I'm in a similar boat - my friends and I love this game and we've really come to master the various fights and builds with a hefty amount of meta knowledge and testing. We feel that the tactician mode is far too easy (not from a boastful standpoint - we SHOULD be able to beat it easily if we have that much practice). My point is that many of us who love the game and have played a crazy amount of it search desperately through mods to find anything that makes the game very difficult despite having all that experience. We even have self imposed rules.
- We don't allow more than 3 characters
- We don't allow lone wolf
- We don't allow 5 of the more broken spells
- We don't allow prebuffing fights
...and several others, you get the idea.
SUGGESTIONS FOR MORE DIFFICULTY
Overwhelmingly we feel that too much experience is provided. We feel getting to level 4 or 5 is a fine pace but beyond that we have to actively avoid getting experience just to not outlevel everything. This doesn't feel good. I think that if there was some box we could click on the difficulty setting that said "1/2 XP GAIN" before you started a game, it would SOLVE SO MUCH. We want to feel like we need to scour the land for every drop of xp - showing true mastery of the game by completing a larger percentage of the quests and exploring a larger percentage of the game.
Increased Hit Points can help. Although usually at higher difficulties our parties focus on infinite CC loops and so more hit points aren't that hard to deal with.
Teleport to players. I love the terrain advantages (especially with height) in the system but I think it is too easy. Throw some spider goop on a pack of melees and a chest in front of a ladder and then fall asleep while you kill everything at zero threat. I wonder if it would be possible to have a large AP cost spell that allows enemies to move to a player. Just a thought.
Lower gold availability - and reduce the value of charm arrows sold to merchants. We buy every arrow/arrow head and use an infinite supply of honey in act 2 to have ridiculous amounts of gold. A lot of the merchant farming comes from having so much gold, we constantly refresh merchants to find that slightly better item. It is tedious. In earlier runs when we didnt have enough gold we didn't spend nearly so much time shopping. It was actually more fun not having access to everything all the time.
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I realize your fanatical players are a smaller percentage of your player base - but we are also the percentage of your base that keep coming back, participate in the community and bully our friends that haven't heard of these games into buying and playing with us. We are the ones that vote in online polls, we are the ones that write reviews, walkthroughs and guides. As a nearly 40 year old gamer that has experienced 100s of games, I can say that Divnity 2 is nearing the absolute top of more entertaining games - and falls short ONLY on available difficulty level. This is legitimately the ONLY thing keeping it from the absolute highest ranks of multiplayer rpg. Mods help but Larian should have an INSANE difficulty that provides a standard to all of us.
Thanks for hearing me out!