You bring up a 100% optional fight, with mobs not even appearing in the area untill you trigger their anger by stealing from a grave
Fair enough, it's been awhile and I don't remember what causes the spectres to show up. If it is clearly signposted along the lines of "grabbing this item will cause several overtuned mobs to show up who are beyond the scope of what the system is designed for," then yeah, my fault. If it says something generic like "beware the wrath of the spirits" then eh, I guess it's still my fault for not save scumming enough or reading a guide. Also, can you un-trigger the ghosts? Once they are there they don't go away and they're all along the paths to the other quests in the area.
tabletoppers probably should play on Core with "Number of enemies: Standard" and Last Azlanti enabled.
It is not actually possible to achieve tabletop balancing in this game. Everything would need to be severely nerfed. The thing no one gets is that this system is not intended for repeat, continuous fights against higher level foes.
PCs are meant to fight 4-5 level-equivalent encounters between resets, or 2-3 EL +4 fights, or one EL +6 fight (boss level). But every fight in this game is at least EL+4 or even +8-12. Even if you acknowledge the extra two PCs (Encounter Level assumes a 4 man party) that's still way higher than what the system was balanced around. Mythic levels help but half of them are basically sidegrades (extra spells/powers), and don't pretend like Kingmaker didn't have the exact same encounter design without the mythic paths.
A single CR 12 enemy is a level-equivalent fight for a group of six level 10 PCs. If you want to add more enemies, you have to
level them down. Two CR 10 mobs is EL 12, or four CR 8, or eight CR 6. Are KM/WotR balanced this way? Hell no. They
start with equal level mobs, and ramp up from there.
Obviously, many people here are fine with this balancing. They probably think the base PnP settings are too forgiving and easy, and want a higher powered game. Totally fine. But take that complaint up with the system designers, not me. It should not be unreasonable to question why a game that "brings the tabletop experience to videogames" severely warped and twisted that experience into something very different. It would make more sense to me to balance the game around normal ELs and then allow enthusiasts to scale up, instead of forcing players to try to nerf down the supercharged mobs.
In any case, I'm not complaining that the game is too hard, but that it isn't fun, which isn't the same thing. In fact,
I don't think it's possible for this game to be challenging. But that is a topic for a different post.