Why are the bosses so insanely strong? (Coop Hardmode)

[Schizophriend]

Me and 2 other guys have been playing this game for about 3-4 hours now, we decided to start on Hard difficulty, since there's also a Very Hard one so we assumed hardmode wouldn't be too bad.

We picked Shax, Willow and Cormag. We can deal with regular enemies fairly well, even tho they kept massacring us at first since they deal so much damage, but with some gear and upgrades we managed to beat everything until now.

Then we arrived at the first boss Hiammel. It always starts out the fight with its poison spray attack that can literally oneshot our entire party if we get hit by it multiple times. The thorns felt almost undodgable as well. At the end, we found a way to cheese the boss with Willow by just standing at the edge of the upper left platform, where nothing could hit her and she just kept throwing roses at the boss until it died.

Now we're at the 2nd boss, the Faungod. It feels literally impossible to beat. We are level 9 (which seems normal at this point), have some decent gear, but the boss has an attack that feels literally undodgable and does like 400 damage to everyone. It's where he charges up and makes tall pillars of purple flames erupt from the entire floor. You can't jump over it, there's no safe spaces in between and he uses it quite frequently. I have no idea what to do. We even tried equipping gear that boosts our magic defense but it barely does anything.

I feel like we'd need to level up at least to level 20 or something just to survive for more than a minute. The other problem is that in coop mode, the gold is split up equally among all players so we can barely afford anything from the shop.


Is there anything we're doing wrong? It feels like the game shouldn't be THIS hard, since we're not even playing on the hardest difficulty. We could just start over on Normal difficulty but still... or could it be that hardmode is intended for something like a New Game+? I have no idea...