This from the dev stream of the 12th July:
"So the game difficulty has received a pretty substantial overhaul I say, in the early game. So if you're end game focussed, this isn't going to affect you much although it will to a degree. The main thing we did is we felt that the base game has really fallen behind in terms of challenge. Players' skills have gotten much more powerful since the main game came out. Ashes of Malmouth came out and there was a steep jump in difficulty that actually kinda threw people off and one thing Ashes of Malmouth didn't feel harder because people had been playing for a long time and they would want a reasonable challenge. However, if you're a new person coming in and you're playing here and suddenly you're here, that's a bit jarring. So rather than bring that down we thought this is fun, why don't we make this more like this. So Veteran difficulty in particular is much more challenging. Actually I went ahead and updated the tooltip when selecting Veteran because I wanted to make it clear that it's not for the faint of heart any more. Another thing Veteran is providing are 10% experiences. One thing we noticed for a long time and it makes sense that players who want to rush to Ultimate difficulty as quickly as possible don't really want to toggle Veteran because it slows down your progression. You're taking more time with enemies because they're more difficult so it takes you longer to get through the story. So to compensate for that we've added experiences and this experience gain is multiplicative with any experience gear you might be wearing so Lokarr set, any medals that might have experience bonuses on them, that experience apply on top of that.
But yes, updated difficulty. It actually means early game you might actually die if you're not paying attention. It's refreshing frankly. What actually spurred this change was we've been playing with the difficulty skip merits, starting in Ultimate difficulty, and that actually felt like so much more fun than blasting through Normal or Veteran that we thought shouldn't we bring that back, that feeling of actually being challenged all the way through the game instead of being challenged only at the end. So these zombies could actually kill you whereas before you lose like a tenth of your health bar by the time they're all dead. Repositioning might actually make sense. Especially with some of the special abilities that monsters are using. So all those projectile effects that gazers use are split or the wave attacks that are cast, it might actually be worth dodging them now because that's damage you do not want to be taking. In addition, because of these changes, that is kind of where difficulty will change a little bit of end game is where we took all these old vanilla monsters and kinda brought them up to speed with monsters from Forgotten Gods and Ashes of Malmouth. Ashes of Malmouth, Forgotten Gods enemies have much more powerful abilities which is kinda where the spike in difficulty comes about. So we went through 18 hundred records in the database in all and hand by hand updated all those skill numbers to bring them up to par. Which means all those special effects are going to feel much better at the end of the game and that enemies that previously were a bit of a joke might actually pose a question to you again. So in a way more difficult yes, but really it's more consistent So when you run into Forgotten Gods or Ashes of Malmouth enemies you get a stern challenge and when you run into vanilla enemies it's no longer going to be way easier, it's just going to be conducive which I think is even better.
Generally I would say, and this is something that's been playtesting for the last few weeks, the difficulty is much more consistent, much more enjoyable, it actually feels as if the game is challenging you again at all levels of play instead of just being a total breeze on Normal or even Veteran. For the longest time Veteran actually felt like Elite difficulty and even then that wasn't that hard. So we made Elite difficulty closer to Ultimate and Veteran is below that and Normal even below that. So you got Normal, Veteran, Elite, Ultimate instead of Normal, Veteran/Elite, Ultimate."
https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/dev-stream-12th-july-2019-re-patch-1-1-4-0/85232 That said there have been some complaints about difficulty spikes in both Veteran and Normal. What Zantai will do about that we'll have to wait and see. Also bear in mind that heroes/bosses in the base game got a health buff a little while back as well.
