Originally posted by Gunther Ultrabolt Novacrunch:

I disagree Ballerhans.

If you have poison resist potion (and i you are in the swamp you should always have one running) then the swamp is not "terribly unbalanced" as you put it ( my opinion).

Killing a lox in leather at range, as dumb as they are isn't unbalanced. Try melee range w/ a lox (or two or three) then have a couple Fulings come from behind a rock with a few deathsqueeters added for flavor. Plains can be rough.

Plains makes Swamp look like a cake walk (which is appropriate since Plains are 2 biomes after swamp).

Iron isn't hard to mine. They've made it much easier. Mud piles just break apart now. You can also use a wishbone in the swamp and find mudpiles outside of crypts.

I don't see anything unbroken or unbalanced about Iron vs dark metal at all.

Plains are quite easy. No stamina penalties, goblins even with stars are easy to kill because of comfortable number of hitpoints. The abominations have only 2 weaknesses, one of them requires melee actions. My character dies after 2-3 hits and I'm not able to make any attack because of some kind of daze effect in melee range. With my bow I have to shoot 40-50 fire arrows to bring it down. Maybe I'll clear the mountains first to get some frost arrows, but it's all still upside down/unbalanced in this game then, either you understand or not. Any biom after swamp is significant easier.(in my opinion:))
I've killed over 50 abominations with iron gear and equally leveled food/mead in an earlier play through, that's not comparable at all and it was still an annoying waste of time without any challenge nor reward(the root armor is far too cheap, it could cost 100 roots per part to give killing abominations more meaning).