I suppose this is attempt number three to chill this topic, so I guess I have to say me piece…
As was mentioned, this does largely come down to philosophy, so I’ll go into how we got here and why it will not be changing. I will preface this by saying, we do realize this update was going to have contentious changes, not just in terms of difficulty and gameplay but also in some of the changes to how auras function and other QoL features that some players may disagree with. That is precisely why we left v1.1.9.8 available on the beta branch so that our direction for the game does not stand in the way of anybody’s fun.
Now, as for Sunder…
Over time, the game naturally went through power creep, resulting in significant power gains on the player side, but not much of a change on the monster side. As a result, the game had become much, much easier over time. This had the unfortunate consequence of trivializing boss mechanics to the point where face-tanking everything was the expectation, rather than a niche of ultra tanky builds. We had certain tools to combat this, but aside from making one-shots common-place, which I frankly do not think would be all that fun, we could apply resist reduction.
Problem with that is, alongside all that power creep, stacking resistances became easier over time. This is fundamentally a good thing. Resistances are largely mandatory so making that less stressful meant more builds could shine. However, it also trivialized all those resist reduction effects as you could ignore them thanks to overcaps. So one of our main tools of making special attacks threatening was effectively irrelevant.
Now here comes v1.2. The intention was in fact to bring back some of the challenge that was lost. I think we largely achieved that, although there is more work to be done. I actually think Sunder will need a bump on Ultimate difficulty, rather than what you’re hoping for 
.
Someone mentioned that you could lower the difficulty, which you balked at. On the surface, I get it. You played on Ultimate difficulty so why shouldn’t you continue on it? That is understandable and I get the frustration.
That was another aspect of v1.2 though. We rebalanced the lower difficulties and made them viable for endgame content. You can play on Normal or Elite difficulty and complete level 100 content and get (most of) the same rewards. We believe that this lets everyone enjoy the game at their own pace and skill level. You have nothing to prove to anyone else in this regard. The game is primarily singleplayer.
If that is disagreeable to you though, well…I suppose that puts you in the minority we did not serve with some of our latest changes. From our perspective, as the game’s curators, we’re talking about the hardest (ultimate) difficulty of the game. Until Fangs of Asterkarn comes out, that is the hardest game mode available and it’s lost a lot of its original appeal.
I saw the comment about how this is not a build issue, and that is 100% accurate. It comes down to piloting, not the build. The game’s difficulty had decayed so much that properly piloting around major boss abilities became irrelevant. That, to us, was a disservice to the game. I know you disagree with that, but that was our stance/thought process behind it.
As for what came first, Sunder or Evade, that is a bit of a chicken and egg debacle. We knew we wanted to add an evade if we ever did a sequel, but here we were working on some significant improvements for the game and thought…fuck it, let’s throw Evade in too. It’s going to be such a satisfying addition to the gameplay. And if we give people new tools, then we can get more creative with how we bring some challenge back to the game…enter Sunder. It is our answer to face-tanking that does not have to rely on one shots. From our end, it has been largely a resounding success. And given the trajectory of the game’s reviews (recent and overall), it seem that the changes we made to refresh the game have been very well received.
I’m sorry you are not among those satisfied. I hope with more practice, your view on this one small part of a huge patch will turn around.
P.S. Now I hope I am saying this for the final time, please cut it out with the insults, or next time I am coming back with bans. We live in a civilized corner of the internet!