Answers to posts first:
Not really… Nemesis during campaign is plainly spoken nonsense.
Getting random 2 LP uniques… or Legendary items during the campaign? As if it wasn’t easy enough already. Plus the random exalted items.
What was the thought process there? ‘Oh, our campaign is too easy and too boring… let’s fix the boring and give rewards making it even easier!’ while failing to address the boring aspect anyway? 
Overall evasion design in ARPGs is atrocious, always has been.
Evasion should be a combination of damage reduction and of complete avoidance. Far less avoidance, far more often reduction. Less reduction then Armor at the upside of total nullification at times.
Instead for some reason devs think that ‘non 100% avoidance of damage but zero reduction’ is a viable game design mechanic if without reduction you can get one-shot. It never was… and never will be.
All games where evasion works is based on non insta-death hits… or as a bonus to even avoid insta death hits. So pure upsides, no significant downsides for not going into other mechanics. A bonus at best.
HARD disagree there. The deadliest mechanics from enemies are DoT based, especially in weaver content. Then we also have the Julra puddle for example, or the friggin ice-cat frost breath. Those tick per frame and do ridiculous amounts of damage, utterly unbalanced for the defensive measures available in the game.
They’re meant to be avoided… albeit with the chaotic combinations happening they sometimes can’t unless you play carefully… which let’s be fair… it’s a power-fantasy Hack&Slash game, you expect to avoid stuff at times but definitely not to be ‘cautious’ overall because there could be 2 tanky enemies upfront where the combination will likely cause you to get hit by one of the ongoing attacks with a high chance unless you are so OP offensive wise that you just delete em before that happens.
Having not 100% crit avoidance or close to 100% crit reduction is inherently a glass cannon, even with massive defensive measures. There’s enough hits incoming which have high damage potential, and since a crit is double damage it means you’ll have half EHP towards that simply. 50% less survival potential.
That’s why it’s mandatory.
I mean… it can happen. I got a T7 skill affix on a chest piece during the campaign already, that’s something I usually farm… 50-100 hours for as a MG player. So it’s kinda weird that it happens that early. Bad base? Pfff… who cares if it’s the right one, that’s basically your unique chest slam with a guarantee… and unique chests offer Damage Reduction options, which are the most powerful defensive measures in the game.
Block is usually a auxiliary mechanic on top of already existing mechanics. Evasion is hated to a fault, nobody likes it since any HC player even says ‘you’ll sooner or later die, just when is the question’ and Suppression is generally a mandatory 100%.
So same issues. When your Archer goes for Armor or ES rather then Evasion something is at fault with the core defensive measures. And since Armour in PoE is also a really weird design everyone goes towards ES if they can… since that at least works, always.
From white mobs? Or from rare mobs? Or from Minibosses?
Where exactly do you draw the line? There’s a big difference saying ‘no matter what’ and having attention be given to attention worthy foes.
It actually is… but for different reasons then were mentioned, see above.
If you can get one-shot in 300c then it’s an issue. And for Evasion classes that’s exactly the case. A mage survives because of Ward… we don’t even need to speak about a Sentinel, they yawn and loose 15% of their EHP while you’re flat on the ground.
It’s the sheer disparity happening between builds and their defensive options.
You can’t sustain through a one-shot, it’s worthless.
Fitting equipment for your class related to the content you run should provide immunity against one-shots against everything besides challenging foes. Hence specific strong rares and minibosses. Nothing else should have the ability to down you in one hit.
Because if it does then it makes no difference between running 300c and 30000c… because as long as your offenses work it’s the exact same gameplay. Defenses matter for a reason.
Remind the weaver mobs about that please, and the champions I think something is bugged there with the necrotic damage though… it seems ‘off’. But I can’t put my finger down on what happens. Weird sudden one-shots where they shouldn’t happen.
If that’s great design then we’re lost plainly spoken.
A game should provide you with a fitting challenge from start to end. It starts low, it raises gradually. No spikes, just a steady steady rise.
LE doesn’t do that yet well.
People loved the Wolcen campaign… and the game failed nonetheless because of other issues. But the campaign feeling? Nice! If you ignore the power-scaling issues.
