with an escort of Arc Screenguard Captains along with a steady stream of Arc Frontliner Leaders. But the kicker of this stage is that at the end - when you'll most likely be busy with bursting her down - a Zerg Rush of Offender Prototypes will roll up, which need 3 block to be held back and can easily flatten operators with the move speed buffs from Kristen or the Gravity. This leads to the extremely common case of being able to weather or kill the boss but one of these leaking nonetheless. Kristen's first phase can still be dealt with by means like Ebenholz or a buffed Surtr, but the real fun starts after that, with Kristen notably becoming a walking Stone Wall with the titanic damage reduction gained from instantly locking the four Star Rings, just as the bulk of her forces start to roll in and she starts walking around the middle of the map to harass your units from afar. On top of this, the Star Rings themselves do way more self-destruct damage, putting heavy pressure on your lineup as you try to destroy them and weaken Kristen's defense, while brute-forcing Kristen without a Silence while Rings are still active will just lead her to blow up all the Star Rings for a potential Total Party Wipe that lets the rest of the enemies swoop in unopposed. And if one manages to kill the boss while having gravity shifted, the player better haul ass before the last wave casually struts in using the new beeline you've just created with the orbs that were previously blocking that path not doing that anymore. Challenge Mode gives the enemies a hefty 35% HP and 25% ATK buff ^note This is greater than the usual passive 20% Challenge Mode buff (notably making the Star Rings hit even harder on destruction) while tripling the cost of Guards and Defenders, removing some of your more reliable options for halting the enemies or surviving the Star Rings.
• CW-S-4 takes everything bad about EX-8 and cranks things up to another level. The map now has six Planetary Debris for Kristen to take advantage of along with two blue boxes on opposite sides of the map, and all the Debris are packed in a way that both renders the middle of the map unsafe and makes it near impossible to utilize them properly to hit the enemies, also coming with the side effect of forcing your entire team to squeeze into the two edges of the map. It being an S stage means that every enemy enjoys a hefty 20% buff to their stats from the get-go, and the initial pressure takes advantage of this in full: the level pre-spawns two R-11a Assault Power Armors with immense bulk and long enough range to blast almost every deployable tile on the map, and will start rolling out R-31a Heavy Power Armors that will start to move later in the level, with just as much bulk and the ability to outmuscle or stun blockers. The pressure doesn't ease up from there - the right side will have to contend with periodic groups of tough enemies like Trimounts City Defenders that can lower your block, very durable Arc Screenguards, and Arc Frontliners that can rip through most defenses already pressured by the rocket mechs, while the left side will have to deal with more R-31a Power Armors and more Arc Frontliners. Kristen is pretty manageable in her first phase and takes an even longer path than her EX incarnation, but that changes quickly in her second, where the sudden 6 Star Rings spread all over the map force you to constantly mobilize your defense to take out the Rings and weaken her enough to beat her, not helped by both Kristen and the Rings doing massive amounts of multi-target damage with the stat buffs the stage condition give them. The Rings also have a tendency to pack close together, meaning that trying to use area attacks to destroy them may result in two breaking at once and instantly wiping your team. To make matters worse, the enemy pressure will intensify once Kristen hits her second phase, with more Arc Frontliners, a third R-11a Power Armor to bombard your lines, several Offender Prototypes that will zoom around before running over your units, and a final group of R-31a Power Armors, all while you're juggling Kristen and the Star Rings. If you take too long to defeat the enemies, Kristen will also just walk into the blue box while unblockable to cause an instant loss. As if that wasn't bad enough, Challenge Mode buffs all enemy stats even higher and strengthens the Star Rings, increasing their ASPD debuff and making each one give Kristen 45% damage reduction, making her nigh immortal even with only a few under her belt and letting her stall for as much time as possible, or even escape altogether if you can't take out the Star Rings fast enough. The only saving grace is that like Kristen's other boss stages, all enemies except Kristen herself have a huge weight penalty, meaning that Shift users can be used to ease the fight against the Power Armors and Arc Frontliners - but they won't be doing much damage since they're not made for that, especially not with the bulk that's fairly universal among the enemies.
• Pretty much the entirety of Hortus de Escapismo is extraordinarily difficult thanks mainly to the inclusion of the Monastery Inhabitant civilians, which like other civilian units need to be actively babysat by the player. However, what makes these a different level of difficulty to manage is the fact that Monastery Inhabitants will panic when enemies are present, losing HP as long as they are panicked until they reach a statue to temporarily calm down. However, this is only temporary, and unless you're constantly sacrificing 20 DP to activate the holy statue to manage panic, the Monastery Inhabitants will panic again and run away from their current statue to a different one, regardless if it's on the other side of the map and their path is blocked off by pitfalls, which they will gladly run off into in their sheer panic. What makes this worse is every other mechanic in the event is specifically designed to disrupt any attempts to manage panic, from enemies that can slow DP generation, steal DP, lower your DP cap, or prioritize destroying statues, to areas that infinitely spawn rolling rocks that will destroy wooden walkways and open up pits for Monastery Inhabitants to fall into. It's a small miracle that the Final Boss doesn't actually need to be fought, because the player is going to be too tied up dealing with the numerous scrappy-tier mechanics of the event, though he does apply debuffs to make things more difficult.
  • One wouldn't think a tutorial stage could qualify, but the second tutorial stage for Hortus De Escapismo (HE-TR-2) is infamous for playing more like a puzzle stage if you want to clear it without leaks. The point of this tutorial stage in particular is to introduce three things: boulders that periodically roll down a line and damage anything in its path, temporary barricades that can be used to block the panicking civilians so they don't walk into a bottomless pit (these are cheaper to build than filling in a gap), and one that wasn't mentioned is that the boulders can break the planks over pits, which you may either want to patch up or use a barricade so a civilian doesn't fall in it. What makes this much harder than it should be is DP generation is slowed to half its normal rate for some reason (and this is not mentioned anywhere in the stage description) but they give you Myrtle to generate it. However, Myrtle is the only one defending the home point and using her skill allows enemies to go right through her, so you can't use it all the time. Secondly, Nearl is deployed in such a way that she's in the path of two boulders and most of the trash mobs. Despite her healing skill and having Jessica also deployed to do additional damage, she will die well before the map is done if you can't find a way to stop this. Lastly, Amiya is deployed in another part of the map and Wasteland Robbers (ranged enemies) will spawn nearby and kill her in a few hits. You're given Gravel and Gummy to deploy; you have to figure out how to use them so that Nearl and Amiya don't die, all the while making sure the civilian doesn't fall off the pit. It doesn't help that the barricade mechanic is only used once more in the rest of the main stages, it only blocks civilians, and as mentioned, only temporary in that it'll be up for a short period of time.
• SL-EX-7 starts covered in Fluffy Buddies that you'd expect to be able to use to douse the map in Pure White Steam, but the level immediately throws out its first curveball by instantly sending out a Wandering Slider to do a drive-by on the first Fluffy Buddy, causing a chain reaction that covers most the map in Carmine Steam right away. This is immediately followed by four Supenova Casters that will park themselves on the tiles now covered in Carmine Steam, spread out enough that they can hit almost anything on the map with their multi-target Arts; the Casters will erase anything you send out if you thought you could stop the Wandering Slider before the chain reaction, and the fact that you start with 0 DP means it's almost impossible to beat the Wandering Slider to the punch and detonate the Fluffy Buddies first without some extreme DP optimization. The Supernova Casters combined with the middle of the map likely being buried under Carmine Steam make it extremely difficult to retake it from the sheep, and their extreme range lets them easily pressure any defense you can muster, especially if you let the other enemies cover more of the map. Said enemies include loads of sheep that will spawn more Carmine Steam on death, more Sliders that will douse the entire map unless blocked or revealed, and four more Supernova Casters that can dismantle your lines if you haven't killed the first four by then. There's also an isolated top lane that will periodically send in Wandering Sliders and Big Men, the latter of which have very high stats and can instantly kill blockers covered in Carmine Steam from their thrown sheep or the Sliders, not helped by how the Supernova Casters can also bombard most of the top lane, destroying anything that isn't under White Steam. Challenge Mode makes it even more enraging by buffing all enemy stats and massively raising the ASPD of the Supernova Casters, turning a huge chunk of the map into a veritable "Instant Death" Radius.
• SL-S-4, specifically its Challenge Mode. Although it unusually doesn't have the universal 20% buff that is standard for S stages, the level instantly opens up with an Urban Tornado Trendsetter while you're out of DP, which can vaporize your Vanguards if you don't use a cheap meat shield to block it beforehand, while also setting up a chunk of Carmine Steam to let the incoming sheep become walls of stats. There's an isolated top lane with only a single melee tile that can be deployed on to block it (albeit with some Fluffy Buddies you can use to set up Pure White Steam and bolster the lane), and any ranged units you use to support the lane will likely be shot down by the Supernova Casters that loiter around the bottom right and move to the top lane. The opening of the level in particular will put you under a severe DP crunch due to how early pressure starts rolling in along with the need to set up Soda Bottles so your units don't get obliterated under Carmine Steam, and if you can't bring things under control fast enough, the steady trickle of Big Men and Tornado Trendsetters will quickly bring your run to a halt. Challenge Mode, however, not only buffs up all enemy stats, but spawns in some more enemies in sadistic positions: the Fluffy Buddies at the top lane will instantly be set off by a Wandering Slider, forcing you to retake the top lane the hard way or suffer an instant death by Supernova Casters, and another Supernova Caster will show up in the middle of the map, letting it pressure the left lane during the aforementioned DP crunch and potentially even wipe a defense instantly if you can't bring the Carmine Steam under control again.
• SL-S-5 is similar to S-3 due to being another rematch with Dolly, but is made considerably worse by both the stage layout and his new backup. The 20% enemy buff is back in full force, and the map is split into two isolated lanes and a middle section that will be completely covered in Carmine Steam most of the time due to the Wandering Sliders patrolling around. The right lane will face constant pressure from the average sheep and Sliders, with occasional pairs of Tornado Trendsetters that will nuke the chokepoint and douse everything in Carmine Steam unless you quickly wrangle the tiles back upder control, while the left lane instead faces a steady stream of Big Men who necessitate a powerful ranged unit under a Decorative Geyser to take down in time. Dolly spawns early on and takes his sweet time traveling around the middle while bombarding your units, which not only limits the positions you have to safely launch attacks against him, but sets you up for the true horror of the level - pairs of Supernova Casters, which will use the Carmine Steam in the middle to trigger their multi-targeting, allowing them to blast pretty much anything on the map and potentially instantly kill anything that Dolly placed Carmine Steam on. Also because of the massive amounts of Carmine Steam everywhere, Dolly's Unintentional Explosion has the potential to cause a Total Party Wipe if you aren't smart with your dedicated steam-spreaders or Soda Bottles, the latter which will be under huge demand since they're needed to both crack Dolly's shield and manage the Carmine Steam on every front. Challenge Mode further increases enemy stats and strengthens Dolly by giving his Wool Shield 200 HP instead of 150 (effectively meaning 25 more hits or one more Soda Bottle to break), putting more strain on your Soda supplies and turning the fight into a race against time to disable the shield and burst him before he causes too much trouble or escapes.
• The finale of the notoriously difficult Design of Strife, Home in the Flames, is comparable to the upper-difficulty runs of Contingency Contract or Integrated Strategies. To preface things, the level passively applies an enormous HP/ATK buff to all enemies, doubles the redeployment time of all units, has one central lane with only a few deployable tiles, and has almost all ranged tiles in range of massively damaging Lava Fissures. Sverdsmeltr is at his strongest in this level, but pales in comparison to the army of Elite Mooks that force their way through the middle two lanes, each of which is buffed to such a ridiculous degree that every single one of them can qualify as a Boss in Mook's Clothing.^note Pretty much every enemy on the stage has close to 100,000 HP, and some have even more than that, while the boss himself has 320,000 effective HP along with his massive defenses and healing another 64000 in the second phase. The level opens with two Hateful Avengers, one of which will walk straight to the blue box seconds after the level starts, often requiring the likes of Mlynar buffed by damage amp or slows to even survive the opener. It only ramps up from there, with a Heartbillow that'll snipe your ranged units and turn into an army of Paperweights on death to end you if you didn't bring AoE multihit, a Bloodboil Elite who will stack offenses from the slain Paperweights to bulldoze melee units, and two Sarkaz Wither Maws with immense bulk and the ability to One-Hit Kill blockers - all within the first minute and a half of the level. Once Sverdsmeltr Turns Red, the enemies arrive in full force, with a Bladehelm Elite who sits at the back of the map and constantly spams his ability to turn your attacks into wet noodles, leaving you helpless against the upcoming assault - a Tiacauh Champion with immense bulk, two Heirbearer Chain Caster Captains who can disable and wipe a lineup with AoE Arts/Necrosis, and a Trilby Asher who can one-shot almost anything while also being able to dash past blockers. All of the enemies come at a relentless frequency, and Sverdsmeltr takes an isolated side path instead of going around the main one, which means you'll have to prepare separate defenses just for him, or try and burst him down fast enough that he dies before the bulk of his backup starts rolling in. This is especially since the Reforged Retinue he spawns in phase 2 are just as strong as the other enemies and can plow through nearly any defense if you can't force him to consume them instead.
