A report came in that city 1 — the very first city, no modifiers, the one meant to be the readable opener — couldn't be cleared on Normal. Our first instinct with any difficulty complaint is to check whether it's a skill issue before touching a single number. This time it wasn't. We ran the actual DPS math and it agreed completely.
A fresh Balanced-cut character with zero perks outputs 5.9 HP/sec of damage. Here's what wave 9 of that city was demanding from them, before this fix:
| Mode | Required DPS | Boss HP |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 4.6 HP/sec | 1335 |
| Normal | 10.7 HP/sec | 2094 |
| Hard | 26.3 HP/sec | 3211 |
Normal was demanding almost double the DPS an unperked player actually has. Hard wanted 4.5×. That's not "tune your build better" — that's a wall with no door in it, on the difficulty setting most players start on.
Three levers, all pulling the same direction
Rather than yank one number and hope, we traced it to three separate multipliers that had each drifted upward independently and were now compounding:
- The difficulty multiplier (0.75 / 1 / 1.3) was hitting the curve twice — once through an enemy-tier threshold and again as a direct multiplier — so a modest-looking number moved the real difficulty much further than it implied.
- The boss HP multiplier had crept from a sane baseline to 1.45 through two separate "still feels too easy" bumps — both judged from later cities, where a built-up perk stack makes everything feel softer than it is. Against a city-1 boss, where the player has no stack yet, that same multiplier was a wall.
- An exploder enemy's blast damage was hitting for half a Balanced cut's entire max HP in one tick, and after that enemy type had separately gained a ranged bomb attack, "don't melee this" had quietly become "this can just kill you from across the room."
All three came down 40–56%. The result:
| Mode | Required DPS | Boss HP |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 2.6 HP/sec | 791 |
| Normal | 4.9 HP/sec | 1220 |
| Hard | 11.5 HP/sec | 1874 |
Normal now sits comfortably under an unperked player's own output, the way an opening city should. We double-checked the late game didn't go soft as a side effect — the final boss of the last city still asks for 26.3 HP/sec against a base output of 17.6 there, so perks stay mandatory the whole way through, not just at the start.