People also love the PoE 2 campaign… 1.0 mind you, not 1.1 where it’s just a nonsensical slog. Too little crafting materials and too few drops making the progression not smooth enough… but otherwise great!
So don’t come with that hogwash, just doesn’t hold true.
20-30 as a first time player likely.
There is no functional difference between the campaign and end-game in LE, the only difference is just how much backtracking happens, as well as enemy density. That’s all.
Proper adjustments to campaign can provide a proper feeling, but that needs to be done still and hasn’t to date.
Ignoring campaign is a bad choice… it’s about making the campaign enjoyable to go through, not exhilarating or anything… just not a braindead experience from start to finish.
Generalizations really do well!.. not.
That’s bollocks by design, because I would like to try out a Meteor mage and play that up… or a Black Hole mage for example… both on my list of builds I wanna mess with since I enjoy the playstyle itself.
Still I wanna have at least a proper miniscule challenge presented. If a mage without defenses can facetank every… single… boss in the campaign the something’s off. I can’t in Torchlight Infinite, I can’t in PoE 1, I can’t in PoE 2, I can’t in D4… only in LE I can first-time playing without any knowledge about character building, no guides and randomly slapping something together. It’s really hard to create any build during campaign which is actually challenged in any way mind you… outside of Majasa and Lagon… because sure, why throw random overly mechanical bosses at a player which never has been challenged at all before, clearly a ‘fun’ experience, right?
As for my own 2 cents now:
Difficulty is too easy. The reasons are plenty though.
The first: Scaling of enemies in the campaign is not at all ‘smooth’. Power scaling is ‘lagging behind’ and has never been adjusted since the times when the game didn’t even have exalted items… not to speak of LP uniques, the new uniques which are extra powerful during the leveling phase or the awful implementation of Nemesis during the campaign giving you random OP freebies ‘just cause’.
The second: Itemization itself. Even pre release LE suffered from scaling issues, always has. At Act 4 usually the character managed to simply outpace content vastly unless you were either extremely unlucky or just randomly added low tier Affixes to your build instead of focusing on singular high tier ones giving vastly more value for the same buck. Using a good base with a single T3 melee damage Affix on it will carry you basically through the whole game… which is… really bad and shouldn’t happen. The amount of influx the base changes over the course of the campaign makes is miniscule comparatively to simply realizing which Affixes will benefit you… which is a core knowledge of every experienced looter Hack&Slash player willing to take actually a look at base damage, damage effectiveness and options for ‘more’ modifiers as well as crit. Comparatively a new player will see ‘Ohh… shiny 60% increased damage!’ while having absolutely nothing it scales from and then wonders ‘where did I go wrong?’. The extreme disaprity in power from different affixes is glaring, and the availability of the more powerful scaling measures shouldn’t be available as early as they are.
The third: New mechanics being implemented retroactively in already existing established content. Be it the LP mechanic which can happen to be useful early on with a lucky key drop… legendary items through nemesis, exalted early items through Nemesis or even the loot lizards during campaign. Those are all ‘unfitting’ mechanics and actually supposed to either only exist in end-game or demand adjustments to drop-rates and power of items overall earlier on. If the sweetspot of getting a ‘mediocre amount of power’ happens by dropping 50 rares every 5 levels for example then ramping that up to dropping 150 rares will obviously mean as a player you’ll be vastly more likely to get a ‘good’ drop related to the current content. While formerly equipment was a mishmash of items but ‘the best you could get’ it went ever further to becoming more and more possible to tailoring it to your needs. Obviously that causes content which is never adjusted to become easier.
This also goes for stronger variants retroactively implemented. Normal Monoliths were easy… now we got weaver content which drops superior versions of idols which give your build more power.
I think those 3 points are the core reasoning as to why we got to where we are currently and why it’s seen as ‘far too easy’. Partially it’s simply power creep retroactively added in existing content… partially it’s design decisions of EHG which are simply not positive for the game and partially it’s a lack of maintenance of content. The last point especially is a very serious issue the game has suffered from since years and EHG has so much catching up to do that a ‘polished feeling’ will at best be achieved in 2 years if they start with the next Cycle.