  • The only saving grace of the level is that you can obtain all of the event rewards (except for the relatively small final LMD rewards) just by beating A-3 and then doing the Trauma Intervention maps, putting S-3 squarely in Brutal Bonus Level territory.
• GO-EX-8 is a steep Difficulty Spike in comparison to the rest of a relatively easy event. Alistair is still limited by his lack of range, but the map is far more accommodating to him due to a cramped layout with few good deployment positions, him coming with a vanguard of Millscar Mercenaries and Armors of the Empire to stop you from just killing him instantly, and his damage now being high enough to easily kill most units that do step into range. Even then, he's not a huge issue...which is why the level is now a Dual Boss with the Last Steam Knight of all things, buffed with his Inferno Mode abilities for good measure. With Alistair's range basically being a no-fly zone, you have a very limited amount of space to handle the Knight, especially once his air strikes begin sealing off all your deployable tiles, putting a ton of pressure to split your team between killing the Steam Knight and handling Alistair and his backup before the king times you out for a Non-Standard Game Over. There are also 3 Heavy Transport Vessels that will slowly patrol the map and instantly kill your precious ranged units with their guns, while having enough health to effectively serve as a third boss-tier threat, especially since they spend most their time flying in Alistair's range before closing in. The Challenge Mode makes things infinitely worse by giving Alistair the global range he was denied in the original fight - except since his stats were seemingly not designed to account for global range (said bosses usually have lower ATK and/or show up a bit later to let you set up), this translates to even setting up an initial defense being painful as Alistair can easily kill vanguards and other early units with his massive AoE damage. On top of this, the map is subject to painful RNG dependency due to the sheer number of randomized Gears that Alistair and the Transport Vessels spawn (which are naturally spawned beyond where you can safely deploy units to grab them), which can screw up your plans if enemies wind up grabbing the wrong ones at a bad time (especially the Millscar Mercenaries), or if Alistair decides to summon one too many lions in a bad place.
• Such is the Joy of Our Reunion's OR-EX-7. The pre-spawned Drifting Aromas cover almost every single tile of the cramped map with their burning auras, making the initial setup phase absolutely hellish, and the constant burning will ensure that any Sapidities you can create will be cooked into Vapidities in no time at all unless you rid the map of them, something hard to do given their significant bulk and the lack of space. Failure to eliminate them quickly will result in you being swamped under not just the Aromas (as more will be constantly spawning), but also multiple Vapid Blights from all the Vapidities being created, especially on Challenge Mode where there are far more Vapidities and the Derelict Stove is positioned closer to them for easy access. To make matters even worse, several Prosperities will also spawn later in the level, whose coin attacks are a One-Hit Kill on all but the tankiest units and can be constantly reloaded because of all the Sapidities or Vapidities floating around the close-quarters lanes.
• OR-S-3 is a hellish melting pot combining all the most painful aspects of the event along with a complicated map layout that applies immense pressure from every side. In addition to three pre-placed Drifting Aromas covering most of the map with burning damage, the central lane faces a constant rush of Bloated that have such high mixed defenses that only the Sapid Auspice or True/Elemental cheese can reasonably kill them before they overwhelm your Defenders, along with several Prosperities that'll roll in later to steamroll laneholders or ranged units alike. The only Sapidities you can use come from the isolated left lane, which also has Humilities that will spawn-kill any Sapidities by pulling them into holes, while also sniping units you place on the limited tiles that can reach them; you'll have to pull them into the hole first if you want to have a chance of firing even a single Sapid Auspice, but at the same time, the global stat buff from S stages allows the Bloated to actually survive the dragon if you didn't soften them up. The isolated right lane will constantly summon more Drifting Aromas in pairs to ensure their flames cook anything they engage, while Fastings will spawn from another isolated red box right next to the Derelict Stove and summon an endless stream of Vapidities to feed the Stove, with no way to stop the Vapidities in time without extreme multi-hit DPS or spawn-killing the Fastings, potentially letting them spam Vapid Blights to nuke your team. To make matters even worse, Remembrances will be spawned in an inaccessible corner of the map before making a straight beeline to the blue box, meaning you also have to prepare powerful ranged damage in the area that can both survive the Remembrances and the Drifting Aromas that happen to pass through the same area. And on top of that, Challenge Mode increases all enemy stats even further while making the Vapid Blight now deal so much damage that a single proc will likely obliterate most of your lineup and force a loss.
• Although the normal and EX stages of The Masses' Travels are on the easier side, the stages in "Rest in Peace" are significantly more painful, with a 20% buff to HP, ATK, and DEF for all enemies, incredibly devilish enemy combinations, and borrowing gimmicks from other events instead of sticking to the usual fare:
  • MT-S-1 brings back the Gelato Stops of Guide Ahead, with no less than six spread out across three lanes to make them harder to capture, not helped by every ranged tile bar one being a Dream Tile that makes setting up ranged firepower a chore. Naturally, most (or all in CM) of them are hostile, and they cover a massive area, which allows the Elite Shrine Swordsmen to buff themselves to high heaven, rush you down, and beat even Defenders to death with ease. The second half of the level will send out a firing squad of Elite Shrine Marksmen who will abuse the infinite supply of ammo to assassinate your units one by one, while Witnesses and Crawls of the Sankta will also be sent in to interfere with your plans. And if you think you're safe just because you took all the Gelato Stops, several waves of Pathfinder Sagittarius Prefects will be periodically airdropped directly onto them to instantly take them back.
  • MT-S-2 brings back the infamously annoying enemies and mechanics from Hortus de Escapismo, and combines it with the Annihilation-style mechanic of disabled natural DP generation. This restriction, combined with the Dream Tiles and all the DP stealing or disrupting foes, makes getting anything set up an absolute chore, and not helping is the pre-spawned Elite Shrine Marksman protected by a Praying Saint Statue, who is nearly impossible to kill quickly and will instantly shoot down any Vanguards or early defenses you send out (although you can use a sufficiently tanky shifter to throw it into a pit for a guaranteed kill). Even after handling the opening, the level won't let up as you'll face intense pressure from more Robbers (who are invisible to boot on CM), Bounty Hunters, Elite Shrine Swordsmen, and Elite Shrine Marksmen, many of which will also step on a conveniently placed Active Originium to ratchet up their ATK, while the Praying Saint Statue blesses all of them with enormous amounts of Barrier HP to magnify their already sizeable bulk.
  • MT-S-3 reaches a whole other level of how much the stage is stacked against your favor. There are 14 pre-spawned Veteran Shrine Nurturers whose ranges overlap with each other in a way that any enemy in their range (including themselves) is effectively immortal unless you can instantly kill them before the horde just heals back to full, and like in S-1 with the Gelato Stops, every enemy is hand-picked to abuse the infinite ammunition and healing, namely the trademark Elite Shrine Swordsmen and Marksmen who will rip through defenses like paper, and even Pathfinder Ballistarius Prefects who inflict colossal amounts of area damage to pound the single chokepoint you're tasked with defending. Challenge Mode somehow makes things worse by hugely increasing the health of the Nurturers, which often removes even the option of insta-killing them and forcing you to face all of the enemies head-on.
  • MT-S-5 flip flops between this and Breather Level depending on if you brought a raised Lemuen, who is essentially the Saint's kryptonite despite the latter now having a whopping 5 phases (6 in Challenge Mode) that must be sequentially taken out over the course of the stage. If you don't, however, the stage combines almost all the pain points of the event and adds in the Saint on top of that, who gains so much attack power as she continues reviving that letting her fire even a single attack or Ceremony of Enlightenment spells instant death for anything in the respective radius, with preventing it being a tall order as she constantly respawns in different locations and also stacks enough defenses to legitimately offset her low HP, along with the constantly expanding map already being highly restrictive with deployable tiles. Each time the Saint shows up, she's also always accompanied by a new flavor of Demonic Spiders along with a constant trickle of Elite Shrine Swordsmen: namely a horde of Wings and Witnesses of the Sankta, followed by a squad of Elite Shrine Marksman backed up by Veteran Shrine Nurturers who will restock their ammo and heal them, and finally (on CM) three Praying Saint Statues whose ranges cover nearly the whole map and will grant The Saint a beefy Barrier just to make it harder to finish her off.
• The final stage of Vector Breakthrough: Inorganic Matters is a major Difficulty Spike compared to the previous 11 stages (which were already no slouch), with an oppressive map layout with 3 lanes, Lava Cracks covering most deployable tiles, and periodic High Tide (most of which submerges high ground as well). The stage also throws out Elite Mooks buffed up to endgame levels, a fully powered Mechanist and his robot companion, and all the previous Elite Op trainees except Stopwatch, with the Elites pouring in through the middle lane while the bosses each take an isolated side lane, and the map being designed with cramped deployment tiles to maximize the damage of Mechanist's cross blast AoEs. Worse still is the devious timing of the enemy waves: Leafcarpet comes with Mechanist as his vanguard to stun units and force you to spend firepower stopping her instead of hitting him out of the gate, the High Tide is timed to almost always intersect with Mechanist approaching your lines to make it even harder to tank or burst him, several 2-block Ursus Raiders will come just as Mechanist activates the first Nirvana Program to take advantage of the Program lowering your block count, Document comes with extremely tanky Waker-Uppers to form a wall of a DPS race, and Uproar shows up at the tail end to make up for the loss of Mechanist's cluster bombs in phase 2 with her own AoE Counter-Attack. That's on top of how Mechanist's sheer firepower and the slippery nature of the Structural Principle make spreading your forces to hold the side lanes along with the mob rush in the middle a fool's errand without some absurdly specialized lineups, making it all the more likely that Mechanist either blows up your whole team or the Structural Principle escapes. It's telling that one of the more popular strategies is to use Yu's S2 to teleport one of the bosses into the center lane just so you can focus more firepower into the middle.
  • While some buffs from the Special Front can ease the difficulty of the stage, this is in turn complicated by how in order to get the trimmed medal for the event, you have to beat VEC-12 within the first week of its running, greatly restricting the number of buffs you have available and locking out the strongest ones only obtained in the second week.
• For those who don't care about the trimmed medal and are struggling to clear Vector Breakthrough: Inorganic Matters, the final buff unlocked in the last stretch of the event, Overclocking Equipment, is so absurdly powerful that it will likely trivialize any stages you haven't cleared yet.^note In exchange for a global -3 block, all units gain +100% HP, +100% ATK, and +100 ASPD.. Unfortunately, the two stages needed to activate it, SP15 and 16, are escort missions where you're limited to 3 operators to free an Ursus Civilian from a roadblock and protect it from a powerful Core Targeteer drone, complicated by each stage also having two of the Elite Op trainees. 15 has Stopwatch and Document, the former of which will greatly accelerate the drone and let it kill the Civilian in seconds, while both Elites are also insanely tanky and hard-hitting to go with Stopwatch's speed buffs. 16 is another can of worms, with Leafcarpet running laps around all deployable melee tiles and taking an extreme amount of punishment to kill in time (which in itself is near impossible without debuffing her movement first), while Uproar constantly camps the bottom side, making it impossible to freely attack Leafcarpet or the bomber drone there without risking a lethal Counter-Attack. Trying to block Uproar to disable the counter will kill all but the most tenacious duelists owing to Leafcarpet's stun and the other two's massive damage output. and she's additionally able to directly attack and likely kill the Civilian if you free them too early; in addition, because of her durability, Auto-Revive, and sticking to a part of the map that is largely unreachable by ranged support, she will often simply time out the stage if you killed the other two but don't have enough left over to quickly melt her, or waited too long to free the Civilian while she was patrolling. In addition, as they're two consecutive stages, units used for 15 cannot be reused for 16, which may complicate your plans if you expended too much DPS on 15 trying to quickly kill the drone and tanky Elites.

