The problem isn't that all that the "most powerful weapons come from NPCs", in fact my weapons were found in the middle of the Flying Fortresses in the plethora of Gold Chests. The problem is that if you do EVERYTHING, which most people do, you'll hit the point where you're massively overpowered in comparison to the enemies. The enemies go to I think 27 or 28 max in ED, not counting the HoE.
I was Level 35 when I beat ED, and no level was gained in the final dungeon (In fact, I lost more experience than I gained that that point). I had equipment that gave +15 - +20 or more Strength, my damage range was over 1000-1500. The problem is that when you first go through, you want to be overpowered, and you can clearly become it. To compensate for your level, the monsters at the later areas are just hordes, instead of actually being strong. When you have 90 Archers and 35 Mages shooting at you all at once, you're bound to die eventually. And that's how the game went with enemies. Yeah, I could kill enemies in one single mouse click in the last two Flying Fortresses I did, but meanwhile when one Mouse Click removes less than 1% of the enemies in the area, that really doesn't help that much. Quantity over Quality, and there were a lot of enemies, but none of them were strong.
If you truly want a challenge in this game, the requirement is self limitation. You must not use that +100 Melee Damage | +100 Magic Damage| 20-200 Melee | +25 Strength Sword if you want the game to be hard. It's this way for just about every single game, the only difference here is that that requirement is amplified by the fact that the enemies don't keep up with your level if you do everything.
