Do Shrine of Mountain increase overall difficulty?

[Sompatbu]

Latest run I was activated 2 Shrine of Mountain and able to defeat the bosses. Then the later stage feels like it's more cruel, elite monster spawn more than usual, bosses pops up more than it's usually have etc. Is this normal when you activate Shrine of Mountain?

[Boksha]

Can't say I've noticed this. Did you spend a lot of time killing the extra bosses maybe?

[Sompatbu]

Originally posted by Boksha:

Can't say I've noticed this. Did you spend a lot of time killing the extra bosses maybe?

Well I do spend about 4-5 more minutes than usual to kill the boss. Do that make much different?

[Panda]

Makes a huge difference because you've used up an extra 5 minutes plus w/e time it bumps up when you complete the level. If the bosses drop trash loot, like 3x StealthKits or something else that doesn't do much for your damage throughput, you can fall behind the curve pretty easily.

[Panda]

I don't think the shrine increases overall difficulty for the entire game but for that stage it will. At 2x shrine of the Mountain, you are dealing with 3x as many bosses and at least one of them will be an elite of some sort. Unless you have strong boss damage, I would pump the brakes on doing multiple shrines on a single stage because of the time that you're going to lose trying to clear the stage.

[Boksha]

It depends a bit; if you can activate the two shrines quickly and immediately head to the teleport and you're a quick-moving character, you can use the money you get from the teleporter fight to clean out the map; the extra powerups can make up for the lost time.

It seems the question on whether you should spend extra time on anything in this game is the same as "Is doing this going to give me more extra powerups than directly going to the next level will?" (including a little leeway since going to the next map itself will also increase the difficulty)

[Ghaleon]

delying a stage by 5 minutes more than usual will certainly increase overall difficulty by a noticeable amount. Ideally you want to finish each stage in 5 minutes except for maybe the lava stages which are littered with items everywhere making a longer stay worthwhile.