I agree.  Plarium over-tuned Sintranos so now they over-corrected and under-tuned Grim Forest.  I haven't fought any of the bosses yet, but based on the rest of the content, I am not worried at all.  I am soloing most non-boss stages with Marius, Thor, Krok'Had and Tholin.  If my draft doesn't include one of them, it takes a bit longer and requires 2-3 toons.  The newest end-game content should offer more of a challenge.

Tend to disagree cursed city is much the same in difficulty, the difference being you get stuck in the former due to the silliness of not having the required champs, whereas the latter gives you a chance to redraw champs, it is how cursed city should have been. 

They could definitely rework Sintranos with lessons learned from Grim Forest, but I do think the difficulty level of Hard Soulcross is higher than that of Hard Grim.

I much prefer easier to start and add more difficulties later than the alternative.  Issue really is no matter what they do some group of people would complain. 

I still haven't started hard yet lol.  I assumed it was going to be at least cursed city difficult. 

Who are must picks?

Who are good champs that you would leave on bench?

Do I need to finally gear up the turtles or any other champ released in last year? 

Procrastination about to end as I think I'll run out of normal stages soon 😆 

for  me  block  buffs  / block debuffs / heal reduction /  hp  burn / freeze   .  if you got those  bases covered you golden  ;)

for me  odin and armanz  allowed me to  secure  wave content and  Boss  adds  by  stun .  which   allowed  me to focus directly on the   mini bosses

The  above  mentioned will all  allow  you to  deal with the main  bosses  

oh  and  some  good  healers/shielders can  help for unique scenarios to stay alive.  

If you want  champions  mvp s   well  that might be a  great thread

bingo

also it still does feel quite fun which is a departure from normal raid things :)

turtles i really found only useful against the gold plated jerk goblin, though i could see use for leo and donnie elsewhere 

ran this though i can see where i should make tweaks 

i

PG pretty much nailed it.

You want at least a couple heal blockers, or mimic is gonna give you a very hard time. A few other stages as well go much smoother with block heals in place.

One of the bosses can be completely locked down by freeze. If you have Gnut, or Santa/Noelle you can just breeze through the fight on a1 and he'll never get a turn.

Burn isn't strictly necessary, but it makes the final boss way easier and faster. And one of the sub-bosses has poison cloud like in hydra, so it just takes forever if you don't have burn.

You definitely want several cleanse/block debuff champs like Elva and Pythion.

Beyond that, to get max damage on the treasure goblin, you'll want to keep up block damage/unkillable, or have some really good heal/revive (like Starsage Galathir) or else your nuker will kill your own team with reflected damage. Getting the minimum chest is easy, getting the top chest takes some planning and work.

I no longer play regularly so i am way behind the curve, but i cleared the forest and only had one boss that had to be manualed (N6, freyja)

I think it probably is a bit easy, but thats fine - it was a fun mode and the rewards well worth the effort.

The irony is that the only actual difficult part is trovemaster, and not because the boss is actually hard, but because you need to wrestle with absurd mechanics reminiscent of IG. Hey guys yknow what'll be cool? Let's gate rewards behind damage breakpoints, but also punish people from doing lots of damage!

Agreed.  Heal Reduc far and away most crucial.  Everything else could probably be handled.  

Im still trying to figure out why I bother fighting this dude.  Coins are essentially useless. 

Indeed.  Im just worried it'll feel like a chore in 6 months.  Though I think the rotating bosses and exploration of it will help with that. 

Rewards are just insanely good relative to the effort input.  Wish more content had the same ratio. 

Which brings up an annoyance/pet peeve of mine, leading into a QOL request:

Not being able to set AI. Using Rowan as a heal blocker, 75% chance to place 2-turn block heal on her a1. Started mimic fight on auto, took my dog for a walk.

Came back not quite half an hour later and the fight was still going with mimic at full health.

Took over and manualed, and completed the fight in 4 minutes with my champs doing nothing at all except a1s

I really wish we could pause a fight and set champ AI instead of needing to pre-set a team, (also request more saved team slots for dungeons!)  and not being able to do even that for sin city or grim forest.

Yup already on my list.  Inconsistent AI is super annoying. 

How about just being able to change each champs baseline skill priority. Add a tab after masteries. 

Probably wouldn't need more presets ever....

The main reason why Grim Forest is easier than Cursed City is the traits. And probably because we get to pick our teams without like "Hey you get to go up against 3 waves of teams that are all legendaries. You can only bring in Rare and Epic Support HP based champions...good luck!". 

So with Cursed City you need to go and buy all your "traits" (area bonuses) with Live Arena medals, in Grim Forest you get to use those bonuses for that run. So it makes it a lot easier at launch in that regards. I like that it is this way honestly. Means the game mode is isolated to itself that I don't need to go farm some other content first to then go and play the other. 

And as said above this is only Normal and Hard difficulty. Technically now they could then add Brutal and Nightmare difficulties to Grim Forest, while Cursed City is still considered pretty hard for players so no need to add Brutal still to that just yet.