I feel like these enemies should be the minimum difficulty of baseline foes to obtain Legendary Weapons and similar tiered equipment. Its unfortunate that they simply guard (and not even that much) the forge you get obsidian from, meaning you can visit once, get most of what you need, and never return. And well… aside from Tools, the weapons aren’t that great. But I’d like to see this level of difficulty spread out a bit more to more areas.

Though I would prefer the difficulty to be more from how hard the enemies are to deal with rather than the raw damage output they do. One effect I think could work (and this probably is best for bosses… but might work for minions too if done right, is something they used to do in FFXIV.

Its kind of a three strikes and you’re out system. So how it works is when you get hit by a certain special attack that you’re supposed to avoid. Is it does pretty medium damage. But it puts a debuff on you. When hit by the attack a second time, it does heavy damage, not enough to kill a decently equipped (for the area) character, but pretty close. But then you get another stack of the debuff. The third hit is most definitely going to kill pretty much anyone.

What this accomplishes is you get a bit of wiggle room to learn the moveset. You’re not outright punished for getting hit randomly. But you do face consequences if you just try to face tank.

So bosses with that sort of attack would get like what was described. But minions might get one that is a little weaker. So it takes 5-6 hits before its lethal. But since they come in numbers, it would put on the stress a bit.

I think this would work very well with the serpentmen and other similar creatures that might be using an exotic ‘poison’ or cursed effect by their very nature. Could even apply the boss version to the Arena Champion as a means of showing how she’s just ‘crushing’ through your armor and defences.