I'm going to take a break before starting on FoV. Another year perhaps, or a thousand.
Different opponents can vary in strength and tactics, and even fighting the same opponent or group, the difficulty can vary significantly based on your own approach. Even just reloading and having the opponents in a different position when you advance can make a huge difference in the outcome of a fight.
In one of the flying fortress I saved and approached a fortification, attacking the demon in the middle, and then having a very hectic fight. Near the end I caught sight of an opponent at the edge of my range off to the left, and waited for it to appear again from behind an obstruction, only to have a skeleton mage rush attack me from behind (thought I cleared that section). After reloading I again approached the entrance, but the demon didn't walk out as far into the opening that time, and was blocked from view before I could attack. After waiting a couple seconds for him to come out from behind a wall section, I again attacked and killed him, but didn't attract nearly the number of opponents I did the first time. I was able to clear the rest of the area a couple opponents at a time; the actual difficulty of each opponent didn't change, but the fight itself much easier.
Awhile ago, in
this topic, Senior Cinco asked if anyone else had experience an automatic difficulty drop after dying and reloading. I've only noticed that happening once, and only had abnormally tough opponents twice (both fixed after quitting the game and loading the same save the next day). In D2:ED several people had a glitch where certain opponents could not be harmed (generally with one of the opponents on the mountain path in the fjords or a couple times with boars); leaving the area and returning would fix the problem.
In DKS I died a few times trying to kill Raze without disabling the regeneration chambers (as I did in D2:ED), and the same in Zagan's cave the first time I tried, and there was no automatic difficulty drop. In the Hall of Echoes I did return to the menu and load the autosave when the game made things easier, where I usually hit A to load a save on the death screen, then load a manual save. I don't know if that could have anything to do with it, though.
