Loxmere spawns on Elite and Ultimate
Oh man just a few days ago I started a HC Veteran Night Blade (my frist HC character so no gear, no blueprints etc). What a fight it was when I came across 4 hero monsters in
the Foggy Bank cave 
And I can’t say NB is a particularly HC friendly class. But that was fun. Looking forward to those totems encounters!
I love the totems. I think everyone is gunna dig em.
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Question to the OP: did you played in single player or multiplayer? Because the latter would explain everything. Multiplayer is unbalanced in favor of the player (more people multiplies the damage output greatly and more targets for the enemies) and the entire game is balanced around single player.
When making criticisms of the difficulty, it’s best to say which mode you played because there’s an huge gap of difficulty between both.
Difficulty is subjective so we can talk about it for ages because you cannot win arguments in the internet 
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Only because I didn’t feel like starting every sentence with “In my opinion”, “How I feel is that”, or so on. I did try to make it clear that I’m simply talking of my experiences, but I guess I didn’t make that clear enough. I’ll pay more mind to that the next time.
I killed the Mad Queen for the first and only time on November, 2018, on normal vet HC. I know since I happened to remark about it on Discord. Apparently I did almost die to her Leech aura thing since I had ignored the forum’s advice and ventured to her with exactly 0% Life Leech resistance.
IIRC I didn’t figure out any clear patterns in the fight that e.g. signaled when her aura is going up in a way that I could interrupt her from casting it, or that let me dodge the poison cloud. For all I can remember I just ran around her drinking healing pots and healing from Wendigo Totem while hitting her.
You sure can make bosses artificially difficult by just having them deal out massive damage. But is that actually interesting? The answer to such a boss is often not so much about learning the attack patterns, timing your skills correctly, and utilizing all your resources, but more about grinding for stuff that lets you resist the boss’ damage. I love situations where the answer is that I must play better. Or use a different skill. Or combine my skills differently. Or learn something useful about the monster’s attack patterns or AI.
Never fought the Sentinel, but when I now look at a YouTube video of him being defeated, it looks similar to other hard bosses - you hit them until you need to run away to heal and then you hit them more. Can that breath attack be dodged? It seems to follow the character in this video. That burst he does seems to happen really fast and without warning, so idk if that can be reacted to either. But yeah I’d be cool with trying him with the HC character I used to finish the normal campaign.
I pay a lot of attention, read the forums, discussions, and so on.
Both, about fifty-fifty. Mad Queen I killed alone for what that’s worth.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame really, I mainly play together with my friends nowadays and play almost nothing solo.
Point!
Yeah, I should have focused less on difficulty and alluding to difficulty. This is not insomuch about difficulty as it’s about how the fights against bosses and mobs feel - they feel simplified and not very engaging, at least over my playtime.
There are clear patterns and she has an attack rotation. Memorizing her attack pattern makes the fight much easier and you can dodge most of her attacks.
She is weak to kiting builds, so you perception of her is only based around killing her with a kiting build. Melee builds have a much harder time against her.
This pretty much applies to all bosses where some build types destroy some of them, while those same bosses can be a pain in the ass to other build types. This makes discussion of difficulty much harder because what may be hard for someone can be really easy for other person that played a different build.
The breath attack is pretty hard to avoid but the only thing it does is reduce your damage. Every other attack he uses can be dodged easily.
I think I was playing a two-handed melee shaman. Granted, Wendigo Totem felt like an extra-easy mode over normal vet.
This is where you’re wrong.
Raising bosses’ health and damage has a purpose. At low levels, those values are accordingly low, so you can kill them without keeping track of their attacks, auras, buffs and debuffs. At higher levels, those values are so high that tanking the attack is not realistic. So you have to watch out for the telegraphs and adjust your actions. There’s a reason why everyone talks about MQ’s screech, Zantarin’s hand wave, Kuba’s breath, Grava’s projectile, Aleks’s meteor…in Ultimate, the vast majority of builds can’t tank those attacks, and have to evade them.
Not sure what exactly I am wrong in. I didn’t say you can’t raise bosses’ health and damage.
I’m unsure if I’ve fought other of those but MQ. MQ’s screech is basically just a signal to stop hitting her for a while - and, like you say, must first get to Ultimate before you actually risk dying to it.
Some of the newer superbosses look pretty interesting. Shame that they are such a small part of the game and are mostly in the expansions or the super late game dungeons.
I see. Grim Dawn doesn’t bring that feeling back to you at all? I mean everyone is different, so I respect your opinion. For me GD brought me immediately to that ancient long lost happy place I’d thought gone forever- the very same one as when I first played Diablo 2, only modernized!
I’ll never forget walking out of Devils Crossing for the first time, at that first house to the left and having zombies crawl up out of the ground. It was like D3, with a D2 facelift and improved depth. Clearing that first shrine under burial hill, coming to understand it was not just my class that I could utilize to customize my guy, but also these devotions??? Are you serious?! And my mind started racing. I got this surge of excitement!
