Spike in difficulty

[Minkles]

Is it just me or at around level 26-27 your character seems to hit a wall and things take longer to kill?.... maybe it's the game telling me I need to upgrade my gear or start crafting haha, I'm really slack in regards to that.

[Vivianite]

theres an in game guide you can access to assist in understanding the crafting system. when you first arrive in the imperial era there's an NPC side quest that encourages you to use that system.

depending on your mastery selection you should consider if you're doing enough damage or taking too much. prioritize looking for high end "base" weapons and equipment. the crafting in this game is incredibly simple;

items have a "forge" rating that's used each time you do a craft. sometimes its small sometimes its not, a "glyph of hope" ensures that at a 25% chance, you dont consume any.
items can have two prefixes or suffixes at any time, upgrading them requires the same shard each time, you can go up to tier 5 in how far this can be pushed.

not all items can use this system like legendaries or otherwise, they use other means that are not accessible at your current level (lv 50+)

[DYNIA]

I didn't feel any spike in difficulty and im not on lvl 100 monoliths, you are doing something wrong

[Odinson]

I think you need to upgrade your gear.
The forge is pretty simple to use early, just try to upgrade the Tier of the affixes you need on your best items. Focus on resistances, vitality and offensive affixes written in the "tags" of the spells you use ("S" to check that in game).
You don't need to upgrade every offensive stat there is, only the ones that scale with the build you play.
Always check on your spellbar the damage output a spell does when you swap an item with another to see if it's really an upgrade for you.

[UmaMusume Enjoyer]

Upgrading your gear will smoothen your journey. Armor, Health, and Resistances can be valuable even by just a little bit early in the game. Buy rune of shattering once in a while to break yellow rarities to get you some affix shards.

The higher area lvl you go, the higher is the necessity to upgrade to even have a solid survivability, and it´s especially true if you´re going blind or not following any leveling guide at all.

[ele]

You can completely skip crafting and just use raw drops until empowered monoliths and should have no issues unless there's something really wrong with your build. That's part of the game though; figuring out how to maximise it's potential.

Using the forge will obviously help if you can't remedy it by changing skill nodes/passives and there's no great harm in doing so. This game really lets you play it your way.

[Katitoff]

You probably encountered enemies resistent to your dmg type, that's all.

Things don't really get any difficulty spike before your first empowered monolith.

[Wild]

Only had a massive difficulty spike in the few levels after I turned my character into void knight, which was the 20-35 range, it felt very weak until I could get a few levels into my new void skills to get better passives.

I'm at around 200 corruption monoliths right now and since then the difficulty felt smooth all the way (I had a respec around 70 to warpath, but I had been saving items that I needed for it and it still felt smooth).