Best Of

1) The mechanics are the main source of difficulty, so I'm not sure it can be compared to much of anything. When we were testing, we used level 100 characters without any artifacts or special outside buffs like chocolates/blessings; so that's what it was initially balanced around. I'm not too surprised that activity went down; I think a large part of this may be incentive-based. It is probably undesirable for an average player to complete challenging content more than once for a reward they aren't particularly interested in. We might add some new rewards to encourage more participation.

2) Yes, we are still watching. That 8min 42second speedrun surprised me greatly. I was anticipating <20mins at peak performance, but never considered <10mins as a possibility.

I am considering further changes. Right now, I'd say I'm the least satisfied with the colossus and fragment fights. The fragments were never meant to be facetanked 3v3 in the same room, so I might adjust it so that it's more difficult or impossible to do so with new mechanics. The colossus on the other hand only has one core mechanic, which can be brutal to unprepared or underbuffed characters, and a breeze otherwise.

Overall we're very happy with the reception so far.

This all said, we are looking into new content and I'd personally rather see more dungeons sooner over intensive redesigns of existing content. Thanks for the questions and I'm glad you're enjoying it.