• Desolate Desert pits you against a Zerg Rush of Acid Originium Slugs that, while weak, will pelt you with long-ranged attacks that inflict a permanent stacking DEF debuff on operators. The problem arises with the fact that there is a lot of them, to the point where near the second half of the stage, your defenses will be so crippled that even the weak slugs will be able to tear through defenders. More slugs will start coming from the bottom side later into the stage, so if you don't have some healers working on overdrive you're in tough luck. And out of all the contracts, one that stands out is Concentrated Acid, which will jack up the slugs' ATK and ASPD while amplifying their DEF reduction, letting them rip through everything with impunity. And if you also tack on Anti-Sniper (increases attack range of enemies), these things will cut you down from across the map. The other enemies (Infused Originium Slugs and Metal Crabs) aren't too bad, but the Metal Crabs can become a nuisance if you take the High-Density Creatures contract, which removes their Achilles' Heel of being knocked into pits.
• East Armory. It's a drone map like the former Abandoned High-rise, but made significantly harder by a few factors. First of all, while there are no Bombtails, the Monster drones have been replaced with Arts Masters that can cut down ranged operators with their Arts attacks, including an Arts Master A2 at the end that packs ridiculous HP and attack. Secondly, the ground enemies are significantly stronger, and while they have nowhere to hide anymore, there are two separate lanes that you'll have to take care of, one with Possessed Junkmen, the other with AoE Shielded Senior Casters, and both with hordes of Breakers. Thirdly, there's a row of ballista turrets that will cause your frontline to be taking significant damage once in a while, especially considering the level doesn't really allow for a row of tanks considering all the ranged units you're going to need to kill off the drones - and it gets worse if you take Deadly Ballista to boost their damage. Combine all of this with an Arts Control contract to buff the HP, ATK, and ASPD of the Arts Masters, and you get a difficult stage to crack at higher risks unless you have a boatload of high tier Snipers. The level does give you two Jammers to neuter the Arts Masters, but you have to place them carefully since the ballista turrets will instantly kill them if they aren't protected by another unit, not to mention the Arts Master A2 at the end of the level can shoot them down from outside their range. There was much rejoicing from the community when the map was eventually taken out of the rotation.
• Frost-Covered Ruins takes the dreaded ice maps of Episode 6 and adds the difficulty of Contingency Contract on top of it. Much of the valuable area is covered by two Originium Ice Crystals that'll cripple your ASPD and, combined with the Yeti Casters, freeze them outright - and if you take either Cold Snap (doubles their pulse rate) or Inertia (doubles their debuff duration), they'll simply perma-freeze everything in their radius. Not helping are the Yeti Squad enemies that will mercilessly exploit your frozen Operators, particularly the Yeti Icecleavers (and two leaders) that have insane bulk and deal ridiculous amounts of damage to frozen units. And just to screw with you, two Defense Crushers will appear on the other side of the map and pincer your main force, soaking up hits and stunning units sent to block them. In particular, some contracts will jack up the power of the Icecleavers and Crushers - Ice Melter significantly buffs the Icecleavers' HP, ATK, and DEF to make them even more terrifying, while Fortification Defense buffs Defense Crushers' ATK, DEF, and ASPD while giving them massive RES and silence immunity to circumvent their Achilles' Heel to Arts damage and silencing effects.
• Windswept Highland, the permanent map of Operation Cinder is a real hair-puller. You better be careful when handling the waves of Sarkaz, lest you want to hit a Sarkaz Sentinel and have a horde of Bladeweavers and Grudgebearers on you. While one of the lanes will have to handle the brunt of the Sarkaz units, the other will be assailed by Sarkaz Lancers and a Demolitionist that will appear later on. The Originium Jetstreams all over the place, depending on your lineup, can either be a boon or an annoyance with their ATK modifiers. But the problem arises with the fact that unlike most CC maps, which have contracts to buff one or two important enemies, all of the Sarkaz enemies have their own contracts. Buff the Bladeweavers with Urgency, and you'll face melee Arts units with colossal HP/DEF, enhanced ASPD, and much faster movement on top of them running at you sooner. Buff the Lancers with Dauntless Charge, and they'll run you down faster before instantly killing the first thing they hit with their enhanced speed-to-damage conversion. Buff the Sentinels with High Alert, and their enhanced speed will make it harder to avoid hitting them while making their global ATK/DEF buff massively increased when you do hit them, turning every single enemy into a One-Hit Kill machine. But worst of all are the Grudgebearer contracts (Mounting Hatred), which significantly buff their HP and ATK while giving them up to 70% RES penetration, letting them instantly kill multiple units with impunity. Individually, all of these are a handful, but if you want to achieve high risk runs, you're going to have to take all of these at the same time.
• Following in its footsteps is Abandoned Mine, the permanent map of Operation Lead Seal. This map throws all kinds of annoying enemies at you, notably Mudrock Zealots to soak up damage and deliver crushing blows, Mudrock Matterlurgists to snipe down your ranged units, and Defense Crushers to stun your defenders. Compounding things is the Active Originium Tile placed in the lower right corner of the map, which an annoying amount of enemies will walk over to gain 50% ATK/ASPD and go to town, as well as the map having the first CC contract to globally buff enemy RES (Arts Blockage), making Arts less effective. However, included in the enemies are two Mudrock Colossi which, while having much lower HP than usual, are still ridiculously bulky and capable of instantly killing just about anything - and there's a contract that buffs their HP, ATK, and RES, while making them immune to either slows/binds (Indomitable Earth) or stuns (Wild Earth) depending on which one you chose, neutering your ability to stall them. Then everything gets ramped up when the Dual Boss of Mudrock and Big Bob arrive - the former has ridiculous durability with her regenerating shield and her signature Gathering Steam trait that'll let her start one-shotting with impunity (especially since her pathing also takes her over the Active Originium Tile), while the latter has absurd bulk and an attack that can one-shot anything that isn't a bulky defender. And things go From Bad to Worse with the Heavy Armor contract that massively buffs both bosses' HP, ATK, and RES, while inflating Big Bob's DEF and making Mudrock's shield both take more damage and regenerate faster. There's gravel blocking the route of the Colossi, but a contract removes most of it, and if it gets far enough to break the final piece - which it will - the pathing of the remaining enemies will change, notably Mudrock making a beeline straight to your base. In short, you've got 3-4 obscenely tanky boss-tier enemies wading through your lines, and their massive buffs (most notably RES) mean that even nuclear attacks that would have dispatched most other CC enemies won't do much to them. If you let Big Bob, Mudrock, or a Colossus meet with any of its cohorts, you may as well have lost already. It's telling that one of the most widely-accepted strategies as of this writing is to not take the Life Point reduction contract and just let the two Colossi or Mudrock through instead of fighting them.
• Operation Dawnseeker has the Grand Knight Territory Bar District, which brings back the vision mechanics from Near Light and sprinkles the usual CC difficulty on top of it. You have three City Neons and 3 Knight Crests to light up the map so you can actually place units and attack the enemies, and certain contracts deprive you of all but one Neon or Crest to work with. The initial waves of enemies consist of Armorless Crossbowmen/Assassins, which will use the darkness to snipe your units with Arts or build up devastating physical blows respectively, especially if you took their special contracts. Knight Territory Wanderers and Hibernators with very high stats will also be stationed around the map (with more appearing if you take their contract), forcing you to play safely with your light lest you incur their wrath too early. All of this is manageable, but the second half of the level is the problem - two global-ranged Armorless archers will appear in the corners of the level, whose high damage and Corrosion will instantly collapse your defense if you messed up your deployment order and don't have a way to spawnkill them or tank their damage. Then the Dual Boss of Viviana and Tola appear to make things worse, with the former having long-ranged Arts that can blow up a whole defense in one go, and the latter being a ridiculously hard-hitting juggernaut whose Coalescing Fear can swiftly kill anyone not positioned with their back to the light. In true CC fashion, both of them have two contract paths to buff their stats to high heaven and amplify their menace - Viviana has Dazzle to reduce her Glimmering Touch cooldown and charge time (to the point where it casts instantly at rank 3) while lowering her taunt, and Candlelight to buff her range and damage while making Glimmering Touch pierce RES; meanwhile, Tola has Lone Khaganquest to buff his RES and make him show up at the start of the level (making early positioning key) while also making him invisible at rank 3, while Khagan's Excursion buffs his DEF instead and lets him bring along several Nightzmora Follower underlings who are capable of similar levels of destruction. Unlike with Lead Seal, letting the minibosses through isn't even an option, since each of them takes 3 lives instead of the usual 1.
• After the seeming end of Contingency Contract, Battleplan Pyrolysis returns with a vengeance in the form of Ashen Swampland, the permanent map. The map in itself isn't too bad, being themed around What the Firelight Casts with plenty of Reeds to give your units invisibility, a lack of threatening foes besides the single Dublinn Evocator and a few Spec Ops Caster Leaders, and a fairly simple layout. However, unlike many previous CC maps, most of the terrain and enemy lineup are tied directly to the risks, which means things get exponentially complicated as you start stacking the different categories:
  • Perhaps the most dangerous of the risk groups is Shadow of Withering, which adds two Withering Collector Disciples which will spawn at the top and slowly circle the map while pelting you with Seeds of Withering. On top of the Disciples already being Demonic Spiders, they benefit from their own set of risk tags along with the global stat buffs, which in particular inflate their defensive stats to such a massive degree that they can take nuclear ranged bombardment from either damage type with barely a scratch to show for it, all while the Seeds they produce can gain a ton of ATK on top of their high base ATK and global buffs, which translates to them dealing so much damage that even a single one can vaporize most melee units. However, the worst one of them is Shadow Tendrils, which renders them invisible on top of their immense bulk and inability to be blocked or hit with melee, effectively mandating a character with permanent True Sight (read: SilverAsh or Ines) to even have a chance to bring them down.
  • Swamp March isn't much better, adding two Heavy Swamp Rovers that not only have very base stats already, but are capable of stacking an incredible amount of stat buffs from their unique modifiers, turning them into unstoppable bulks that may as well be immune to physical damage and have more than enough HP to soak up bombardment from Arts as well, while doing enough damage to steamroll the best Protectors in seconds. Their passive True Sight also means that the Reeds your units use to hide are suddenly ineffective, letting the Spec Ops Casters, Evocator fireballs, and especially Seeds of Withering punch through them with impunity. Furthermore, you'll also have to take one of two risks that alters their behavior to be more painful: Camouflage makes them invisible in a similar vein to Shadow Tendrils, which is not a good thing considering how tanky and hard-hitting the Rovers are already, while Overdrive instead doubles their speed and makes them unblockable, meaning you'd best hope you can quickly nuke them during their rest points before they zoom right past.
  • Treacherous Terrain is slightly non-indicative, as while it does alter the terrain to be more restrictive, the real threat is that it can increase the number of Evocators on the map from one to four, with one being pre-spawned on either lane. Despite Evocators not actually scaling with ATK buffs due to the way their attacks work, their high base damage and Burn combined with any allied HP down risks is already formidable enough to severely pressure an early defense, and renders most starting strategies useless as weaker melee units will blown to bits in seconds. To make matters worse, there's also an extra risk unlocked from the rotating maps that not only buffs up the HP, RES, and damage of the Evocators, but makes them invisible as well.
  • The Wild Weeds set completely reverses the normally forgiving environment into something hellish, as the very first risk you take will lower the SP regeneration of units on Reeds by 50-90%. For most units with Auto Recovery skills, this translates to them being lucky if they're able to fire their skill more than once in a round, if at all, and will severely hamstring any strategy since any tiles without Reeds are either subject to continous bombardment, or banned outright. If that wasn't enough, Raging Flames I will pre-ignite the Reeds on the right side of the map while buffing their Burning damage, making it impossible for anything to survive without a Wandering Medic working overtime, and Mobilization will replace the regular Special Forces Soldiers on that side with Flamechaser Soldiers that use hard-hitting Arts and Burn, and can endlessly revive if you don't have someone with a fast attack speed to stamp out the Embers they spawn on death. And that's not the end - Scorching Ashes I not only makes the Flamechasers even harder to bring down by buffing their health and doubling the hits needed to kill their Embers, but also gives all enemies +50 ASPD to let them run you over.
  • As you unlock more missions, you can even add the Caster Leader Squad risk that pre-spawns two more Spec Ops Caster Leaders while buffing their HP and range, which means that if you aren't able to constantly stay in the Reeds or get rid of the Swamp Rovers in time, your lineup is all but finished, especially at the start.
• Battleplan Extinguished Sins features enemies from Chapter 14 which includes Originium Pollutions and Storm, stacking up specific risks will turn the map into literal hell where you only have very limited tiles you can place your operators on.
  • Originium Storm is a double-edge sword for both your squad and the enemies, with risks that will make the Storm grow larger and stronger with every Pollutions it absorbed to the point it filled nearly half the map. To make it more difficult, it also include risks that reduces your Operators' SP recovery and increases the enemies' ATK and DEF if they are standing on the Originium Pollutions or inside the Storm. Caustic Originium Slugs will also appear to feed the Storm with more Pollutions, with a risk where they resist silence.
  • The Souls set will have two Focused Soul Remnants stationed on the right side of the map in the beginning of the battle, with Soul Maelstroms appearing to fuel them for their laser attack to fire at anyone in their line of sight, including risks that rises their survivability and attack range, further restricting your Operators' placement to avoid their attacks and gunning them down. Furthermore, Soul Maelstroms have risks that increases their Movement Speed and HP and prevent them from being blocked, allowing them to charge Focused Soul Remnants at a faster pace.
  • Sharp Knife adds four more Profane Chimeras immediately on the top left of the map, but will stay for some time or less if you added a risk that reduces their standby duration. Their risks raise their ATK, which was already boosted after being exposed the pollution, their Block count and also their survivability like the Focused Soul Remnants. Although they are packed together and their Originium pollutions will slowly kill them once they're exposed, but because of their Mighty Glaciers statues and the amount of time taken for them to get exposed, killing them will be harder in hindsight.
  • The Fortress set will reinforce their survivability even further, with a Chalice of Regret appearing on either left or right side of the map or both sides each at the start of battle, protecting Sarkaz Wither Bulwarks and Focused Soul Remnants from your Operators or the Storm, with risks that increase Chalice of Regrets' HP and Sarkaz Wither Bulwarks' HP and DEF, making them harder to take them down. Sarkaz Altar Keepers will appear during the battle, carrying risks that raises their survivability and resistance towards Stun, Frozen, and Sleep, allowing them to steal the beacon and carry it to the Objective Point at the center, where the Storm will be drawn towards, making the center a death zone for anyone who can't withstand it. Sudarams will also appear, cutting down any unfortunate souls nearby or within the Pollution/Storms with risk that increases their ASPD and resistance towards Stun, Frozen and Sleep with impunity, with an unlocked risk that increases their ATK, HP, and DEF.

