Monsoon Sky Meadows

[Thug Killadome]

I have 600+ hours in this game and before the update, I was able to obliterate most of the time on Monsoon. Now, getting past this level seems like a complete dice roll. No strat I've tried on vanilla Monsoon seems to consistently get me through this stage without using the artifact teleporter. It's not a question of going too slow--stage 4 is easy enough and so is stage 6; success here feels like it boils down to melting enemies faster than I should be expected to at around 18/20 minutes. I really think this map needs its enemy types looked at, or at the very least fix the AI director so you're not given absolutely insane elites (Overloading Parents/Elders/Brass Contraptions are an instant kill if they so much as scratch you) so early on. This level would be annoying, but way WAY more manageable without the guaranteed killer elite at the start.

This map has absolutely brutal enemy combinations. Nearly everything flies and everything except wisps are complete damage sponges. Each map has 1 or 2 spongy "strong" enemies, but on this map, they're the norm. I really think the bells are the worst offender due to flying off into space whenever you try to fight them--cutting off your field of view for way too long.

PS: nobody likes Horde of Many, seriously

[a e s t h e t i c]

It's way more hard to play on mosoon right now compared to any previous update, but still
adaptively. I needed to make some changes to my runs by implying something new and fresh and without abusive skip to Trial, because in before I didn't need to spend time on map 4 to farm legendary (in more than half of my runs I always tried to rush even map 4, but now it's necessary as I noticed. Another thing is the gilded coast - now I'm always trying to search at least once before map 5 and going in to Bazaar if I can't find any golden shrine on the map. Also, if I see that my items are good or even perfecly fine and survivor fits for Void Field challenge I'm going there before Sky Meadow. I see that from developers was some kind of 'hidden message' to players (especially for monsoon) about stopped time in any hidden realm. And it's not about abusive and dirty strat for Artifact Sacrifice spam and direct skip in to Trials (that I've mentioned before).
I totally agree about some changes to Sky Meadow map, it definitely needs some tweaks about such huge hop in difficulty. No matter how fast or slow is your pace (is it 15 minute mark or 30 on that map) those bs, elite and tough spawns already waiting for you there.
Plus horde of many is still a problem even after patch, because for me they are still spawning once per 2 or 3 runs.

[TrueEvil]

Sky Meadow is seriously unusually hard to the point where I just rush artifact portal to avoid it. And this doesn't make a lot of sense, considering it shares a lot of its enemy spawns with the previous stages. It's not like the Parents or Mushrums are even that dangerous, they're just tanky as hell. And I mean, sure, the stage gets more Scene Director credits to spend on monsters, but that doesn't excuse its all around insane difficulty.

Honestly, I can only find two reasons as to why it might make combat so difficult.
1) The geometry of the stage is highly unfriendly to combat. This is ESPECIALLY bad with the teleporter event, because Worms are the only damn things that spawn (Solus Control Units can spawn but everyone knows they don't like to), and the terrain makes it super hard to hit the Worms. Also they just like to leave for some reason and go off the the other side of the map.
2) There's no fodder-like enemies except for the Lesser Wisps. The lack of Lemurians, Beetles, and Golems means that the average enemy is overall tankier and far more dangerous.