level 40 captains in act 1 Minas Ithil

[TextualArc]

any reason this might be happening? I did choose to play on brutal but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ man, I wasn't expecting endgame tier enemies from the very word go.
I also baleeted my old end game save to start this go, so maybe online still thinks it needs to populate my world with high level enemies? idk but its weird.

[GDSpectra]

If you ask me, this is not related to online stuff at all, but rather the game not making a difference between your old save and your new save due to something confusing happening inside its mechanics (the first example of such event was a creepy "Shadow Bruz" event, thus as long as none of these dudes is a story character it shouldn´t cause any more problems aside fighting those high-level Captains on their own ).

I´d suggest you try Time Advancing after entering your game and waiting for like 3-4 minutes to fully gets into the groove if you know what I mean (load itself fully; I´ve gotten some wonky stuff happening by being faster than the game itself), as just like in SoM, this is how you essentially "refresh" the system and thus those "old save outsiders" would stop coming.

[TextualArc]

sounds good, I'll give it a shot refreshing the game, so far its only actually been a handfull of seriously overleveled guys, and its actually pretty cool that I need to run like hell from these monsters. but they are effectively unkillable, tried putting 100% of my elven rage into one and only got him down about half health.
legendary, no mortal weaknesses, gains ~ 10 levels each time he kills me. you get the idea.
time for a full restart -_-

[GDSpectra]

Originally posted by TextualArc:

legendary, no mortal weaknesses, gains ~ 10 levels each time he kills me. you get the idea.
time for a full restart -_-

That sounds like you˙re playing on quite a difficulty there. Which difficulty are you on?

[TextualArc]

its on Brutal, I said so in the OP. sounded like the best level for high intensity game-play without having spongy enemies. kinda ironic now that I think about it.

[GDSpectra]

Pretty ironic alright, since even on Brutal you˙re fighting Gravewalker-rate enemies, only that you too get the damage buff too.

[highfivingbears]

Yeah, on Brutal, it's very easy to get super high level enemies. I've fought level 75's before at level 20, when I first conquered Nurnen. What's even worse is if you get a moderately high level enemy (30 to 40), you shame them so you can recruit... and they turn into a Maniac. And they're suddenly level 70.

Happened to me more times than I'd like to admit.

[GDSpectra]

As someone that played a self-imposed "Butcher Challenge" playthrough on Brutal I totally advise you to not jump into it if you´re not ready to either become an offspring of a cat and Sonic or walk out of the grave more times than you care to admit. Heck, the craziest thing that ever happened to me was 1/2 of the entire Nemesis system attacking me at the same time for good 5-10 minutes, including ones that cheated death ...
... and that happened on Brutal. I didn˙t die, but I definitely was close to death for like 1/2 of the battle, so yeah, the game is NOT kind on that difficulty at all, no sir!

[TextualArc]

well I'll admit that brutal lives up to its name then, but that kind of level scaling is pretty godamn absurd, I just wanted short punchy intense fights with smart AI. fighting enemies that are orders of magnitude more powerful than me isn't what I'm really interested in, at least not from this game lol.
maybe I ought to dial it back to nemesis, since gravewalker sounds like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare, sounds like they just slap some more spongeyness onto the difficulty of brutal.

is the AI still fast and responsive on nemesis, or will they be slow and predictable?
really want to find the sweetspot here for difficulty, the kind of challenge that punishes mistakes without snowballing enemies into being unstopable.

[GDSpectra]

But of course and I totally sympathize with you as well, since both Brutal and Gravewalker are really made for well experienced players ... and I˙m not experienced enough to even try Gravewalker in the 1st place even if I have over 1K hours in this game.
Nope, Brutal makes it easier by buffing your level damage scale as well as a Last Chance. Gravewalker has none of that, it˙s just foes being super buffed and followers being hella nerfed. In both cases, a cat is a bloody must to last more than an hour, seeing how its HP scales with that of foes.

"Slow and predictable" is Normal shtick. Nemesis is square down the middle and believe me, it does punish you for mistakes as well, especially if you find foes that can take 1/2 of your HP with a single strike. Thank everything that it indeed doesn˙t punish as hard as Brutal and Gravewalker do, yet it definitely punishes more than Normal.