• In general, Integrated Strategies in and of itself is a gigantic Luck-Based Mission composed of smaller but no less aggravating ones. Stages can range from trivial to fiendishly difficult to outright impossible due to the Roguelike nature of the mode that effectively randomizes lineup and equipment. Not only will you not always have the right Operators to do the job, the game also hard-caps Operator levels unless you can recruit them twice - and even then, they'll only go up to the level you have them at in the base game unless special conditions arise, screwing you over if you can only afford to recruit operators you haven't leveled yet. If the game decides to give you a dysfunctional lineup, or you don't have the correct Operators to take on a particular map, half the time you may as well give up before the action starts and reroll for a (hopefully) better hand. Additionally, in order to complete a run in Integrated Strategies, you are expected to complete every encountered stage flawlessly (read: don't get a Game Over by losing all your life points or even quit the stage) from start to finish, which is easier said than done, since all of of the difficult stages in the game (even outside of IS) would require at least a few to several attempts to get right, and is not helped by the aforementioned randomized lineup.

Ceobe's Fungimist

• Bob's Farm/Vintage Transport is a straight-line, straightforward map...except a horde of Infused Originium Slugs shows up from the start of the level. Particularly in the earlier stages of the game, not many Operators can survive an explosion from the slugs, and their positioning means that it's impossible to assassinate them without someone getting hit - and having an Operator capable of inflicting Silence isn't often viable. In short, you'll be forced to throw your units at the slugs just to clear up enough space to deploy your defenses, and then whatever defenses you've mustered will have to contend with more Infused Originium Slugs and Big Bob, who's insanely hard to stop without powerful DPS units and can One-Hit Kill just about anything save for a defender.
  • While it is possible to take advantage of an Easy Level Trick if you have more than one Sniper in your team^note Start by deploying one on the ranged tile facing your base, so they will start shooting at the furthest Slug first, then retreating them once the explosions start getting close to them and then slapping down another Sniper in the opposite direction to mop up the rest, most of the time, you might either not have that many units to begin with because of RNG-based recruitment, on top of the starting Arbitrary Headcount Limit of 6, making it hard to run this strategy, especially if it hits you during the early stages.
• Ursus Tetris/With the Crowd is a relentless Zerg Rush of compacted enemies in a Tetris-like falling pattern, which you are forced to shoot down before the reach the bottom and enter one of two blue boxes. The problem arises with the sheer number of soldiers that appear at a time, overwhelming defenses that don't have heavy area damage, as well as the fact that the enemies start to get very physically bulky later down the line, also necessitating Arts DPS. Considering that there are 5 lanes to defend, relying on melee Operators is out of the question, so you better hope you're packing some powerful casters and crowd-clearing units. That is unless you have Ifrit whose unique attack range covers an entire lane, in which case this stage becomes extremely easy.
• Valley Ambush/Beast Fighting pits you against a rush of Hounds, along with four crossbow soldiers in the corners and a Mortar Gunner. The problem is that due to a stage condition, all units will lose 50% of their max HP on deployment, which will increase further if it's an emergency operation. If you don't have anybody that can soak up lots of hits on top of the 50% damage while you try to set up a defense, either the ranged units or Hounds will cut them down in a flash. And even if you can defend the central loop, you better hope you have something to kill off the ranged units before they walk into the blue boxes stationed right next to them that can survive said HP ding, and then still have enough operators to deal with the Hound rush. Another problem in this stage is the combination between the Hounds and the Butchers, since during the time your operators will be busy cutting down the Butchers, the Hounds may easily slip through. The only saving grace is that after you deal with the snipers in the corners, there is no damage that can harm your ranged units.
• Barrens Cadet/Unending has you defend against a relentless onslaught of Sarkaz Lancers and Lancer Leaders that will build up speed in inaccessible parts of the map before charging down the central lane. A full-speed Lancer already deals terrifying amounts of impact damage, and they'll start coming in large groups near the end of the level, overwhelming any defense you've set up. Considering that your units will almost certainly already be weaker than average, the Lancers might even pierce your defensive line individually before the latter parts of the level even begin. You'd have to be hoping you either have high-level defenders, heavy DEF-buffing items, summoners/fast-redeploys to throw at the Lancers, or stuns to reset their charge, otherwise you're almost certainly in for a bad time.
• Torrent of Fact and Fiction/Dangers Abound. For starters, you're instantly screwed if you enter without a 3-block unit, as the Bullies periodically sent in will charge straight through your lines. If you do have those, the Bullies become a walk in the park, but then the problem becomes the buffed Wraiths and Wraith Leaders that will start appearing later into the level. Both of these are subjected to ridiculous HP and DEF steroids that make them borderline impossible to kill in time unless you have some extremely potent Arts damage nukes like Eyja or a lot of crowd control, and combined with the Bullies already drawing your units' attention, it's obscenely easy for them to slip through and cause severe life loss or even an instant defeat. To make matters even worse, the lanes that allow ranged units to be deployed have ballista turrets that deal almost a thousand damage per shot, cutting down your ranged DPS unless you have a strong medic working overtime.
• Escaped Bee Colony/Drone Landing Zone is a Zerg Rush of drones along with some weaker ground forces. The drone army is backed up by Defender-4 drones that'll let them shrug off hits from low-ATK snipers, and is also spearheaded by a very powerful Raptor and Arts Master A2 that can blow holes in your defenses while soaking up fire. If you have a lot of high level snipers, then it's almost trivial. If you don't, it's borderline impossible.
• Ancient Ice/The Biting Cold is a huge, wide-open map where the only melee tiles are around an Originium Ice Crystal, which means all your close ranged units are permanently at risk of being chilled and frozen. Naturally, the enemies are all Yeti Squad members who will mercilessly freeze your units while the Icecleavers tear through them. There are a few safe ranged tiles, but they're too far away to actually assist the main bulk of the melee force (also denying Medic support), and you're going to need them to deal with the Oneiros drones that'll start showing up.
• Land of Rust and Smoke/Shrouded in Clouds and Radioactive Dust/The Red Mist are both very difficult for similar reasons, namely the poison gas permeating the map that causes all Operators to take damage over time. Players can be put in a very bad spot if they don't have a lot of healing - and if they have no healing at all, they might as well forfeit the run. Not helping is the fact that there are three isolated lanes to defend, the main one being two tiles wide (on the latter stage, half of the lane doesn't have any melee tiles to deploy blockers, forcing you to burst the enemies coming down that lane or block them earlier). Furthermore, the enemies aren't pushovers either - Land of Rust and Smoke bombards you with various Casters and Caster Leaders, alongside Infused Originium Slugs and Mortar Gunners to overwhelm whatever healing you can muster, while Radioactive Dust swaps these out for Breakers and Agents that will relentlessly run you down, as well as Shielded Senior Casters and a Sarkaz Centurion to blast your units to mincemeat while you're holding off the onslaught.
• Both of the ISW-SP stages are this, despite the fact that you have a choice to turn them down. While they guarantee special rewards, they're often so difficult that without a prepared team, you may end up losing more than you gained, or outright failing the run.
  • Fanatic Siege/Twisted Cage pits you in a tiny 3x3 box staffed with Veteran Junkmen/Sarkaz Greatswordsman Leaders and Desperate Fanatics. The former aren't that big of a deal, but the Fanatics can deal massive damage per hit, and the way the map is designed makes it so that 2-3 Fanatics can hit any given melee tile, causing your melee Operators to fall quickly. The two ranged tiles don't help a whole lot, since the Fanatics can also hit those. Whether the level ends in success or significant life loss hinges on your ability to use something to blow up the Fanatics before they can kill your units.
  • Rusthammer Battle is a whole other can of worms. It puts you into a battle against 4 elite enemies that have their stats buffed to high heaven - a Hateful Avenger, Shielded Senior Caster, Defense Crusher Leader and Enraged Possessed Bonethrower. Each of them alone already have reputations as Demonic Spiders, but the level jacks up their stats to the point where each one can be considered a boss on its own, turning the level into a bona fide Boss Rush. They at least have the decency to initially come at you one at a time, but the chances of actually killing any of them before the next one joins the fun are very low - and if multiple of them meet up, you'll find that they'll quickly form an "Instant Death" Radius that is borderline impossible to break through. You'll have to hope that you're both prepared and equipped with the strongest defenses you can muster, or the four of them will effortlessly tear you down - and possibly cost you the game, too, since the level condition also makes them each take 3 lives instead of 1 should they leak.

Phantom & Crimson Solitaire

• Beast Taming is a remake of Pack of Beasts from Fungimist, and has a good chance of ending your run then and there. It pits you against a Zerg Rush of various hounds, so if you lack the means to block them, that's it for your run. The bigger problem is that the stage now incorporates an Originium Altar and Sarkaz Guerilla Fighters. The altar means you have limited space to deploy ranged operators, and the Sarkaz Guerilla Fighters can easily punch through your operators blocking the hounds, thanks to their Arts damage. The stage itself isn't actually so hard if you have the right mix of Operators (usually a 2-block operator, a healer, and a speedy dps), but the problem is how the stage is encountered so early, and you might not have the necessary mix of Operators yet.
• Accident is one of the possible stages in the first floor of Crimson Solitaire, and its main gimmick is a rush of paradropping enemies mid-way through the stage. The normal stage is usually no trouble, but the Emergency version can easily murder you if you make a mistake in aggro control and/or are lacking in Operators. The paradropping enemies are upgraded from Airborne Soldiers to Ursus Assault Crossbowmen, who will then start firing at your last deployed Operator. As they come en masse and have boosted ATK from the Emergency condition, any Operator that's not a Defender is quite likely to die instantly, even with Medic support. Even if said Operator survives, your DPS still needs to kill them before they overwhelm your frontline's Block capacity and make their way to the Protection Objective. As with Beast Taming, the problem is how this stage can be encountered very early in the run when you are still short on resources.
• Traveler from Afar is a remake of Villain of the Barren Hills from the first IS, but made much harder due to the enemies being swapped out for Chapter 9 Dublinn troops. Two Dublinn Evocators with buffed HP will spawn in the unblockable top lane and launch fireballs down the middle lane, decimating anything that is sent to fend off the Heavy Defenders unless you have enough ranged firepower to shoot them down; however, there are only 3 ranged tiles on the entire map, making it hard to find room for DPS and healing. Airborne Soldiers will also be spawning from the top lanes to shoot down your ranged units in turn before moving to the bottom lane, meaning that you'll usually need at least one Sniper to shoot them down in time, especially the one that will make a beeline straight to the blue box.
• Absurd Trickeries is basically Unending 2.0, pitting you against a legion of Lancers and Derisive Audience. Fortunately, unlike Unending, you get more tiles to either block the Lancers early or gun them down before they can move, but they start with a speed boost to make sure they hurt a lot even if you did block them early. However, the Emergency Operation version takes it up a notch and makes the Lancers invisible. If you have no detection or someone to constantly eat the charges or an E2 Mudrock, they will absolutely end your run.
• Knights' Duel is the Solitaire version of Fungimist's Elite Four stage, featuring the Plastic, Brassrust, Candle, and Left-Handed Knights instead. Like before, all of them are buffed to boss-tier; unlike before, each of them were already Mini Bosses with special abilities that are now immensely stronger thanks to their stat inflation. The Plastic Knight is now a credible threat thanks to his buffed HP/ATK and Nigh-Invulnerable defense for the first minute, the Brassrust Knight becomes unstoppable after only a single ally defeat, the Candle Knight's Glimmering Touch can instantly kill an entire defense from halfway across the map, and the Left-handed Knight's ATK-weakening ability makes it even harder to break through the hyper-buffed knights. Like before, if you let them group up, it's practically a death sentence, but the Plastic and Left-Handed Knights intentionally come first to stall out the battle long enough for the others to join the fun. Fortunately, each of them only deducts 1 life if they escape, meaning it's actually possible to just soak up the life loss and take your reward at the end.