Then when I hit level 10, wait a minute I can dual class on top of all this?!
That’s where I got hooked, sucked right in. So for me I guess it’s more about the potential for build complexity and unique functions that can be attained. My drive to keep playing was just to experiment with all the class combinations and Devotions and see what kind of weird things I could do. Something Diablo 2 touched on ever so briefly, that I’d hoped they would expand on in 3, but they didnt… When I found it here, I fell in love straight away. All the other stuff was just added bonus I guess.
But that’s me, not you. So yeah if you don’t feel that drive, like there’s no reason to push to higher levels and further game progress… maybe it’s just not for you. But you’re missing out, I cant help but say it. Lots of game changing gear and complexities aren’t available until higher levels. For me another huge milestone was finally building a character of my own design (Full tilt HP Regen warder) that was able to survive all the base game content through all difficulties and hit revered status with all the factions, when Malmouth released, this improved all my experimentation efforts due to the +100% XP gain potion only available if reputation is revered with Malmouth Resistance faction! Then I just went hog wild!!!
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IT is actually possibile if you play pets 
I see Diablo 2 is brought up and I often find myself wondering how many people are mixing up starting out in Diablo 2 versus starting out in Diablo 2 with /players 8. For me at least, I always played with that command on.
Because without that command, Normal difficulty was actually incredibly easy.
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I am not sure every pattern becomes clear from a single encounter, regardless, she is not easy to defeat with 0 deaths on a first try, so congrats 
then give up on Diablo-like games and play Souls-likes instead. That is not what they are about (gear and build are more important than the player’s skill), and they should not be either
If sounds like you want player skill to play a bigger role and therefore attacks to be telegraphed better to allow for it - even though one could argue that showing an area on the ground the player should not be in as otherwise the attack will kill him does not require more player skill either…
at this high level that is true for all bosses in all games
not sure, but it does not kill you. You can dodge the meteors
you were the one saying the game does not require attention
I think I notice a pattern here and maybe that is because you play HC, but it seems you look everything up before you encounter it instead of simply coming across it. That obviously removes some of the challenge as you know what to expect.
Well you should enjoy the vast majority of Grim Dawn’s Bosses then. I can probably name something notable or worth watching out for on just about every major Boss encounter throughout the story (e.g. Krieg, Darius, Karroz, Lucius) or similar transitional Bosses (e.g. Amalgamation, Ekket’Zul).
Several of them have attack patterns that can be observed and learned, attacks that are fatal but are telegraphed and can be dodged, deal a diverse range of damage types that you have to defend against and so on. Even the Nemeses and hidden encounter Bosses like Rashalga or Sentinel have tactical aspects to their fight.
It is really impressive how they have designed these encounters and so many more so that they’re more than just “Hold LMB until dead”.
Diablo 2 and balance lmao 
or all these old arpgs… none were balanced at all
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I don’t think “balance” is really a subject worth much talking of with ARPGs without defining what it means.
I don’t think anyone here suggested that D2 was, somehow, balanced. 
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I cant believe I never even knew about this.
well, grim dawn is designed to feel old school like diablo 2. which means earlier part of the main campaign is very easy for veteran arpg players. players need to actively find their own means to increase difficulties of earlier parts of the game (like zantai using -player8 command in diablo 2 for more challenging levelling gameplay).
maybe op feels burnt out from the levelling process in gd?
in that case i suggest op play other games for awhile to relieve the boredom from the chores of levelling in gd.
or try playing coop with the serious intention of levelling as fast as possible to reach ultimate and tackling all the exciting end game challenges. coop makes most of gd content much more easier imo. since players’ resistance reductions and damage inputs to enemies will be so high that many enemies resistances can plunge so deep into yugol’s abyssal domain of negative numbers. Malmouth resistance’s +%xp potion will fasten the process. though malmouth faction reputation need to be grinded 1st.
i find that most of vanilla grim dawn experience to be somewhat easy (it is to make sure every players can enjoy the main story of grim dawn in normal/veteran). without crucible, AoM and FG, grim dawn 's challenging contents are pretty limited. maybe crate will make gd 2 more in line with what op suggest right from the earlier parts of the game. like torchlight 2 elite difficulty (and low level enemies critting players randomly.) and dark souls (taking the wrong path to the graveyard of skeletons from the start)
To op.
Your post refers to main game only. You describe things in a way that reveals you know little of the game’s more advanced stuff. Try Crucible speedrunning or deep SR climbs. It has all you say the game lacks and more. In fact, imo Crucible speedrunning is one of the most skill (and theorycrafting knowledge) demanding thing ever made in aRPG genre.
But it doesn’t not mean you are wrong. Main game lacks challenge. But devs said no to implementing Nightmare Mode in main game long ago.