I have observed that while there are lots of fights that are very challenging and exciting, there are also lots of fights that are almost boringly easy. It seems that what type of fight it is (town battle, mod) matters a lot. I give my observations here in hopes of starting a discussion about how we can inject some more challenge into some of the fights that are currently very easy.
"Set Piece" Mods
These are the large mods, usually tied to a guild or other group, that are set up in advance. For instance, the Mages' Guild "magic mirror" mods, or the Healers' Guild "puzzle" mod to acquire the Staff of Concordance last event. These already have plenty of challenge in them - I've seen or heard of PCs dying or almost dying - so you are doing well on these.
Town Battles at Night
Some of the large town battles that occur at night, like the "fey realm" battle, also are quite challenging. I think that being at night adds a lot of challenge to the battle because it makes coordination harder, and PCs depend a lot more on coordination (to do healing, armor refitting, etc.) than NPCs do. However I still think that some of the ideas below for daytime town battles apply just as well at night.
Daytime Town Battles
These are usually the town battles that occur just before Logistics and just before end-game. I think that it is important that there be town battles at these times in order to give spellcasters (and other classes with per-day abilities) a chance to use all their cool spells before the end, so they don't feel like they've wasted their spell slots. However I think that so far, most of the battles at these times are particularly easy. A large part of this is that:
(1) There are usually more PCs than NPCs, so the PCs have a large advantage. Having lots and lots of waves of NPCs doesn't necessarily increase the difficulty that much because PCs can easily refit and heal between waves.
(2) The vast majority of NPCs are melee only. So if the PCs can form their shield wall, and cycle out people who need refits, and so on, they can hold the line and have the NPCs just wail at it ineffectively.
(3) Even for NPCs who have packet attacks, most commonly what happens is that they only have a few packets, which they lob from medium to long range (where they are easily dodged, and even if they do hit it's easy to fix what they did) before engaging in melee, where we go back to part (2).
Some suggestions I have to make these more challenging are:
(1) Make it so the PCs need to be doing something else in addition to fending off the monsters. That means that fewer PCs are available at the front lines. Some of the battles where I've seen this happen, like the "nightmare realm" fight or the "close the magical rift" fight, were some of the more challenging.
(2) Have more NPCs, such as spellcasters, who have all or primarily packet attacks.
(3) Have the packet based NPCs coordinate better with the melee NPCs. That is, rather than just lob all your packets and then charge into melee, have the packet based NPCs do things like get right behind a melee NPC, then throw a Fear at someone in the front lines and the melee NPC can go for the gap, and so on.
Mod Cards
The majority of mod card fights that I have seen are almost complete pushovers. There have only been a few mod card fights I've been in where I really felt like the group could be in trouble, and that rate seems to have gone down recently as PCs have gotten better at tactics. In one of them the only reason that happened was that (1) I was almost out of spells from the previous night and (2) one of our four party members chickened out after the mod scaling had been set. This also might be a factor in why there often seem to be sizable queues for mod cards lately: on so many of the mod cards, the fight is so easy it might as well be free treasure.
Of course, since mod cards are, by their nature, much smaller encounters they might inherently be less challenging, but here are some ideas that might increase the difficulty a bit:
(1) Give the monsters more abilities that are likely to force PCs to expend resources. For instance, Shatters or Acidic Skin to destroy their weapons, or necromancy or Slays that are likely to cause Body damage to force healing. With the types of monsters that just swing 4 normal or something, oftentimes at the end of the battle all you have to do is refit armor and it's like nothing happened.
(2) Allow players, if they want to, to request that the mod be scaled to higher than their actual level. For instance, if there was a group of 5th level players that were looking for a tougher challenge, they could request that the mod be scaled for 8th level, or something. Optionally, the treasure could also be scaled to the higher level (I'm not sure if treasure is normally also scaled with level like the monster difficulty is) to encourage players to do this. Note that obviously you would not be able to request a lower scaling. That is, you can't play on "easy mode", but you could, if you wanted to, play on "hard mode" and maybe get some extra treasure out of the bargain.