Mizuki & Caerula Arbor

• With the introduction of the expanded difficulty system in the form of Surging Waves, virtually any level past the first floor has the potential to be this at higher levels. Each of the 15 sequential difficulty levels will apply a unique handicap to the run, and all of them stack with each other to make higher levels frightening. In addition, SW will cause enemies to gain exponentially increasing HP and ATK with every floor, with the amount gained scaling with the level, which is particularly bad since the last floor is already home to some of the nastiest difficulty spikes in the mode. At the highest levels, you'll have to contend with enemies having hyper-inflated stats to the point where basic Mooks can run over early Vanguards, increased Elemental Damage that can outpace a Wandering Medic, boosted movement and attack speed, and buffed RES (which in particular makes Arts virtually useless against the bosses and some of the elites due to their already massive base RES), particularly elite and boss enemies which get further stat buffs stacking with the normal ones. Meanwhile, your fighting force will also be hampered by the penalties to recruitment costs making it harder to teambuild, the lower starting Light making you unable to get Enlightenments and more likely to contract debilitating Rejections on your units,^note Especially Metastatic Aberration, which halves all major stats in a difficulty where you usually need every last one of them to stand a chance and a cursed item forced onto you halfway through the run that can either gimp Light generation, further weaken your units, or give enemies even more HP. Strategies that work on lower Surging Waves can straight up fail to work on higher ones just because of how powerful all of the enemies become on top of the other handicaps, and previously benign levels can become outright run-enders, while the original run-enders can become nigh impossible without copious life loss. You'll need both a top-form team and strategy, a lot of patience, and good luck with Collectibles to even stand a chance.
  • It's worth noting that while the difficulty system as a whole can turn a lot of levels into examples of this, Surging Waves particularly stands out for how unforgiving it makes the game as a whole, whereas Braving Nature in the next season, while still difficult, wasn't as restrictive.
• Symbiosis is abnormally difficult for a Chapter I stage, forcing you to defend a chokepoint against an unrelenting onslaught of Shell Sea Runners and Bone Sea Drifters along with periodic Sarkaz Greatswordsman/Tiacauh Ripper support. The Runners and Drifters come in relatively large groups for how little of a defense you likely have at this point, letting them swiftly overwhelm you if you're lacking significant area damage to wipe them out. If you get this as your first stage (or worse, an Emergency that bloats all their stats even further) and don't have a strong start, prepare to suffer major losses.
• Territorial Tendencies opens with a horde of pre-placed Acid Originium Slugs and half the map covered in heated paths, making it tricky to set up a defense from the get-go. If you survive that, then it'll send a continous stream of Infused Originium Slugs and Bombtails that will deal massive area damage, and the cramped level layout ensures that they'll usually be able to hit more than one operator at once, necessitating major healing and tanking power. Even if you survive the exploding slugs, the Bombtails have an annoying tendency to slip through without enough anti-air, and things only get worse when Pompeii shows up and starts raining fire across the entire map, especially in Emergency Battles where its range is buffed and nowhere is safe.
• Out of Control is a veritable Zerg Rush of Enraged Possessed Leaders and Bonethrowers, who are each individually Demonic Spiders due to their tremendous stats making trying to block them nearly pointless. They do stand still for some time before moving, but the level layout ensures that any ranged units you send to chip them down will be swiftly dismantled by the Bonethrowers, and the Enraged Possessed are both tanky and spread out enough that they won't go down from a brief skirmish. The Bonethrowers will fortunately usually die of HP loss before they start moving, but Emergency or Surging Waves bloats their HP to the point where they'll actually survive long enough to start moving and throwing - if you leave them for too long, all of the Possessed will swarm towards the blue box at once, overwhelming any defense you can muster and likely ending your run right there.
• Ubi bona somnia forces you to play incredibly carefully with how you handle the enemies on the map, as it has a veritable army of Nourished Reapers in the center that will instantly run you down if you awaken them. It's pretty easy to accidentally wake them up if you don't watch your area damage or skills, but waking them up bit by bit is also necessary to avoid the entire horde running at you at the end of the level. The level becomes easier with means to wake them up one by one, such as Executor Specialists and a Wandering Medic, but you'll also have to deal with the very tanky Originutants that are slowly advancing from the top lane, preferably without waking up too many Reapers. If you don't pay attention to them, the Originutants will carve a path through the top of the map (especially in Emergency where there's now two of them), upon which every other enemy will immediately reroute away from your likely chokepoint to the exposed opening.
• The Piper's Call gives you limited space to deploy ranged Operators. But the main gimmick of the level is the Saxophonists from Lingering Echoes, who will move around and do their special attack right towards the deployable ranged tiles. Considering their high base damage, they can easily critically wound your ranged Operators or outright One-Hit Kill them in case of the Elite or Emergency variants. The obvious solution is of course to deploy melee Operators who have enough defense and HP to tank the shots... But then you will have to deal with the Broodmothers chucking their offsprings at you, requiring good DPS that a typical Vanguard won't have, or a Medic support that makes the rest of your deployment that much slower. And you can't take too long fiddling with the fiddlers, as a mob of Bloodboil Knights are getting ready to rush down your Protection Objective. Barring gamebreaking combinations, it'd be a wonder to get past this level without any leaks.
• Water and Fire Union, although only found on the secret Chapter VI and Indigo Cradle, is a brutal onslaught of Infused Originium Slugs that will approach en masse from 3 lanes, along with several Retching Broodmothers to further complicate things. Out of the three lanes, one of them doesn't have any blockable tiles (with the only nearby ranged tiles in range of the explosions), while one is completely covered in Corrosive Ground that halves DEF and makes it harder for laneholders to survive the Slugs, especially with the Broodmothers and other Seaborn inflicting Corrosion as well. Pompeii will also spawn in an isolated corner at the start of the map in a spot that covers many of the tiles that are safe from the spiders (with the Emergency version giving it near-global range), and won't be blockable until much later into the level, letting it rain fire over most of your defense with very few ways to stop it. And if you don't kill the first Pompeii fast enough, you'll be in deep trouble once the second one appears at the bottom, toasting your entire team alongside the constant explosions.
• "Joy" from a Box is the event's equivalent to the Fanatic Siege/Demonic Cage encounter, and is a nasty enough surprise to consider avoiding despite the substantial reward you may get. The map contains a huge number of treasure chests, some of which may be the spiked or Seaborn versions, and no less than ten Sarkaz Grudgebearers guarding them in a circle, topped off with two Sarkaz Sentinels pathing around the chests ready to activate all the Grudgebearers at the slightest provocation. The ideal goal of the stage is to take out the Grudgebearers individually while taking as many chests as you can, but positioning your units to deal damage to the Grudgebearers without also activating the Sentinels can be a very daunting task, and should you misplay and activate one of the Sentinels with a stray area of effect attack or a misplaced unit with enough Grudgebearers remaining, you are practically guaranteed to lose your entire line of defense as they make a run for your base and leak all of the remaining foes, potentially ending your run. Trying to get the chests at the same time, especially Spiked and Seaborn Chests which become more dangerous the higher floor you are at, practically mandates the use of Fast Redeploy units who can take out the chests while being retreated to avoid the Sentinels should they stray too close. On the other hand, if you are blessed with the Royal Alliance Treaty relic beforehand, this stage instantly becomes a free source of massive income instead.
• Reality is a special level that only has a chance to appear later if you greed for the extra item in the Medic's Will encounter, but will certainly make you think twice about taking it a second time. From the get-go, the level pre-spawns three extremely buffed Bladehelm Elites whose attack ranges cover the whole bottom half of the map save for one ranged tile, and will constantly spam their ATK-halving ability to debuff your entire team simultaneously, making them hit like pool noodles. The level also demands you protect an Ursus Civilian from a squad of Ursus Patrol Captains, but not only is the Civilian infuriatingly slow, the Captains travel in a path that cannot be blocked by melee units, making it impossible to stop them from gaining ground on the Civilian unless you can kill them quickly - although they'll fortunately linger briefly in places where melee units can hit them, that won't stop them from prioritizing the Civilian and shooting it to death, nor does it necessarily mean the melee units can kill them in time with the Bladehelms permanently halving their ATK. As the cherry on top, there's also a Bloodboil Elite with its stats buffed to boss-tier levels, who will instantly overwhelm any defense you can muster if you focus a bit too much on the Bladehelms and Escort Mission.
• While the second expansion added some gamebreakingly powerful collectibles as well as even more Cognitive Shaping bonuses to the mix to make things easier, it also threw a few curveballs in the newly added stages. Mutual Aid, a new combat node for the first floor, is frustrating for the reason that it includes two Dublinn Flying Soldiers, making it the first early stage to require a unit that can hit aerial targets. Considering that the flying soldiers are also more durable than most low level aerial foes, it's entirely possible that certain low rarity units that the player regularly starts with such as Steward or Orchid might not even be able to take them down before they leave their range, especially at higher Surging Waves where enemies are more durable and have increased RES, essentially requiring a start that includes Kroos at the very minimum under the threat of encountering this stage early. Worse if you choose a random starting squad that starts you with no ranged units at all, making this a guaranteed -2 to your Life Points and thus likely dropping your Light as well. While not that difficult with the right starters, the clear case of Character Select Forcing is quite egregious, leading the state to cause quite a lot of frustration.
• Also from the second expansion is Hunger and Thirst, which includes the Demonic Spiders from Chapter 11 in the Rotchasers and Sarkaz Wither Devourers. The Rotchaser has extremely high health and enough damage to rip apart a weak blocker without healing support, while the Sarkaz Wither Devourers need to be either fed a fodder melee unit to spare your necessary blocker or killed with a strong ranged unit before they begin to move, which is no easy task considering this stage appears on the second floor, meaning your squad is likely still lacking. And if that wasn't enough, a half dozen Seeds of Withering will spawn on the right side of the map twice over the course of the stage, necessitating someone either be sacrificed or be durable enough to survive that burst of damage as well on top of everything else the map throws at you. Not to mention the Emergency Operation version of the map which not only buffs the enemies' stats but spawns a second Sarkaz Wither Devourer that you have to deal with before they start moving and consume your blocker. For a pre-third floor stage, this one can be astonishingly difficult due to the resources needed to handle the various gimmicks at play.

