Most difficult Branch Ends

[Reptisaurus]

Thread because the frog pond in the middle of the lair is way, way, way worse than all the other lair endings. If my characters even think about straying from the stairs... splat! The other endings have tougher enemies, but you're not getting swarmed immediately by a bunch of critters that are faster than you. It is so much nastier than the demons or the dire elephants or what-have you. Is this a problem?

None of the other vault-based branch ending have a significant difficulty variance, but....

The spider ending with the door flat-out killed me the first time I ran into it. Now I know that I need to clear the rest of the level, read teleport, and then open the door so the ghost moths and spark wasps disperse. The other spider branch ends are - if not cake - not really that much worse than the rest of spider.

Crossbow orcs are probably the worst orc:2 for most characters, maybe?

I really don't see any swamp or snake ending as being harder than any other.

[chequers]

Frog pond was recently changed to be less swarmy - the middle is closed now and monsters can't cross it - and it is less swarmy than before but that's not saying a lot.

[yesno]

dunno, today i got spider end with at least 3 ghost moths, just said "fuck it i hate this" and tabbed myself to death. definitely doable with a lot of summons and consumables, but sometimes when crawl wants to kill you, you just say, ok, crawl

[lethediver]

I dunno about difficult, but I always find Cocytus 7 really tedious... lots of crossing or moving around water, lots of luring, and the enemies arent all that interesting. Give me a good hell sentinel or iron giant any day.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

There's a snake rune vault that has some unpassable terrain (lava or deep water, not sure) lake you have to walk around. On the other side you have the usual snake denizens, many with ranged attacks. Walking straight in is certainly lethal. I don't think it's too difficult, but it does take a rather long time to lure everything out. Consequently I really had to fight against my own impatience.

[prozacelf]

Every snake rune vault has more or less the same problem, given that they're all packed full of giant, slow bags of hp that both take some effort to kill and take forever to lure back to a choke point.

[Sprucery]

Icy and miasma Swamp endings are harder than the rest imo, and of course the LH can be a nasty surprise for a newbie.

[le_nerd]

Gonna go with the V:5 ending where all 4 sectors are wide open, no chokepoints, no walls to attenuate the noise - its pretty bad.

[Reptisaurus]

Every snake rune vault has more or less the same problem, given that they're all packed full of giant, slow bags of hp that both take some effort to kill and take forever to lure back to a choke point.

I just wiped out to 5 guardian serpents in snake:4. I never enjoy snake:4.

I used to really hate the Miasma ending of Swamp, but recent rot changes made it better - and I never thought it was that hard, I just lost a lot of permanent hit points. It's strange that none of the swamp endings are "A bunch of thorn hunters" since they are BY FAR the most dangerous swampy criters.

[Reptisaurus]

Gonna go with the V:5 ending where all 4 sectors are wide open, no chokepoints, no walls to attenuate the noise - its pretty bad.

I haven't had that in a while. I was hoping they got rid of it.

[robbcorp]

Every snake rune vault has more or less the same problem, given that they're all packed full of giant, slow bags of hp that both take some effort to kill and take forever to lure back to a choke point.

I just wiped out to 5 guardian serpents in snake:4. I never enjoy snake:4.

I used to really hate the Miasma ending of Swamp, but recent rot changes made it better - and I never thought it was that hard, I just lost a lot of permanent hit points. It's strange that none of the swamp endings are "A bunch of thorn hunters" since they are BY FAR the most dangerous swampy criters.

GOOD SUGGESTION

That absurd Shoals ending where everything is out in the open is quite obnoxious. I'll take the small enclosures any day of having every mob have near immediate LOS of you.

[tabstorm]

Shoals 4, all of them, but especially the wide-open ending.

[ZoFy]

For Lair:$, demon ending is the one i always skip (just the wizard and demons, not the forest). The relatively new one with a sun(spider?)-shaped construction containing guardian serpents and nasties is the one i should probably start skipping too.
For Swamp:$, anything with the Lernaean hydra is pretty ridiculous. Undead endings, on the other hand, i find to be a free rune.
Shoals:4 and Vaults:5 are the scariest in general.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Gonna go with the V:5 ending where all 4 sectors are wide open, no chokepoints, no walls to attenuate the noise - its pretty bad.

I haven't had that in a while. I was hoping they got rid of it.

I was under the impression that the four sectors are picked randomly from a large-ish list. You have to get fairly unlucky to get four open quadrants.

[dynast]

The relatively new one with a sun-shaped construction

Its a spider.

[Cheibrodos]

Gonna go with the V:5 ending where all 4 sectors are wide open, no chokepoints, no walls to attenuate the noise - its pretty bad.

I haven't had that in a while. I was hoping they got rid of it.

I was under the impression that the four sectors are picked randomly from a large-ish list. You have to get fairly unlucky to get four open quadrants.

It does work like that, but for some reason a whole bunch of open layouts got added to the list a while back. I don't know the history but I guess someone wanted Vaults:5 to be harder.

[Shtopit]

To me spider, because I usually get there when I don't yet have a decent weapon to use against emperor scorpions (I tend not to leave the last level for later). Otherwise, Vaults can be ugly because of Wardens, but, otherwise, I just attempt using a scroll of immolation and, when I think it's run out, I do some stair dancing. Same for the Tomb.

Earlier it was Elf. It seems that I get there with a few more levels now, but, earlier, it was where I died most often, or got banished and died in the Abyss.

[duvessa]

It does work like that, but for some reason a whole bunch of open layouts got added to the list a while back. I don't know the history but I guess someone wanted Vaults:5 to be harder.

It was dpeg. The chance of getting 4 quadrants with bad terrain is still super low though.

[tasonir]

It's strange that none of the swamp endings are "A bunch of thorn hunters" since they are BY FAR the most dangerous swampy criters.

Don't give them ideas.

[Shard1697]

I'd like to keep trivializing swamp endings with a single potion of invisibility, thanks.

[Laraso]

Worst branch end I ever had was a Vaults:5 that was entirely made out of green crystal walls. All the scary things in there became twice as scary. Ended up just giving up and grabbed the slime rune instead.