Am I missing something with the trolls

[Not John Malkovich]

Is there something that is supposed to make trolls easier?

I've been mostly breezing through the game up until Melm.
When you first get to the area with the Trolls, you get a warning stating they're super strong and you should go back to Dronya.
OK, fine. Go back for Dronya cut scene.

... trolls are still there and still regularly one shot individual puppets. And often breaking them in the process, so it's back to the well to get recovered.

Most of the party is like level 28. I did some alchemy to beef up whatever weapons and armors I had, but throwing 8 armors into a 9th one just to get a useful item didn't seem like it was producing much and quickly ran me out of stuff to combine.

Is there something I'm supposed to be doing to make them not hit like a freight train?

[SleepingSeaweed]

Well, that's how it is. They're by far the toughest enemy at that point, and also don't give any special rewards so they're not really worth fighting. They just move back and forth in a line, and from what I've seen don't aggro you unless you're standing on a spot they're trying to move to, so they won't chase you.

Just keep an eye out for purple-eyed enemy symbols and they're quite easy to avoid, they all pack some nasty stuff from here on, though it's still not unreasonable to fight them.

If you do want to fight the trolls (there's an event battle with one you have to do later), you can blow them up quite easily in 2 turns without being overleveled, by using covens with marginal mazes to cast donum, such as the red goat pact or peco's pact and use their fire donum. Red goat pact is particularly good in melm since red sheep strike is a powerful blunt attack for a very low DP cost.

It's just that trolls hit your whole brigade and do a lot of status effects, so there's a lot of chances for things to go wrong (mainly crit gore, or not being able to move due to startle or poison). If you have one or two peer fortress dual wielding katars they'll help take some pressure off the party, just make sure to fortify coven or they won't actually guard other puppets.

Lastly, it's not really worth fusing armors. You can do it with weapons since you 1: use a bunch of different weapon types, and 2: it actually gives decent stats. For armor, everyone more or less use the same item types, and anything you no longer need is also unlikely to provide any useful stats.

[Dead Parrot]

The monsters with the big scary icon and the crazy music are monsters that you are suppose to try and avoid. Every zone has these starting with melm. There are strategies to fighting the trolls, and of course you can always overgrind to kill them, but for your first play through running into those kinds of monsters is suppose to be a punishment for not paying attention or being cautious enough.

when you've gone through the story more and are back tracking to find specific quest items or end game treasure it will make more sense why these strong monsters are here.

[Shunsatsu]

iirc you unlock a petition that lets you become invisible to enemies so they don't chase you (running into them still starts the battle), but in any case, you are supposed to avoid them and not battle them (even the story tells you this), not until you are at a much higher level. It works similar to a stealth game in these sections, where you you wait for these strong enemies to walk past you before going from cover to cover to avoid engaging them in battle.