In Oblivion, you only became weaker in comparison to your enemies if you didn't know what you were doing when you made your character, and when you leveled. You had to do it half ass backwards in order to do it properly. You needed to control when you leveled.
Morrowind did things best, imo, where there were areas that you definitely wanted to come back later because you'd get your ass kicked.
WoW's scaling is trash. Not only does it scale with your level, it scales with your item level as well(gear level). You can't go around one shotting creatures until a couple raid tiers in, and overworld mobs that they add in later patches take just as long to kill as a regular one did as a fresh level 70 character. It's stupid, I don't feel stronger.
My problem with your crusade for more difficult content is that it always ends up affecting everyone else. Always. And when they add options, they're defaulted on. See: Karmic dice, which did not exist when I played EA last, yet was on by default when I reinstalled post launch. Many people find the game plenty challenging, and I find that many of the people that don't use super optimized builds and strategies, without considering that the game maybe isn't necessarily designed to be hard.
There's plenty of ways to challenge yourself, as well. I've done it in other games. You could outright delete if you have a tpk. There's your hardcore. I play Skyrim like that. If I die and it's not to a glitch or some kind of bug, I delete the save and start over.
Also, there's been multiple threads on this subject. Y'all should keep it down and stop making new threads on it. Pick one, use that.
I don't know if we have different experiences because we've played to different points (I didn't play much of the shadowlands expansion I sort of quit there) but even when mobs scaled to ilvl I always felt much more powerful as I got better gear. Just because they scale with item level does not actually mean that you can't feel more relatively powerful; it all depends on how the tuning is done. I enjoyed the scaling much more because it made the questing experience better imo. And scaling also does not imply that you can't have areas still gated by more powerful enemies. It all depends on how it's implemented. You could easily have enemies that scale within a 5-7 level range, but then have areas where enemies are at minimum level 10 by default. To be clear I would prefer if other methods were tried first with BG3. But I do think a big problem with the game is that if you explore everything you become very overleveled for a large portion of the game.
Also, this is not a "crusade", don't be hyperbolic. This is people commenting in some threads on a forum. "There are multiple threads on the subject when you should only have one!!!" is a standard you are holding literally nobody else to, because it's completely absurd (How are people supposed to coordinate with total strangers about when topics get created?) I wouldn't mind a dedicated topic, but then you'd probably have to consider dedicated topics for a bunch of other things people are regularly discussing as well.
The problem is that you characterize this as people requesting balance around metagaming or optimized builds, but its' really not. BG2 has some spell combos that notoriously utterly break the game, and I don't think the entire game should be balanced around those. You do *not* have to optimize *at all* to make this game extremely easy even at the highest difficulty level. I didn't optimize on my first playthrough. I stuck with single class builds (except for Astarion, I made him rogue/fighter.) I disregarded better equipment if I didn't think it looked cool. And the game STILL ended up being very easy. As for self challenge, here's the rules I've been toying around with so far:
1. No consumables
2. No scrolls used except by casters
3. No haste
4. No ridiculous stat-increasing gear
5. No gear that does things like "adds an extra die of damage to all your damage rolls"
6. None of the absurd healing synergy gear that you can get early on
7. No legendaries, period
8. No tadpole powers
We'll see how it goes, I think I need to get to higher levels to really feel the impact of these rules. But I shouldn't need to lock myself off from huge chunks of the game to have some sort of challenge at the *highest* difficulty. It is absolutely a reasonable request to Larian to have some sort of difficulty level above Tactician and I really do not understand your opposition to it. I mean you give the example of "Karmic Dice", but ... that is *not even a difficulty thing*, and can *totally be toggled off*, contradicting all your arguments about how any discussion about difficulty is going to result in changes that you can't toggle off. People asking for more difficulty are not a bunch of "whiners" or "metagamers", and it comes up in multiple threads because *plenty of people who play relatively 'normally' have noticed the problem as well.* Nobody is asking for the lower difficulties to go away, nobody is saying that if you are currently satisfied with the difficulty that you should be forced to play at higher difficulty, but if you currently find the highest difficulty too easy you have *nowhere to go.*
