Most annoying branch

[TeshiAlair]

What branches do you guys find extremely annoying?

My personal annoyance is Spider. While I think Shoals and Snake are harder, Spider just annoys me because the spiders aren't very interesting, come in huge numbers, and can be really varying in terms of threat level- because they are high EV enemies, they are basically popcorn until they suddenly aren't any more.

[tasonir]

Shoals. Water isn't that good of a mechanic, imho, and the sheer amount of spike damage that javalineers can randomly hit you with is frustrating. Ilsuiw's summon spam/invis is also annoying. Also the whole thing is trivial if you just invis.

Spider is actually my favorite lair subbranch, really

[duvessa]

Yeah I actually find the other 3 more annoying than spider these days (not that spider isn't annoying).

Of the branches you might visit in a normal game: labyrinths, followed by abyss, followed by one of crypt/zot/shoals (can't decide).

[Lasty]

I'd definitely vote Shoals for most annoying Lair branch, and the one I'm most likely to skip until later, and it's almost entirely because of the water. The branch has some very powerful enemies, and they're faster than normal while you're slower than normal over a lot of the level, so if you're not considerably stronger than everything that spawns you have to be incredibly careful about exact positioning -- unless you run into a siren, in which case you're forced to fight in awful terrain. Unless you have invis, in which case everything is harmless.

Also, it breaks autoexplore.

I'm not a huge fan of the water in Swamp either, or the swamp worms for that matter, but otherwise it's been getting better with the new monster set.

Edit: outside of Lair, Tomb has been the worst by a huge margin. It's the place I least want to ever go for the reasons KoboldLord states below. Death curses are just really unpleasant to slog through. I know there's been some work on the branch and maybe that's making it more fun, but I do my best to avoid ever going inside Tomb so it may take me a while to notice if it gets better.

[Sprucery]

Extremely annoying? None. All of Crawl is quite enjoyable.

However, the branch I like the least is Depths. Clearing a single level of U seems to take 3 times the time it took to clear a D:twentysomething. Most importantly, because I'm a dinosaur, in my opinion Crawl should have 27 Dungeon levels (it was meant to be so).

[mopl]

Everything after Vaults. I like Dungeon, Lair, Orc, Lair branches, Elf, Vaults, even Slime is OK, Crypt

Tomb is kind of special, cool with some char (Og PProjecting Large rocks !), extremely boring with some others...

I don't like Depths, Hell, Pan, I hate Abyss.

[phobetor]

Abyss is god awful plus the added dollop of awful tacked on because kobolds can randomly send me there. Shoals are pretty painful too. Unless I have perma-fly/swim then its one of my favorites. Tomb could use some improvement but is alright. The rest of the game is good.

[tedric]

Shoals is the only branch that makes me groan inside whenever it spawns, for pretty much all the reasons others have mentioned. Spider feels the most tedious to me, probably because there's less variation in the enemies & terrain so it usually starts to feel old before I'm halfway to the rune vault. Snake is my vote for most "annoying" though, mostly because of the newer naga enemies, especially sharpshooters with their goddamned smite-targeted portal projectile (though I like that there's more variety in the enemies than there used to be).

I think Swamp is the best of all the Lair branches and I like all of the core Dungeon branches (D, L, O, V, U, Z). Don't have strong opinions about the rest because everything else is optional!

[KoboldLord]

I'm going to go with Tomb. When my character is extremely powerful or well-suited for handling it, it's easy and tedious. When I go in for my third Rune because Vaults 5, Slime, and Abyss all sound difficult to handle, it's harder but still tedious. There's basically no way to go in and reliably both win and have fun.

The four main Lair Rune branches have their annoying parts, but it's usually a good annoying. I'm killing dudes and trying to avoid being killed by dudes, and I can reasonably try different things to maximize my success with both of these important tactics. There may be monsters that I hate seeing at the edge of the screen, but at least I care which monster is on the edge of the screen.

[Patashu]

I'm going to be a renegade and say Swamp, it just looks and feels really boring to me, to the point when I'm glad when I get Shoals instead

[crate]

swamp bothers me much much more than shoals layout-wise, though shoals is trying pretty hard to win via having water nymphs

[zardo]

least annoying lair rune branch = snake, but i'm actually pretty okay with shoals. swamp is easily the worst, because of the layout (combined with general water issues) and monster set

[Magipi]

I almost said the Vaults, but no: the Abyss is the clear winner.

[tasonir]

In the case where I'm prepared for the abyss, I actually rather like it. Being high enough level with rMut and high regeneration, going down for the rune, it's pretty cool. Randomness of finding the way to the next level/rune/exit can be a bit annoying, but overall it's a good branch.

Getting stuck there when you didn't intend to be there is annoying, but that's intended to be a punishment, so I'm not really sure what to do about that.

[Tiktacy]

The Vaults back when it was 8 levels instead of 5.