• Teams and Job Roles
...people have a hard time doing their part. Tanks struggle to pull without grabbing too many extras while backtracking to pick up accidental enemies. The "crowd" gets out of hand and can whiplash back and forth as enmity drops or new aggro happens. Even going slow doesn't guarantee management; monsters can aggro from farther away than most pulling happens.

Meanwhile damage dealing members are all over the place avoiding puddles, dodging ranged AoEs and running into wandering monsters. Prioritizing becomes a nightmare as some enemies stay at max projectile range and moving to them may trigger additional fights. Healers struggle to top up everyone from random damage. Pets, both DPS and healing, will stand in puddles and die if not managed. Even for experienced players it is easy to get thrown into personal crisis mode and just handle whatever is right in front of you.

And it doesn't help that...

• Equipment
...level 47-49 is a weird spot for gear versus skills. DPS get a bump in damage, however healers and tanks don't get abilities to even things out until level 50. This makes enmity and crowd control a little bit more dicey than normal during a time when everything is already in danger of going wrong.

Healers juggle drawing attention from accidental pulls while trying to keep members alive. Meanwhile tanks run out of MP using AoE enmity abilities or try to maintain hate individually on whichever target the melee are fighting. In a weird way Aurum is the only place where having exceptionally good DPS can actually cause issues as the pack bounces back and forth.

Monsters benefit from this sort of dysfunction. The longer it takes to reduce the "pack" size the more incoming damage occurs. Not to mention an accidental aggro will quite happily slip by to pound a back line job to death in five or six seconds. Most enemies are at (or near) the highest damage output for the level, which is bad because...

• Mechanics
...the difficulty suddenly spikes with no warning. The bosses in Aurum Vale abruptly introduce three new mechanics: Stacking damage over time, no telegraphs and ignoring enmity.

Stacking DoT is especially insidious because it is not obvious, drains the healer's MP trying to keep oblivious members alive and kills assisting pets. Even seasoned players can forget and end up with extra damage.

No telegraphs is a hard departure from everything the game teaches new players. Avoiding telegraphs is so fundamental it is taught in the Hall of Novices; changing that mechanic should have been a dungeon all by itself. But what makes it so over the top is the penalty for error: A single Glower nearly kills non-tanks and the angle of attack is wider than belt sizes at a buffet.

Which makes ignoring enmity a problem. Bosses will simply stop paying attention to the tank, run off and do their own thing. This is not something new players are expecting to happen.