Expeditioner's Jǫklumarkar

• Prisoners' Night, unusually for a Floor 1 stage, can range from trivial to nigh-impossible depending solely on whether or not you managed to draft a powerful source of area damage beforehand. The level is a rapid Zerg Rush of Prisoners from Mansfield Break swarming two Rubbles, along with Pugilist Prisoners that will be able to punch right through the Rubble once they free themselves. Although heavy area damage can easily wipe out the Prisoners and deal with the Pugilists after, you're out of luck if you weren't able to get any, and this can potentially show up as early as the first node, greatly limiting your choices. On higher difficulties, being forced into this map without a powerful area damage dealer can potentially just end the run right there.
• Beasts Awaiting Slaughter is a similarly demanding early stage, except instead of checking for area damage, it demands strong blocking power. The Hornbeasts initially come at a manageable pace, but will all move at once later in the level, instantly overrunning you if you don't have multiple melee units or a damage dealer strong enough to kill them during their sprint; on the other hand, trying to kill them early may also lead to them alerting the pack and running it down early, causing the same result. There's also a Basorobeast that will show up later to wall or even kill your blockers if you can't gun it down from behind, potentially letting enemies through by taking up block count, and Tainted Carcasses that hit surprisingly hard and can really ruin your day if you lack healing. The Emergency version is particularly infamous, as not only does it buff everything's stats, it spawns more Hornbeasts in a bigger horde, making it ever more likely you'll get overrun.
• Unwell on the second floor is a potential run ender if you lack Defenders, as you'll be faced with an onslaught of Norport Civilians and disguised spies, which not demand not just a huge amount of blocking power to make sure you can block them alongside the actual enemies running in, but also ranged units that can get a head start on identifying them. Even with both, it's alarmingly easy to get overwhelmed from the sheer number of Civilians along with the Norport Agents hitting surprisingly hard due to their doubled damage on first attack, and you won't even be able to field your most expensive units thanks to the Civilians capping your DP; you can destroy the supplies on the map to fix this, but this also opens up the lanes from one to three, making it easier for the spies to slip by. The level will also complicate things later with a Sarkaz Absurdist Tyrant that can shrug off most damage and either walk through your lines or blow up your blockers, and if you're on Emergency, it'll also send a Rebellion Instigator that'll make the Civilians unblockable.
• Don't Turn Around, Sluggies on the second floor is also extremely demanding for such an early stage. You have Infused Originium Slugs that can do huge area damage, Tainted Carcasses that abuse the wide-open map to run straight for the exit, and Distorted Casters that purposely take the longest side path possible so they can spend more time harassing your units. Furthermore, the ranged tiles on the map are extremely restrictive, making it hard to support the main force with healing or damage, especially since all of them are in range of the Casters. This map can become easier if you know to place your strongest blocker in the center rather than close to the blue boxes so you only have to defend one lane instead of two, but this isn't immediately obvious and the damage from the exploding slugs and the Casters can still prove to be overwhelming when all focused onto one unit. On Emergency, not only are things even tankier and harder hitting, the level will also send in buffed Wraith Leaders which can cause almost unavoidable leaks if your ranged damage is lacking.
• Shadows with Ghosts is yet another operation that will almost guarantee a leak. It has an awkward pathing; there are only 2 ground spots that can block the incoming horde. But when the operation starts, the first enemy that will spawn is a Redmark Infiltrator, the one who spawns a hologram decoy on first damage and will become unblockable until the decoy dies. Putting a melee operator to try and stop it is futile as it will spawn a decoy and slip past the operator, leaving a ranged operator as the ideal option. But the Infiltrator also has ranged attacks, so you need to be careful with aggro control or he will kill your ranged operator, leaving you with no ope. The operation actually isn't too hard if you have accumulated a few operators, but the problem as usual is that it is encountered on the 2nd floor.
• Altar of Craving, especially the Emergency version, will almost guarantee a leak. It begins with 2 paths towards the Protection Objectives, and 4 Originium Altars on the left side, where the only deployable ground spot for the upper path is right next to an altar, ensuring a constant pummeling by Originium blasts. Then a single lone Tainted Carcass will spawn, who will then get hit by the blast and inevitably make a mad dash towards the bottom path; and since it spawns so early, you better pray your deployed Operator can take it out solo. And then comes a Distorted Caster towards the upper path, and given the layout, that single safe ranged spot in the middle likely won't cover it; you either pray whoever you deploy to block the upper path can kill it while tanking the massive damage from both the casters and altars, or deploy a dedicated ranged support to help deal with it. And now comes the main course: a Zerg Rush of Tainted Carcasses as usual, circling the altars before rushing to the protection objective, with a few Sarkaz arts users in the mix for extra pain. Dealing with this stage requires 1.) 2 strong blockers who can take a beating from the heavy Arts/True damage 2.) strong DPS to deal with the mob, 3.) strong healer to keep everyone alive. That's 4 strong operators needed, and just for a 3rd-floor operation. And for the Emergency mode, there's an extra altar between the paths, ensuring everyone will get pummeled by True damage and potentially instantly ending the run if you didn't draft a strong healer before then.
• Shady Frozen Sea, specifically its Emergency version. It's a huge map where most of the deployable tiles are covered in Corrosive Ground that halves the DEF of your units, causing the already hard-hitting Dockworkers, Delinquents, and Explosive Boats to hit even harder, with the latter particularly destroying you if you can't shoot them down in time. Tidal Casters and their Speedboat variants will also start showing up later, with annoying long range and the ability to dismantle an entire lineup from the rapid splash damage and Corrosion, with the Speedboats also taking a separate from everything else. However, the Emergency battle makes things infinitely worse by providing a 30% buff to HP and ATK...and a 70% buff to DEF and speed, turning every single enemy into a Lightning Bruiser and making it nearly impossible to stop them before they speed into your lines and blow up everything. Just to add insult to injury, there are Competition Transport Vessels that will deduct Life Points if killed, which the Tidal Casters will gleefully rain fire upon if you can't kill them fast. On higher difficulties, unless you can assassinate the Casters, you'll be almost guaranteed to lose at least 1 life point since the Casters' aggro can't be drawn off of the Vessels and they now do enough damage to kill them before they escape.
• Musical Disaster opens up with the halved SP regeneration from Lingering Echoes and the map filled with Enhanced Mass-Produced Colossi who start advancing one by one, packing extreme defenses while not in Realigned Flux along with 2 block to let them walk past units if you don't kill one by the time the next one shows up. There is a spot in the top left where you can place a unit to create a spiral with the Flux that covers the entire map, but there are three Spire Casters right beneath it that'll start moving up in short order, blowing up the unit maintaining the beam and causing Disaster Dominoes as the Colossi become too tanky to kill and your skills are gimped. Trying to assassinate the Casters will potentially just lead to an instant death from the three simultaneous attacks due to their very high ATK, and letting them advance will cause trouble in your frontline, especially since they'll do splash damage if nobody is maintaining the beam. Even if you manage the beam, the Remnant Principal Violinists can throw a wrench into the plan, as they'll deal simultaneous damage to all allies in Flux instead of being weakened by it.
• Where be No Mounts and Seas features the most dangerous of the Shanhaizhong from Where Vernal Winds Will Never Blow, including Secret-Keepers who are invisible and can nuke the first operator that blocks them, Oracles that can rip apart all of your units from out of range, and two pre-placed Cipher Machines that will massively buff the ASPD and speed of all the enemies if you can't chew through their significant bulk fast enough. There are also three lanes to defend without any real chokepoint, with the two right lanes in particular facing the most ferocious of the resistance, including Shattered Champions that will run with the Oracles and Secret-Keepers partway through the level. Furthermore, the right lane becomes undeployable about halfway through, so if you can't block the enemies early or get overwhelmed up front (which is incredibly easy thanks to the Secret-Keepers potentially one-tapping units), your only hope is to pray you can shoot them down in time or have a single melee unit finish them at the end, neither of which are likely (and may be outright impossible if an invisible Secret-Keeper is running it down). Emergency buffs all the enemy stats (including an abnormally high 50% HP buff) while improving the damage on the Oracles and Secret-Keepers' special abilities, which can result in units being completely obliterated before they have a chance to even attack back.
• March of the Dead has two top lanes that will face ferocious opposition from elite Dublinn Flamechaser Soldiers and Guards, along with Enraged Tombkeeper Grotesques, while the bottom lane will periodically send in Dublinn Cannoneer Captains to pelt units from anywhere on the map, along with Distorted Casters to back them up. The hard part is that the map has virtually no good ranged tiles - only one ranged tile can feasibly deliver damage or healing support to the front lines on the top lane, with the other potentially useful one being in range of bombardment by Casters, meaning that if you don't have a very self-sufficient melee force, the top lane can easily overrun you. This is especially the case with the Tombkeepers, as if they live long enough to take flight, very few low-ground units will be able to stop them before they either kill everything or just slip by. The bottom lane is also no slouch despite having more ranged tiles, as without a strong melee unit to take the hits, the ranged threats will demolish everything there. As for the Emergency version, not only does it give everything the usual hefty stat buff, but it also causes two extra Mudrock Colossi to spawn on the top lane.
• Instinct Contamination quickly gained a reputation for being one of the hardest maps you can get on Floor 5, especially on higher Braving Nature levels. It's a two-lane map with only one lane having deployable tiles, forcing you to block enemies up front where there are limited ranged tiles to support them, or build a single-blocker chokepoint at the blue box and risk being overwhelmed. The enemies themselves are also ferocious - Tainted Carcasses buffed by Active Originium will rush down your lines seconds after the level starts, and once enough time passes, you'll face a continuous onslaught of Shattered Champions, half of which will walk over the Active Originium before blitzing you. Considering the already high stats on the Champions and the Originium giving them a 50% ATK/ASPD buff, even heavily buffed Protectors will find themselves melted in seconds, while the speed and bulk of the Champions also make it incredibly hard to shoot them down before they run straight into the blue box, barring sources of wide-area slows. Just to screw with you, the level also sends in Distorted Casters and Collapsed Constructs to pelt you from afar, further reducing your ability to hold the line. Woe betide you if you get its Emergency version, which not only further inflates the stats on the enemies (including a massive +70% DEF), but restricts the one tile in front of the objective, forcing you to deal with the ridiculously powerful Champions with little to no ranged support.
• Terminus of Life on Floor 6+ has elite Yeti Squad members, like Yeti Caster and Icecleaver Leaders backed up by hard-hitting Sarkaz Lancers and Wither Tanks, with Casters and Tanks pre-placed to make the beginning of the level extremely restrictive if you can't kill them fast. Unfortunately, they're also supported by a Frozen Monstrosity, of all things. The Monstrosity doesn't have Ice Crystals anymore, but it will circle around the map and pelt everything with its highly damaging Arts attacks that Freeze targets, synergizing with the Yeti Squad like on its boss level, and its passive doubling redeployment time of Frozen units can cause the level to spiral into a loss if you lose the initial defense and can't get it back up in time. The level also has Jetstreams which, while potentially giving you an ATK buff if you line them up right, can also reduce ATK since a lot of the key ranged positions in the center of the map have Jetstreams facing the opposite way as one would usually want to aim. Fortunately, the Frozen Monstrosity no longer causes a One-Hit Kill if it leaks, but it'll still take a hefty 5 Life Points, which is not a loss you want to take right before facing the Final Boss of the third or fourth endings. If you get its Emergency variant, it's even worse as in addition to the stat inflation (which includes a rare RES buff), the enemies and boss have their attack range doubled.
• Nameless Hero is the iteration's equivalent to the Elite Four stages, and may prove to be the most difficult of them all despite no elite or boss-tier enemies at all but instead six regular mooks with stats buffed to absurd levels. What makes this version so difficult compared to its predecessors is that there is practically no safe position to set up a line of defense anywhere on the map, as two of the featured enemies are a Sniper and a Mortar Gunner Leader who are positioned so that their combined ranges cover almost the entirety of the stage, while the small area they do not cover is instead guarded by an Invisible Caster standing on an undeployable tile, giving you no way to attack them unless you have an operator with True Sight. This makes the number of operators able to handle this map extremely limited as they will be harassed by ranged attacks coming from tremendously buffed units, with most ranged units being unusable without immediately deploying a tank afterwards to draw aggro away from them - and said tank will have to watch out for the incoming Dual Swordsman and Agent Leader who will circle around the area before heading towards your base. Without a squad suited for handling the stage, you are very likely to leak at least a couple of the enemies, which you will feel since each enemy also depletes two Life Points instead of one. While the individual enemies may be less powerful than the Elite Four enemies from previous maps, the fact that it ranges from being extremely difficult to nigh impossible to set up depending on the difficulty makes this a very likely run ender, making it a wiser decision to refuse the battle instead at a high difficulty unless you have a specific counter or a lot of Life Points to spare.
• Much like IS3 before it, while the second expansion brought a slew of new tools and goodies, but it also added another grueling early stage to the first floor: No More Than Four, which pits you against a squad of Dublinn Phalanx Infantry backed up by several casters. The combination of the Phalanx Infantry's Refraction and their defenses scaling with proximity means they're annoyingly tanky on both sides of the spectrum, and given that this is potentially the first node you can encounter, you'd be hard pressed to have a source of damage that can actually cut them down in time before they overwhelm your blockers, especially if you have no 3-block units. The Dublinn Shadowcasters are also a pain due to their effective 90 RES making them all but immune to Arts while doing heavy damage if you don't have a healer yet, and the second one will also sometimes instead be a Shielded Senior Caster with higher DEF (but lower RES) and splash damage to blow up your early defenses. And as cherry on top, the enemies' Arts resistance means the normally gamebreaking Reed the Flame Shadow won't help you here.
• Added in the second expansion, Where Ice Condenses on the fourth floor is an extremely cramped map with Originium Ice Crystals covering nearly all deployable tiles, Glacial Originium Slugs pre-spawned in clusters around the map to blow up and Freeze your damage dealers no matter where you place them, and a buffed Nova Knightclub Elite who will pelt you with Arts and their nuke of a Glimmering Touch if you try to regain some territory. There are also two objectives that are fairly separated and both crawling with spiders, with no tile being completely safe, and you'll be quickly assaulted by Yeti Squad members who can exploit the Cold or add in their own, making things incredibly oppressive without an extremely strong opener. Take too long, and not only will the casters and eventual Icecleavers dismantle your lines, the Slugs will just walk right into the blue box. The Emergency version is even worse in this regard, as on top of the stat buffs, the Nova Caster is now invisible, effectively making them unkillable for most of the level unless you have True Sight since it never goes on deployable tiles until much later.
• Also from the second expansion, Manmade Carnival is a ferocious three-pronged assault from various Machina enemies, who due to their innately high base stats are able to scale extremely well with difficulty buffs and overpower you unless you're packing extremely potent Arts damage. You'll be immediately faced with Londiunium Self-Propelled Artillery that will slowly increase in number and circle around the top of the map, with long enough range to hit almost every deployable tile that can actually reach them barring extreme long-distance or global range attacks, and enough damage to flatten your melee units into dust as they try to hold off the beefy Experimental Power Armors from the right side. The left side doesn't show up until later, but proves itself to be even worse, as it will spawn groups of R-31 Heavy Power Armors with ridiculous stats to offset their slow speed, Whiskey-Grade Waker-Uppers that will blitz you and flatten everything in their path the moment you attack them, and even some R-11 Assault Power Armors if you're unlucky (as they spawn at random, turning things into a Luck-Based Mission at times) that have even longer range than the Artillery and just as much damage. In short, it's a relentless assault that demands an airtight melee defense to tank attacks, powerful ranged damage to punch through the defensive Machina, enough healing to protect your squishy damage dealers from the constant artillery bombardments, and maybe some crowd control for the Waker-Uppers, all at once: this is particularly demanding even for the standards of the grueling fifth floor, meaning you're almost certainly going to leak unless you have a ridiculously broken run. As always, the Emergency version makes things infinitely worse by inflating their stats beyond what is normally expected of an Emergency: a standard +20% HP, a massive +70% DEF that makes them even more immune to physical damage, and +30 RES to let them withstand even their Achilles' Heel to Arts.
• Illusions in the Sand, which replaces the first Encounter you enter after obtaining the Horizon Invitation for the fourth ending added in Expansion II, and is required to obtain the Dimensional Fluid that locks you into the ending. Entering the level, you're immediately faced with the Sandstorm from Originium Dust and Dirt Mounds with drastically lowered HP, forcing you to rush out 10 DP to use your two Reinforcement Devices before the Sandstorm destroys them. However, the Sandstorm comes from a random direction each time you run the stage, meaning you'll have to be quick on your feet to choose two Mounds that will maximize the amount of tiles protected from the storm, given that the level will soon spawn Redmark Eradicators that will swiftly kill anything not protected. From then on, you'll have to rush out your precious few ranged units to handle a rush of Hounds and Redmark Infiltrators, the latter of which will be getting near-permanent evasion buffs since the Sandstorm is covering most of the map, and have ranged attacks to kill your units if one of your tiles isn't dedicated to a healer. This is further compounded by there being no deployable melee tiles that actually intercept the enemies, meaning you're screwed from the beginning if your ranged power is lacking - in particular, this means that the invisible Redmark Eradicators cannot be revealed without a source of True Sight. The map will provide you a Detector to work with, but if you misplay at the beginning of the map and reinforce the Mounds in the center or fail to reinforce the one in the top left, they will take the top path and avoid the Detector entirely, making them guaranteed to leak if you can't reveal or kill them another way. Perhaps the worst part about it is that because of the way you enter it, you're liable to enter the stage as early as the second floor if you buy the Horizon Invitation on the floor 1 shop, so unless you got very lucky with recruitment vouchers, you'd be hard pressed to have a team that can handle the map without significant life loss or an outright game over. You can put it off until later since it's guaranteed to replace your next Encounter, but that's no reprieve for players who get screwed by RNG and railroaded into Encounters early on, and on higher difficulties will also make the enemies way stronger since they inherit the stat scaling of whatever floor you entered the battle on. Although players may be tempted to simply wait for a shop on a later floor to buy the Horizon Invitation, this instead runs the risk of not even being able to initiate the fourth ending, as beyond the first floor, there's no guarantee whether a shop, Horizon Invitation, or even Encounter will show up in your path.
• Expansion II added a series of "alternate" stages for the Final Bosses that have a chance to replace the original while playing on Braving Nature 12 or higher, all of which are noted to be significantly harder than their predecessors even taking the difficulty buffs into account.
  • Ice-Cold Image, the rematch with the Samivilinn, might have more tiles available to deploy on from the beginning, but the Silvernwhite Bulwarks covering the map now have quadruple their usual health, which combined with the natural HP inflation makes them nearly impossible to clear out quickly without an extreme amount of burst damage, especially the ones in the top left which block the path to the blue box and will let enemies walk through unopposed until you destroy them. Speaking of the start of the level, the pressure is far more intense than the original thanks to several pre-spawned, buffed Remnant Official Saxophonists who can fire their cross-shaped attacks and hit your units at any range (as well as several more spawning later), which considering their enormous ATK and Samivilinn also attacking effectively makes it impossible to deploy ranged units until you take them down, in itself a tall order due to their inflated bulk. The enemies are also changed to be more Cold-themed rather than mixed: Infused Glacial Originium Slugs and Oneiros drones will use their AoE explosions to blow holes in your formation and Freeze anything that lives, while the Icecleaver Leaders will snap your Frozen units in half if they ever get a chance to land a hit. Samivilinn itself loses its Surge of Nature attack, but swaps it out for a permanent Snowfall (periodically inflicting Cold to all units) along with strengthened armor once it Turns Red, which can actually be worse as it's globally debuffing all your units and making them univerally vulnerable to the Cold attacks and Icecleavers rather than focusing down two lure units, and the Cold doesn't even affect the enemies as most of them don't rely on ASPD to be dangerous.
  • Hollow Visage, Eikthyrnir's rematch. In the original stage, Eikthyrnir was highly vulnerable to being blocked early when his only backup was Tainted Carcasses, allowing a tank and healer to block him and 2 other fodder enemies while ignoring all of the stronger ones until he was alone. Not so much here, as while Eikthyrnir himself is unchanged, he's now escorted by a far stronger entourage of enemies and comes out with them immediately, including Mudrock Zealot Leaders with a ton of offense and defense, a pincer attack from Imperial Core Artillery Targeteers that are just as tanky and will flatten their units with their extreme ATK, and eventually several Sarkaz Worldcursers who can nuke your lines with their extremely damaging Arts. All of this is designed to make it as difficult as possible to hunker down and keep Eikthyrnir in place, with the boss himself still remaining an instant loss condition if he breaks free and breaches your lines for even a second. The regular enemies are also replaced with a constant stream of Heavy Defender Leaders, so it's not like you can focus only on Eikthyrnir and his vanguard either.
  • Sentinel, the remake of Crazelyseon's stage, might be the worst of them all, and is widely considered to be one of, if not the hardest stage in the entire game at higher difficulties. To start things off, the Dimensional Anchoring Pylon gains a modifier that halves its cooldown but also halves its duration, which is generally much worse than usual since it greatly limits the time you have to burst the boss before it goes invincible again, while the reduced cooldown means little if Crazelyseon has already moved out of range or your skills have run out. Secondly, Crazelyseon itself has a much more complicated teleportation path, with the most noticable difference being that it warps more frequently and sporadically to spread its Seedbeds, with the first few minutes of the fight being Crazelyseon hugging the outskirts of the map and spreading as many as it can before approaching, albeit now only switching between two positions instead of 4. All of this is to maximize the chances that Crazelyseon is out of range of your burst setup, but still within shooting distance, letting it rain hell upon you and potentially wipe you out given the massive amount of Seedbeds everywhere boosting its damage while gutting yours; on top of potentially needing multiple burst windows due to the Pylon's halved duration, it still has its second phase in store, so good luck figuring out where it's going for one or more burst windows while surviving its ATK-boosted onslaught. This is a piece of work already, but the enemies are also far more ferocious than the already tough backup on the original map: the right faces an unforgiving rush of buffed Dublinn Companion Shadowblades which take 2 lives each and are extremely difficult to kill due to their bulk and invisibility (especially with Crazelyseon also camping the right half of the map for the first chunk of the battle), while the left will face a continous stream of Shattered Champions who will rush you down at lightning speed and toss aside anything in their path, while both sides will be attacked by Oneiros drones that can do massive AoE damage while Freezing your units to leave them helpless. Possibly worst of all are the Defender-4 and Blocker-P drones that gradually trickle in, which have enormously buffed HP (each having more than one of Crazelyseon's phases) and will give the boss major buffs to DEF and RES to make it even harder for you to kill it for good. The fight is considered nearly impossible if you didn't draw an extremely overpowered hand and use a ton of Foldartals before the fight, and even then expect it to be an uphill battle, especially with any Collapse Paradigms you may have accumulated.
  • Enter Eternity, the upgraded version of the Lugalszargus/Kharanduu fight. The map layout is exactly the same, but on top of the bosses already being a massive pain as is, their backup is directly upgraded in both number and variety: in addition to the various tough melee adds from the original, the level adds in Armorless Archers and Tiacauh Ritualists that have extreme range and will harass you from afar, which is notable because the previous map had only the bosses being able to attack your high-ground units. Ranged bombardment is already paramount to handling the bosses due to facing them head-on being suicidal, so this small addition of enemies that can take them out makes the already difficult fight even more hellish. On top of this, all of the melee enemies from before also come in increased numbers, making them liable to overrun you if you focus too much effort on the bosses.

