Originally posted by oybl606:

After
So what I can see is the difficulty jumps are the same. You get killed by trolls, get chased trough half the island by Elite Draugr, don't stand a chance against two star Draugr archer in the crypts. If you encounter an impossible enemy, you run away.
Crafting progression is also consistent: iron armor at the start is almost the same as upgraded bronze armor. The forge gets new upgrades after you enter the swamp, so two biomes.

Originally posted by oybl606:

After
I think that one year waiting for the update is the cause for all the hate I see. We became so good at fighting in old biomes, that we are all now in shock, when we get our ass kicked again :)

Nope and nope.
If you only comparing monster power it may be so. What makes Mistlands a good-looking pile of bad game design is overall composition,

Hard hitting fat monsters -ok
Difficult to navigate landscape -ok
lowered visibility - ok
all of the above simultaneously - fail

When you enter new biome one of key means to survival is you footwork. And all biomes are flat or have flat enough and large enough surface to effectively kite or trade blows. Even swamp generate dry big spots often enough. Mistlands offer you a limited vision and terrain so uneven, that most of the time you have a "democratic" choice of facetank or kite with high probability to fall down. It will be usually in water(where you can`t fight but mobs can and will) or you fall down in crevice (with a high chance that you can`t jump out fast enough due to stamina) or you just fall down and loose two thirds of hp(bonus points for aggroing more bugs)

Add to this extremely bad vertical fighting mechanics in Valheim... fights stop being fun and challenging and start being frustration festivals.

But there is more!
Bugs have an attack pattern ensuring that if you encounter more than one -you re pretty much done for if your bone mass on CD. That`s especially so when you have a bunch of seekers. fast attacks + fast recovery from stagger and you will take hits. Alot. To make things worse, they are fast, and even worse, they are flying and have aerial attack. So kiting them is a very risky and annoying thing. Draugs have slow and very distinct attack animation, Wolves have loooooong stagger time, fulings have attack pattern with a lot of running around.

And even more, though It`s not about difficulty, It`s about annoyance. Igg wood, constantly falling in water, Insane mob damage to structures. horrible fog eliminating range of moving AND stationaly wisps, brain-dead concept of sap gathering (nono- you can`t tele that. Go and waste time to deliver it by foot or by boat) and so on,

They did a really good job design and idea-wise. But it looks like on the mechanics part they just slapped crap together and deployed.