The "Combat Difficulty" needs to be separated into four separate settings.
I decided to try "Very Hard" because the game was getting kind of easy. I expected more rare, deadly spawns and to have to be more careful, but instead what I got was me dealing around half the damage I usually do and enemies doing twice as much. At first glance this seems fine, but...
...the game's not build to handle it. Parrying, and therefore shields that aren't way above the content, stopped working. A fully upgraded bronze buckler and root armor was insufficient for parrying trolls or Elder stomps! In similar vain there wasn't a point in health foods anymore because any significant mob one-tapped me if they landed a hit. The game centered around stamina food and cheese strategies like building a pit around a boss and plinking at them for 20 minutes with wood arrows.
Now, to be fair, the game isn't balanced around this and the devs aren't at fault for how boring the game becomes. There's something that may help, though: separating the "Combat Difficulty" setting broadly into 3 or 4 separate settings, namely the ones this setting affects.
- Damage dealt
- Damage taken
- Star chance
- Spawn rate
I'd be totally okay with the difficulty inherent in being constantly swarmed by large numbers of 2* mobs, but I don't have the choice to make that a reality. I have to deal with either the game on the "default" settings, or having parrying be a non-option if I want to fight huge swarms of deadly mobs.