Sarkaz's Furnaceside Fables

• Clear the Crowd is the most difficult of the early stages. It's a very small map with four Sarkaz Bladeweavers and a Sarkaz Sentinel ready to activate them if aggroed, already making it tricky to place down a ranged unit without prematurely attacking an enemy you don't want to, but that's not the biggest problem. The actual issue is that there are Technical Scouts patrolling the left side of the map which will remove the camouflage your ranged units get from the Exhaust Grilles on the map, making them completely vulnerable to the Sarkaz Crossbowmen that will spawn from the left. So you'd want to get rid of them as quickly as possible, but that's only really feasible with a fast redeploy unit and, since this is a second floor stage, you probably haven't got a fully built squad yet. And to add insult to injury, the Spine of Epoch on this map always spawns on the left side, but any unit you use to actually try to break it is likely just going to be shot to death within seconds. Expect to have to cut your losses and give up on it regularly when you play this stage.
• Careless Magic's Emergency variant can be an instant run-ender if you didn't draft a strong source of healing, as the Originium Altars now cover just short of every deployable tile instead of having a few safe zones, with the only safe tile being on the top right. Units without high HP like ranged units and healers can be overwhelmed on deployment, doubly so once the Guerilla Casters start coming in with their huge AoE pulses (and its range covers the only safe tile as well), but melee units without enough support will be run over by the swarms of Sanguinarch spawn and Dreadkaz spawning Necrosis fields.
• Simulated Skirmish's Emergency variant takes a level with an already tight opener thanks to the two preplaced Guerilla Mortars, and adds the Londinium Artillery to the mix. On the third floor, few units will have enough HP to survive a hit from the cannon while dealing with the Mortars, leaving them at the mercy of the otherwise fairly benign enemies that they'd be able to handle normally. To add insult to injury, killing the Mortars spawns Dreadkaz. And just like a few other rough stages such as the aforementioned Clear the Crowd, the stage taunts you by placing its guaranteed Spine of Epoch in an awkward position that's out of range for most ranged operators from their available tiles, making it extremely hard to break if you didn't draft a strong ground attacker with either enough range or fast enough skill activation to avoid Necrosis, and even if you do, you still have to make sure they don't get blown up by the artillery first before they can finish breaking it.
• Crimson Corridor is usually not bad on lower difficulties, as the horde of Sanguinarch spawn don't do enough damage to overwhelm the blockades in the middle of the map, leaving them at the mercy of the Heat Pump Passages that shred them. This is not the case on higher Facing Souls levels or with additional modifiers to enemy ATK, as the spawn will now do so much damage they can shred through the central wall in an instant, potentially costing you the run instantly as there can be upwards of 20 at any given point in time. Trying to stop them is also a pain as there'll be Heirbearer ASVs that grant them increased ATK and Necrosis as well as Hatedrinkers that will scale their damage off the horde, letting them overwhelm many blockers as they'll also be taking damage from the heat passages. And them being Armored, but Frail, very few ranged units will be able to thin the horde in a timely manner; not even Logos with his "Instant Death" Radius S1 can save you unless you have a ton of SP regen buffs to let him get it up in time. The Emergency version makes things even worse by pre-spawning a few ASVs to kill off any ranged units you would have thought to use and buff the horde further.
• Past the Aquapit is a relentless rush of Scrap Assemblers, who are not only insanely tanky until taking flight while being able to bypass blockers, but hit incredibly hard even when their flight expires, making it difficult to stop them before they run into the blue box. There's also a top lane that has a gap just long enough for the Assemblers to fly across if they're blocked by the naturally spawned barricades, forcing you to either block them in the back, slow them down, or place blockers to trigger their flight early - but that top section also has Sarkaz Maze Returners and Spines of Epoch that will easily foil any of these plans if you don't have a way to get rid of them early. As insult to injury, there's also an isolated side lane with more Maze Returners in case you invested too much firepower into the main threats.
• Sordid Surveillance can be a really rough stage without a strong source of area of effect. The stage opens with an entire platoon of Sarkaz Maze Guides along with a couple of Sarkaz Maze Spellweavers in their midst marching through a wide lane, though thankfully they do it in several slow intervals giving you some time to prepare. The problem is that there are Spines of Epoch positioned to have their fields of effect cover the whole lane, meaning any melee unit you place in preparation to intercept the incoming enemies is going to have to deal with Necrosis. The ranged tiles are safe, but the units you place there to cover the lane will be aggroed onto the Spines and likely end up just letting the Royal Court Soldiers that slip through via the bottom left straight into your base. So you desperately need to get rid of at least the Spine closest to your base as soon as possible to give yourself a good position to attack from, and then also be able to bring down the advancing Maze Guides from range before they get close enough to start wreaking havoc. And despite the difficulty you really want to clear this stage if you think you have a chance, because the Spines can guarantee at least three Plans which puts you at a great advantage... if you survive. For the overly greedy and unprepared, though, the stage ends up being pure Schmuck Bait.
• Timeworn Tensions has a fairly standard assault of Maze Returners and Maze Guides at the top...and four Sarkaz Worldcursers lying in wait at the bottom. Even if you pick them off one at a time, few units are able to safely duel a Worldcurser due to their stunning damage output and HP, and the level will also send unblockable Paladin Automata which, if allowed to leak, create an explosion that instantly wakes up all the Worldcursers, upon which you're almost certain to suffer a Total Party Kill as the Worldcursers nuke everyone and run into the blue box, leaving you vulnerable to the other enemies. While you can remove the threat of the Automata in the normal version by killing them before they reach the blue box, in the Emergency mode, Automata spawn Dreadkaz when killed, forcing you to kill them early to prevent the Necrosis field from spawning in the middle of your DPS.
• Witch-Curse Alliance is an immense check for both DPS and healing, as it throws out enormous waves of Sarkaz Wither Maws and Remnant Orchestra Cellists, both of which have immense bulk along with the Cellists' Attack Reflector potentially instantly killing any units that rely on ASPD or don't have lots of DEF/healing, especially as it scales with difficulty level. Not helping is that their shields and taunt not only stall out your damage even further, but prevent you from engaging the Wither Maws with ranged damage, ruining the main way to neutralize their threat before they close in and eat your blockers for lunch. The player can activate the Tuning Nodes to disable the Cellists' ability, but doing so is harder than it seems thanks to the awkward positioning of some of the Nodes (especially the bottom-left one, which is out of reach of most melee deployments) and all the Wither Maws looking to devour any unit you send to hit them.
• Land Reclamation all but demands a source of massive or global range, or a powerful fast-redeploy unit, otherwise hordes of pre-spawned, lingering Self-Propelled Artillery will pound your defenses into dust beyond reach of retaliation. The amount of Corruption being tossed around by the regular enemies and Wither Tanks doesn't help matters, as they can easily soften up or kill your damage units before the Artillery moves in to finish the job.
• Rogue Mercenary is potentially one of the hardest levels you can get on the fifth floor, featuring a mix of the Londinium Artillery, Sanguinarch enemies, Necrosis threats, Mudrock as the boss, and Ursus Civilians. Dealing with all of these at once is a tall order for even well-stocked teams, particularly the need to juggle both the Artillery and Civilians while still maintaining enough of a force to deal with the legions of enemies at your door, which include a Zerg Rush of the surprisingly durable Sanguinarch mooks, the more intermittent Elites like Royal Court Casters or Hatedrinkers that can single-handedly dismantle your defenses, and of course Mudrock whose massive bulk and Gathering Steam ability can screw you over if you didn't pile on the damage before she started moving. Even then, if you don't spawn-camp the Court Casters, you can still get screwed over by the Civilians' Artificial Stupidity making them stand in range of the Casters as they use their lock-on Arts, which will almost certainly kill them, lose you a life, and spawn a Dreadkaz for good measure.
• Divine Desire, although thankfully exclusive to the sixth floor and inside of Possibility nodes, lives up to its placement and then some. Almost every deployable tile on the map is within range of Pathfinder Ballistarii Prefects who will do massive area damage with their missiles, and there are multiple pre-placed hostile Gelato Stops that'll constantly refresh their ammo, letting them shower you with explosions. Trying to pick them off is a tall order thanks to the convoluted stage layout and their huge overlapping ranges, while trying to capture the Gelato Stops is also harder than it sounds since the moment one of them gets captured for your side, all the other enemies will immediately turn on it and blast it to reclaim it instantly. All of this is while melee and ranged enemies will trickle in from the side lanes while you struggle to shore up a defense, which includes Pathfinder Nuncios that can deal huge damage while temporarily disarming your units, and a steady stream of Ballistarii reinforcements that will continue to pressure the Gelato Stops and your units even if you culled the initial wave.
• Quest For Consensus is the other sixth floor-exclusive stage and is hardly any easier, especially on the higher difficulties due to featuring all of the Demonic Spiders of Chapter 14. The stage immediately opens with an incoming swarm of Soul Maelstroms which will charge up the Penumbral Soul Husk positioned dead center in the stage, which will massacre any ranged units you try to place in the tiles close to it if it gets its Orbiting Particle Shield up. Stopping the Soul Maelstroms from reaching their targets is the main objective, but this is much easier said than done because of the Chalices of Mortality all over the stage which will absorb the damage you deal and make it almost impossible to actually kill any of the Soul Maelstroms. Woe betide you if they actually reach the Prism Soul Remnants towards the left side, as they will turn the entire map into a death zone and kill any operator you try to deploy within seconds. So your only real solution is to use a powerful area of effect staller such as Ascalon to keep the Soul Maelstroms in place and give you more time to destroy them, but that's not all. Soon after the initial wave of enemies, a couple of Sarkaz Wither Aegis will spawn and march towards your base through a Chalice of Mortality, making the already tanky enemies basically unkillable as long as they're in range. So if you're unable to break the Chalices of Mortality quickly enough, you will be overwhelmed by an onslaught of enemy units pathing towards multiple lanes that take absolutely no damage with massive portions of the map being practically undeployable because the Prism Soul Remnants will vaporize anyone you place in the rows they cover. And if you're playing the Emergency version, everything is even tankier and the Soul Maelstroms move faster. Good luck.
• Kaz Falls from the first expansion is absurdly difficult for a stage that shows up as early as the second floor. You have several Mutant Giant Rock Spiders that spawn a steady stream of Originiutant Excrescences, which aren't too threatening as they are scripted to throw themselves off the map to their deaths after running through several corridors. However, every single one has the mark of a Dreadkaz, which means if you so much as kill even one by accident, it'll deal heavy splash damage and summon a Mark of Age that'll cripple a chunk of your limited space with Necrosis, essentially limiting your entire operation to the rightmost two columns on the map. Eliminating the Rock Spiders early will ease up the pressure, but this is much easier said than done given their fairly powerful ranged attacks and any source of area damage potentially blowing up the attacker if they hit a slug by accident and summon a Mark of Age. If that weren't enough, the other enemies include Holy Automata that can nuke your lines if you lack damage or crowd-control to wrangle them before they escape, Snipers to stun what few units you can deploy, and a Redmark Infiltrator to shoot down ranged units and sneak through your lines.
• Chaos is among the most brutal stages you can get with a lack of healing, featuring Poison Haze that deals a huge amount of damage compared to almost every other appearance of the mechanic, along with a siege of melee and ranged Sarkaz. You're instantly screwed without at least two healers (preferably with AoE, and even then they have to be in top form to survive both the Haze and the constant assaults from Crossbowmen, as well as the Dreadkaz and Maze Spellweavers who can nail you with even more DoT with their Marks of Epoch and Necrosis.
• Elusive Merc has you fighting an extremely buffed W along with her entourage of troops, including Maze Spellweavers with their Necrosis fields, Mudrock Matterlurgists Leaders that can hit two units at once, Frost drones to neuter your ASPD, and Dublinn Flamechasers who can sneak past your lines if you lack the attack rate to finish them off. The level is also insanely cramped and has pretty much no ranged tiles that aren't at risk of being nuked by W or the ranged units, making the initial setup phase painful and holding it not much less so. W herself takes numerous tunnels that let her traverse nearly the whole map and bomb you to kingdom come unless you can pin her down early - but on Emergency, she's invisible, removing even that option.
• Regular Army is a Boss Rush against W alongside Skullshatterer and/or Crownslayer, as well as an absolutely brutal horde of elite enemies that will support the already heavily buffed bosses, especially as W and Skullshatterer can cover a good chunk of the map with their ranges and will bomb you to kingdom come if you take even a step into their aggro radius. Pre-spawned Imperial Core Targeteers will bomb you into paste the second you try to shore up a defense or generate DP, Sniper Leaders will interfere with your formation with their incredibly long stuns, and Deathveil Assassins can eliminate most units in a single blow while using their invisibility and dash ability to evade any attempts to fight back. There are even a few Swamp Rovers that reveal invisibility and render the Exhaust Grilles on the map useless until you eliminate them, which is easier said than done when they've got the artillery drones covering them at all times. The enemies also all start at different points before converging on the blue box (which in turn has almost no melee tiles on its lane), forcing you to spread your defenses to counter them all.
• Heretics, added to the sixth floor in the first expansion, is potentially just as bad as Divine Desire or Quest for Consensus, if not worse. You have three blue boxes to defend against an absolute horde of almost 100 lethal troops, including Shanhaizhong Secret-Keepers who are permanently stealthed and will one-shot most blockers on higher difficulties, Shanhaizhong Oracles that will barrage you with Arts, and Sharpedges that deal absolutely ridiculous melee damage and split into Spearheads that need tons of rapid multi-hit to kill. On top of that, there's a constant stream of Beach Buggies that will pick up the enemies and use their bulk to shuttle them right to your doorstep, which usually spells death as an operator that can barely tank one Secret-Keeper may suddenly be beset upon by four at once, instantly crushing your lines unless you can kill the Buggies early. Even then, without a source of True Sight, you can still easily be screwed by the sheer number of Secret-Keepers that can run over most defenses and clear a path to the blue box.
• Heavenly Paradise, added in the first expansion, is just as difficult as a sixth floor stage as its counterpart Heretics. It features two lanes to defend against, but every enemy is the Apparation type that will spawn tons of smaller enemies that require rapid multi-hit to kill. The left lane has Scantwords to divert hits against other enemies, hard-hitting Sharpedges that loop around, and Magnificences to cloak them periodically. Meanwhile, the right lane is protected by Heartbillows that can perform a punishing ranged attack and breaks up into a swarm when defeated while featuring unplacable ground tiles or DEF-debuff tiles over most of it. They are also placed so that the ranged tiles that can reach both lanes aren't safe from their hit. Worse, the Heartbillows can potentially summon Dreadkazs upon death, meaning you will also have to contend with Necrosis that may hit precious ranged tiles or ground tiles in addition to the enemy spam. At higher difficulties, the ASPD is almost a requirement, especially with Emergency Mode, where the on-death spawns can require up to 349 hits to kill.

