cvv The progression in EE revolves mostly around giving you more different tools to handle a situation, rather than just number bloat. In White Orchard, a group of Drowners is a bloody nightmare because you only have your swords and piss-weak Signs to deal with them. As you progress, you get access to Alternate Signs and additional effects when using them, potions and their more powerful versions, bombs, exploding crossbow bolts, Mutagens, more defensive maneuvers to help avoid/mitigate damage etc. and a good application of those rips the once-problematic Drowners to shreds. However, even though I'm over 50 hours in, that same group can still fuck me up real good if I'm careless and just swing the sword like a drunken chimp.
In vanilla, completionists really get the shaft because they will relatively quickly outlevel all the content the main game has to offer (expansions mitigate the problem somewhat), making it laughably easy and boring even on the highest difficulty. In EE, you are getting noticeably more powerful, but only if you actually bother to use your new abilities and toys and you never feel like an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. You have to constantly be on your toes, even against weaker enemies.
In base game that fight is easy in W3EE is tough as shit next Capra from DS because like capra it has bunch of wolves around him that will fuck you up by themselves and on top of that you have warewolf whic hin 3-4 swings will make mincemeat out of you.
I did this relatively early into the game by sniping the wolves with a crossbow one by one. Whenever I got hit, I ran away from the cave, ate some food and meditated to heal, returned to snipe another wolf, rinse and repeat until it was only me and the Werewolf left. Cheap shit and clearly an exploit, but I was determined to beat the quest without returning to it later.
Vanilla has horrible scaling system where new random sword is almost always better than your ancient godslayer you were given by god of thunder 30 minutes ago. Other overhauls don't fix that.
That's true, but EE has the opposite problem, where you'll go over 30 hours without finding a better sword, especially if you want it to compliment a certain play style. Like I've mentioned in one of my previous posts, I found a steel sword with pretty decent bonuses that I like almost right after White Orchard in some random chest in some random bandit camp and haven't found a better one yet, including the "legendary" Relic swords, Mastercrafted Witcher gear etc. Hell, I'm almost convinced now I'll be using this sword until the end of the game.
Similar thing with silver swords - found a Relic in some random chest that turned out to be a pretty great Silver Sword ~30 hours ago and neither crafted swords nor quest rewards offered something even remotely as good. I was hoping the sword you get from Crach after you help his kids would be an upgrade, because for a story-driven experience like Twitcher it makes sense to get the best stuff from completing important quests, but no, it was just a useless piece of crap with far too heavy penalties and miserable base damage compared to a random Relic I found on one of the gajillion "?"s scattered across Velen.
Every chest in W3EE is hope for some rare ingredient you can use in crafting
What version of the mod did you play on your last playthrough? It looks like versions we're playing are pretty different or I installed something wrong, because even Mastercrafted Witcher gear requires pretty basic ingredients, 90% of which can be bought from either Hatori or the Master Armorsmith chick and the other 10% (Monster Feather Samples, Monster Scale Samples) you can get from killing run-o-the-mill, common monsters. I haven't seen a single item that requires even a Dimeritium Plate, let alone something rarer and more expensive.