heres my personal take on this problem, it feels like mistland was balanced around two serious things, ONE magic and TWO co-op because with magic it becomes much more tolerable than before as a meele user without magic and despite having Q4 padded armor (which is 100 armor, on par wit the cartapaste armor) and as previously stated the fog of war is a serious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ problem given how quick the mobs are to notice you but you cant see them back and given the most common enemy is by far the most dangerous being so heavily melee based and can easily come in groups, it makes it an absolute nightmare to solo, the plains were doable because you could see these enemies appearing beforehand so you could get the jump on them with a bow but here you have little to no room to work with, cant see them for crap and the dungeons... my god the dungeons it was gruesome it forced me to cheat given how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard it was compared to the plains but the moment i got magic it was... too easy like it was no problem afterwards because 90% of the mistland enemies that ARE a problem dont have range and thus makes it easy to counter sure theres still things that have range but you got ♥♥♥♥ like a magic shield, frost staff and AOE fire attack, meanwhile non magic users have no AOE, a regular shield that you have to hope to parry with, and a crossbow or a bow that doesn't do ♥♥♥♥ given their hard windup unlike the staffs.
TLDR magic was seemingly built around mistlands no problem but meele was not, additionally most of this feels like it was made for co-op and not solo