root reason behind this insane dificulty

well, after enough fights, the reason behind this insane difficulty seems discovered.

it seems that heroes and gear ap's now count for the generation of the enemy army. meaning that, if we bring gear and heroes, they will make the enemy much harder and more units as well.

needless to say, that pre-update, it did not worked like this, and heroes and gear were ignored in coops and solos.

now i am doing the battles naked and without heroes and things are more or less alright. if i bring my second army with 7 heroes and loads of weak drop rate gear, its like suicide in any difficulty level. gear and heroes can account for nearly half the ap of my army and if this suddenly also has to be matched with enemy units, then i get these crazy 10 vs 20 battles or in coop, 15 vs 30 which is complete suicide, especially with mercs in the mix.

some players can still win using gl's, but its because gl's ap per stat ratio is low and makes it worth it.

this makes the game completely unbalanced at so many levels:
1) heroes now suck as their ap is not worth the spawning of new units so i don't bring them. they will remain untrained and forgotten.
2)gear or is top notch gls, maybe epics, or is not worth it.
3)having a drop rate set is like playing with an huge handicap and i cant use it.
4)our battles generate much more enemies but we don't get corresponding rewards of the extra units spawned and killed. rewards are still based on the units we bring to battle, ignoring the gear and heroes.

I strongly suggest that this is issue be fixed by removing the heroes and gear from the ap pool used to generate the enemy army. this should make difficulty level similar to what it was before, else the game has to be completely rebalanced from lowering aps of gear and heroes to increased rewards based on army ap.

Agreed, I fought a coop and other guy got wiped out. I was down to 2 heroes for the win, but at that rate not worth playing, AND i only recieved 1600 gold, most of which went to heal and repair

My experiences mostly bear this out too but I think there's more to it. Even on normal difficulty with naked units and no heroes, I'm still losing whole units. That never happened before unless I played on nightmare. It seems to me that if I bring a few naked units, the match is well balanced but the more units I bring, the more unbalanced it becomes so that if I bring 10 naked units, I risk getting some of them wiped out

I'll just repost what i said in another thread before I noticed this topic:

"I have noticed enemies being a lot stronger than what their lvl suggests they are ever since the NM was made harder a while back and now it seems (to me at least) that it's all over the place. Back then I started noticing that lvl 15 HI were a lot harder to take down in NM than when faced in co-op and now my lvl 11 hero almost died vs a lvl 13 goblin archer in a co-op which used to be unheard of. Is it just me or are the enemies matching not only your AP but GS as well now? If it's something similar then I must say that that's a bad idea. If enemies are progressing along with the player then you're always fighting the same difficulty and putting time and effort into the game just makes it harder and counter-productive. The whole point of gear is to give you that extra edge over the enemy that only get their stats from lvls. I have faith that the devs will balance things out as usual though "

I fully agree with nathor that this type of progressing difficulty renders heroes and low tier gear useless.
Edit: Only place I can see this type of progression working would be in an "Insane" or "Hell" or whatever the devs decide to call a harder solo or co-op difficulty mode.