What happened to the difficulty in this game?

[Max Shadow]

So I started playing this game before Harbringers. My first character was a Runemaster Mage. I remember I had complaints about the difficulty at first (it was too easy), but in the second half of the campaign, things started to get more challenging. I remember struggling to get past some areas and bosses, enemies killed me too easily. It was fun, I like challenge.

Fast forward to today. I had a Druid that got moved to Legacy. I gave him another try, and noticed things are quite different now. I overleveled the area I was in by like 10 levels. Everything died easily, my character would barely take any damage. So I start skipping normal mobs and just do the quests. After a few hours I end up in a zone that's like 4 levels above my character, and I can still kill stuff without much trouble. Nothing feels challenging this time...

My theory is that one of these things is happening:
- The druid is OP for some reason, or maybe my build has too much survivability
- The game has an excess of powerful loot now

I'm inclined to think the second item is the worst offender. I'm level 45, and all my equipment slots are legendary or unique. There are too many drops with fancy colors now, so much so that I don't see the point of using anything yellow or below. Since loot doesn't have levels in this game, getting a unique feels like getting endgame gear, as those items can be useful even much later in the game. Kinda feels like the loot system is a mess now, you get access to powerful gear too early in the game.

And please, don't tell me monoliths are the real game, where the real challenge is and blah blah. I know that. I'm just saying that it feels like the campaign is getting increasingly easy and boring with each update, and since you can't skip it easily, having to play it again for every character is getting extremely tedious. Getting bigger numbers is not my definition of fun, challenge is my kind of fun, and this game seems to have none.

[Stormsong]

Well, you don't want to hear about Monoliths, so skipping that bit: the campaign has never been particularly difficult. Nothing has happened to the game's campaign difficulty, AFAIK. It was simply never really there to begin with. Majasa was a tough cookie for a while, but the playerbase and thus general sentiment has largely caught up to her now. So, she's seen as pretty manageable too.

My guess, you're a better player than you were. Grats on the growth.

[Ravenkid9266]

Not seen a lot of people compare the druid to the RM favorably, so there is that to consider.

Having said that welcome to LE where your level provides the overwhelming majority of your player power, especially in the campaign thanks to how the area scaling works.

[Ayk-]

LE was and is an easy game though, from start to finish.
I guess the only difficulty is pushing to extreme high corruptions and not fall asleep while doing that.

[Purromi]

difficulty of arpg/hns games is based on your RNG and pool of items you get. Barely single good weapon makes a strugling run to trivalizing entire campain run.

[Horse Glue™]

I hope they add a feature similar to Grim Dawn's 'Veteran Mode'. Added challenge for repeat playthroughs of the Campaign would really do wonders.

[JIK]

if you get lucky you can get overpowered legendary items early and more you play more chances you get then the weavers will items that were also added so leveling items have been upgraded haven't played that much lately so the 90+ areas could be quite challenging still.