Originally posted by Falaris:

Started a new game, and ran into a pretty hard wall - getting surtling stones with a 2-quality club as best weapon is rough when I meet an elite skeleton AND a ghost, in a tomb guarded by 4 skeletons outside.

It was a deathathlon!

Now, I'm not a great player. I'm not horribad either. But I think that it's fair to say that with such difficulty spikes, some way of altering difficulty would be greatly appreciated.

Instead of giving up and asking for easy mode, you could instead consider a different strategy

Stagbreaker can cheese literally every melee enemy in a dungeon provided you can lead it to the entrance as neither ghosts nor skeletons can climb up the rock platform there.

A level 3 wood shield can block and parry all skeleton attacks, so 1v1 combat should be trivial

Every room in a dungeon has a door, if you wanna take on enemies one at a time you can just only open doors when you are ready to fight them