I don’t think they are too hard or too easy. I think they have a relatively low margin of error which leads to a steep learning curve. Once you’ve learned it, and are in similarly-educated company, the difficulty drops sharply.
Unfortunately, this makes it intimidating to new players (my son was scared kittenless on his first dungeon run, and that was story mode). It also means that experienced players have an easy time farming and have a rewarding but unfulfilling pastime.
I don’t really like the idea of variable difficulty, but I also don’t like hopping over to the dungeon forum and seeing rant after polarized rant. It is time for a bipartisan solution.
While the exact implementation would need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, some thoughts on how to adjust the content:
Easy mode lowers the magnitude of damage spikes. Also, enemy health and/or armor are dropped to make the fights shorter. In a dungeon fight players are asked to perform with minimal error; shorter fights equate to fewer opportunities to make mistakes. Lower spikes reduce the chance of somebody being downed, which allows everyone to focus on fewer aspects of combat—one player’s ability to learn the fight is not penalized for another’s mistakes. Knockback, fear, etc…. perhaps tone down the frequency but players need to be prepared to deal with these.
Hard mode cannot be established by simply reducing the margin of error—other games have tried this and it generally does not go over well. Adding new tricks doesn’t work well, either, because players will learn them and adapt. A player should not know everything there is to know about an enemy by looking at it—this means that enemies get special abilities at random and the players have no way of knowing what (perhaps a warrior foe gets a burn proc, or a ranged attacker immobilizes. A similar effect could be added by adding weapon-swaps to NPCs—a warrior foe swapping from sword to hammer just went from bleed to knockdown, while the ranger is now doing AE instead of single-target damage. If you’re in the catacombs, for example, there might be a cave-in mid fight. Unlike a foe casting a spell, events of this sort are not announced—the red circle appears as damage/knockdown starts. This doesn’t have to be fatal, or anywhere near it, but a kiter that is knocked down will need to adapt, and quickly.
Obviously, rewards scale with difficulty. A party opting for hard mode should face a genuine challenge and be forced to adapt and be rewarded in excess of what could be done had the same group oblittered easy or normal mode for the same length of time. Easy mode is intended to be a learning mode, so most of the reward should be in the form of knowledge / skill gained.
I don’t particularly like this solution, but there is so much polarized whining that I can’t help but think that something has to be done before it reaches critical mass.