Sui's Garden of Grotesqueries

• Feng Shui is a stage encountered on the third floor that's notorious for being an outright run ender if you lack the right Operators for it. For starters, the enemies are the Waregeists which require a fixed number of hits to destroy after defeating them once, and they just so happen to spawn precariously close to the Protection Objective. While you do have roadblocks to modify their route, it's only a small mercy, as the stage also features the Inkwaves which split into a hefty 15 Paperweights that start moving almost immediately after they spawn. Damage Over Time Operators like Ethan and Ascalon are outright mandatory to be able to handle the sheer number of Waregeists rushing towards the objective, otherwise you can kiss your run goodbye.
• Added in the first expansion, Beyond Mount and Sea takes the worst parts of Heavenly Paradise, Heretics, and Feng Shui and makes things much, much worse. There are four red boxes where Sharpedges and Raging Di Beasts beeline straight for the lone blue box, though four pre-spawned Sand Voyagers prevent them from causing an immediate leak. The main issue that you have to deal with the Voyagers and Sharpedges while also dealing with the dangerous enemies coming down the middle, which include Fortbreakers, Shanhaizhong Oracles, and Shanhaizhong Secret-Keepers. Even if you're able to curb your damage so that you kill the Voyagers on the right side, you'll still have to deal with a stream of Sharpedges and their corresponding Spearheads, which will still path directly to the left. Fortunately, two Statuegeists will continually spawn Sand Voyagers that park themselves next to the blue box, but you also have to be careful not to incidentally destroy the Statuegeists and stop the Voyagers from spawning. All in all, it's an incredibly stressful level that requires maximum precision to do leakless, especially if you're doing an Ending 3 run and have their corresponding collectibles and debuffs.^note Unflinching Masterplan causes operators to lose 50% of their max SP on deployment and Cloud & Paint causes operators to lose 2% of their max HP each second for 60 seconds on deployment.  The Emergency version makes things even worse, starting with all enemies receiving a 30% buff to ATK and DEF, along with a 50% buff to HP and a 50% debuff to Statuegeist HP, making it harder to keep the Statuegeists alive. The HP buff also applies to Iron Sharpedges, which now take 45 hits to kill instead of 30. What makes things even worse is that all Raging Di Beasts are replaced with Heartbillows, which spawn 15 Rosewood Paperweights that take 6 hits each. It's telling that the easiest solution to clearing this map involves not playing the level at all, but having an End of Times ^note  If you would fail a battle that's not the final battle of a floor or a Dreadful Foe, you instead get +1 Life Point and continue. Notably, if you quit, you also get to keep your current HP. in your inventory and simply quitting the level immediately to preserve your current HP.

• Annihilation 3: Lungmen Downtown has gained infamy for representing a huge Difficulty Spike in the Annihilation missions.
  • Massive, wide open map with three lanes to cover? Check. Insanely powerful enemies that include Breakers, Spec Ops Casters, Possessed Leaders, Arts Master Drones, and especially Defense Crushers? Check. Disturbingly powerful crossbow turrets that periodically deploy just to mess with your frontline? Also check. Basically, every enemy in this map hits like a truck and can take about as much punishment in return, and the presence of the crossbow turrets mean all of your frontliners will be taking 600 damage every few seconds, on top of the obscenely painful hits they're already taking from Reunion troops. The annoying part really begins to ramp up after the 350 kills mark, where a wall of Defense Crushers pops up just to ruin your day, along with hordes of Arts Master A2 Drones and Spec Ops Caster Leaders to turn defenders and backliners alike into mincemeat. And there's a red Crusher Leader variant that will rock up later too. If you thought 5-10 was maddening to play, you haven't seen anything yet.
  • To put things into perspective: this is the one map where it's damn near impossible (but not completely) for low rarity teams to beat it. Even experienced players who can offer tips to clearing high-difficulty maps using budget squads will tell you to bring the most powerful operators you have to bear here, as you won't stand a chance otherwise. You're gonna have a bad time if you lack very strong and specific 6-star operators like SilverAsh, Eyjafjalla, Ifrit, or Angelina, so at least do yourself a favor and find a friend who has them. At the very minimum, your team needs to have a solid mix of high level 4 and 5-star operators to reliably full clear the map.
  • At the time of its release, the consensus among the playerbase was that Anni3 was ultimately not worth the hassle to run every week at the point in the game where you're supposed to first attempt it, let alone set up for a completely stable Auto mode run, so players were encouraged to just try for 400 kills to nab all of the rewards, then come back to Anni2 and keep farming there. While rotating Annihilations and stronger operators have lessened the need to do the stage and lessened the pressure of fully clearing it, it still remains a piece of work for anyone that just unlocked it and doesn't have a strong roster under their belt.
• Annihilation 5: Frozen Abandoned City brings back the Yeti Squadron for an Annihilation stage, and everything that made them frustrating to deal with in Chapter 6 is present here, too. The Originium Ice Crystals in the middle of the map along with swarms of Glacial Originium Slugs will ensure your Operators keep getting frozen, making them easy pickings for the many Yeti Icecleavers you'll be facing, necessitating comparatively rare true AoE operators. Once you've beaten 100 enemies, Patriot's guerrillas will join the fray, and while they're nowhere near as devastating as the Yetis, they can still be a pain, especially the Heralds, who appear in out of the way areas and just stay there buffing the rest of the guerrillas, and the Shieldguards, who have ridiculous bulk and Draw Aggro away from the much more immediate threats. Like Annihilation 3, the stage also features a Difficulty Spike at the end, with two more Ice Crystals appearing at the 370 kills mark to blast the few remaining safe zones with freezing air, followed by two Icecleaver Leaders spawning in. With their naturally high stats, plus the damage buff they'll get from the Active Originium tiles their paths cross over, they'll be strong enough to cut down your sturdiest defenders even when they're not frozen, and if they are, you can expect them to deal a One-Hit KO. An option is to place someone on one or two of the Active Originium tiles yourself to exploit the massive DPS buff, but not only are they squarely located in the very middle of the map well away from your frontline, the tiles are also in the range of two icecrystals that will, in combination with the enemies, make sure that anyone deployed there is reduced to a block of ice about 90% of the time if you don't give them status resistance ^note  Good job trying to, since wide-range medics can't quite reach them and their healing is reduced on the outer tiles .

• Oblivion and Outcry, the final stage of the War-torn Wilderness, is designed to make its otherwise simplistic boss about as infuriating to deal with as possible. The boss, the Altar of Hatred, is an immobile artillery which periodically fires a barrage of attacks towards the two closest units without a range limit. It's neither that durable nor does it hit all that hard initially, so it doesn't seem so bad at first. However, the problem is that it's positioned in a way which makes it impossible to reach for anyone but ranged ground units and specific ranged units such as Blast Casters, Goldenglow, etc. which leaves you with a very limited pool of units which you can even use to bring it down to begin with. If you've been relying entirely on high tile ranged units throughout the run and haven't prioritized units capable of hitting the altar such as Lord Guards or anyone else with the range to reach the boss, it's entirely possible you'll enter the stage completely unprepared and find yourself in an literally Unwinnable position, forcing you to reset so you can rebuild your squad and having to go through all the prior stages again. And if you have the right unit, you'd better hope you have the hand to set them up immediately, because once it starts ramping up (which is a Guide Dang It! moment as explained later) and the danger level starts rising, the boss's barrage of attacks are going to really start hurting to the point that if you take long enough it will obliterate even the tankiest of Defenders, making it practically a Time-Limit Boss in all but name. And if that wasn't enough, the altar continuously spawns Witchcraft Orbs, which are possibly the most horrifying variant of exploding slugs as they not only do true damage but stun everyone around them when killed, which is prone to cause leaks and possibly a loss if they explode on your line of defense. And unlike most stages where you can simply prioritize the boss and then mop up once they're dealt with, even after you bring down the altar you're still not guaranteed to be out of the woods yet, because you still have to contend with any Witchcraft Orbs left over on top swarms of Infused Glacial Originium Slugs and Sarkaz Guerilla Casters which are going to be buffed by the danger level as well as the half dozen Guerilla Herald Leaders that sit on the map, all of which are massive AoE threats that could very easily destroy your setup. And just to be even more annoying, the boss has a bunch of badly explained or completely unexplained mechanics, such as a defense buff which makes it take 90% reduced Physical and Arts damage once it falls below 60% HP for 45 seconds, but it doesn't have a clear visual to reflect that nor does its boss description mention how long this defensive buff lasts, but worse, nowhere is it explained that its barrage does up to 300% more damage after consecutive attacks, making it unclear to the player exactly why it goes from fairly negligible damage to suddenly wiping out your entire squad.

• Olden Site of the Zümrütrüyası is one of the biggest roadblocks in the whole mode and surpasses even its notoriously hard predecessor, even with all of the changes made to reduce the second iteration's difficulty. On top of the Zümrütrüyası Priestess being That One Boss in of herself (elaborated on in the respective page) and a Damage-Sponge Boss extraordinaire, they're also a Time-Limit Boss that only appears once the first two waves of enemies are cleared first, essentially mandating the player to set up a squad to deal with the waves as quickly as possible to give them the most time to deal as much damage to the boss as possible before time runs out, then dedicate another squad to bring down the boss during their second Act of the day. And because the stage's enemies will reset at the start of each day, you must finish off the Priestess and her army within the two Acts you get, otherwise you've just wasted two teams' worth of resources and Energy Drinks for nothing. And if that wasn't enough, you are also at the mercy of the RNG as depending on the weather, the stage can become even harder under conditions that debuff or disable your units, particularly during Monsoon season as most of the map will be flooded outright, forcing you to bring deployable platforms to even be able to counterattack. Altogether, this stage quickly became one of the biggest obstacles that stumped many players due to the time limit as well as the sheer number of essential units that are needed for specific roles, making it feel nigh-impossible for players with underdeveloped rosters to even have a hope of beating the stage.
• Accepting the Apex Showdown Encounter has a chance to unleash an Elite Raid of Rampaging Direswines, and boy will you regret it. The swines' speed will allow them to quickly reach the protection objective, but the bigger problem is how to actually stop them. Unlike the infamous Sarkaz Lancers, the swines still deal damage by passing through Operators, so Ambushers who are usually a godsend in stopping hordes will get trampled to death in seconds. And given the wide open space of RA maps, the swines will build up speed to critical level, allowing them to oneshot most Operators. This leaves Barricades as the only viable solution to stop the swines' rampage, but you best have a few in hand as they can only block up to 2 swines, and there are 55 in the pipeline. Hope you have enough AOE damage to finish those who are temporarily stopped by your Barricades...
• Domain of Valor is exclusive to the Strange Territory and boasts one of the largest hauls of any Resource Zone in the entire game (having a ton of every resource, treasure chests, fresh water, and rare beasts), but it'll make you work for those materials. The map is a veritable maze of rooms separated by destructible walls, some of which are hidden behind resource blocks that necessitate either extreme clearing power or Splash Damage Abuse, with many of the resource-rich rooms being staffed by ferocious Elite Mooks or (on higher Environmental Pressures) outright bosses like Pompeii and the Frozen Monstrosity. Even if you can weather the hazards and clear the paths, the map is simply massive, demanding a ton of multitasking and preparation to harvest as many resources as possible across the map within the time limit, and you're unlikely to be able to harvest all of them even with two Acts and a fully kitted team. Worse still, where the destructible walls appear is actually randomized when first entering the node and some terrain might actually change when re-entering after an initial attempt, turning it into a Luck-Based Mission if you can even get all of the rooms open in time.
• Mineshaft Crawl may be the best source of Lighting Ore in the entire mode, but it's an even larger maze than Domain of Valor, has some of the most confusing design of any map in the mode, and is stuffed to the brim with extraordinarily tanky and lethal enemies that will make your life a living hell as you try to open up the caves and put your harvesters into position. To make matters worse, there are ballista turrets all over the place, further chipping at your constructs or operators sent to harvest the materials. While it's relatively consistent each time, good luck trying to actually bring home the motherload when you'll likely be spending one or two Acts just trying to figure out where everything is.
• Exploring Conflict Zones is useless as they give no reward, yet they tend to block your path and thus must be dealt with. But Beast March stands above the rest as the stage has a few factors that make it super annoying. For starter, it has at least 100 enemies in the pipeline, starting with a Zerg Rush of Originium Tumors; fail to deal with them in time, you won't be able to take on the next wave of the heavy hitters. The second is the zone starts with 6 pre-existing enemies that can make it more difficult with dealing with the first Tumors, such as Frost drones that slow your ASPD even more, or mechs that can hit ranged tiles. Third, this zone is exclusive to Strange Territory explorations, so unlike those in the main overworld that can be explored once and never again, you will likely have to deal with this stage repeatedly as it tends to block your path to other zones. Finally, the type of enemies can change depending on Strange Zone modifiers, and it can be a bit unpredictable as to what enemy you will be facing; you might be getting ready for a rush of melee enemies, and instead a wave of drones will come and bypass your ranged Operators' killzone.