(3) Have more monsters with goals other than killing the PCs once combat starts. For instance, maybe the mod is bandits, that are so tough they're actually likely to knock many of the PCs out, but they want to hold them for ransom rather than kill them. If Plot is afraid to make mod card fights too tough because they're afraid that players won't be willing to risk death just for some treasure (I don't know if in fact they are), this might be a way to add some risk to the fight in a more measured quantity to start out.
"Set Piece" Mods
These are the large mods, usually tied to a guild or other group, that are set up in advance. For instance, the Mages' Guild "magic mirror" mods, or the Healers' Guild "puzzle" mod to acquire the Staff of Concordance last event. These already have plenty of challenge in them - I've seen or heard of PCs dying or almost dying - so you are doing well on these.
Town Battles at Night
Some of the large town battles that occur at night, like the "fey realm" battle, also are quite challenging. I think that being at night adds a lot of challenge to the battle because it makes coordination harder, and PCs depend a lot more on coordination (to do healing, armor refitting, etc.) than NPCs do. However I still think that some of the ideas below for daytime town battles apply just as well at night.
Daytime Town Battles
These are usually the town battles that occur just before Logistics and just before end-game. I think that it is important that there be town battles at these times in order to give spellcasters (and other classes with per-day abilities) a chance to use all their cool spells before the end, so they don't feel like they've wasted their spell slots. However I think that so far, most of the battles at these times are particularly easy. A large part of this is that:
(1) There are usually more PCs than NPCs, so the PCs have a large advantage. Having lots and lots of waves of NPCs doesn't necessarily increase the difficulty that much because PCs can easily refit and heal between waves.
(2) The vast majority of NPCs are melee only. So if the PCs can form their shield wall, and cycle out people who need refits, and so on, they can hold the line and have the NPCs just wail at it ineffectively.
(3) Even for NPCs who have packet attacks, most commonly what happens is that they only have a few packets, which they lob from medium to long range (where they are easily dodged, and even if they do hit it's easy to fix what they did) before engaging in melee, where we go back to part (2).
Some suggestions I have to make these more challenging are:
(1) Make it so the PCs need to be doing something else in addition to fending off the monsters. That means that fewer PCs are available at the front lines. Some of the battles where I've seen this happen, like the "nightmare realm" fight or the "close the magical rift" fight, were some of the more challenging.
(2) Have more NPCs, such as spellcasters, who have all or primarily packet attacks.
(3) Have the packet based NPCs coordinate better with the melee NPCs. That is, rather than just lob all your packets and then charge into melee, have the packet based NPCs do things like get right behind a melee NPC, then throw a Fear at someone in the front lines and the melee NPC can go for the gap, and so on.
Mod Cards
The majority of mod card fights that I have seen are almost complete pushovers. There have only been a few mod card fights I've been in where I really felt like the group could be in trouble, and that rate seems to have gone down recently as PCs have gotten better at tactics. In one of them the only reason that happened was that (1) I was almost out of spells from the previous night and (2) one of our four party members chickened out after the mod scaling had been set. This also might be a factor in why there often seem to be sizable queues for mod cards lately: on so many of the mod cards, the fight is so easy it might as well be free treasure.
Of course, since mod cards are, by their nature, much smaller encounters they might inherently be less challenging, but here are some ideas that might increase the difficulty a bit:
(1) Give the monsters more abilities that are likely to force PCs to expend resources. For instance, Shatters or Acidic Skin to destroy their weapons, or necromancy or Slays that are likely to cause Body damage to force healing. With the types of monsters that just swing 4 normal or something, oftentimes at the end of the battle all you have to do is refit armor and it's like nothing happened.
(2) Allow players, if they want to, to request that the mod be scaled to higher than their actual level. For instance, if there was a group of 5th level players that were looking for a tougher challenge, they could request that the mod be scaled for 8th level, or something. Optionally, the treasure could also be scaled to the higher level (I'm not sure if treasure is normally also scaled with level like the monster difficulty is) to encourage players to do this. Note that obviously you would not be able to request a lower scaling. That is, you can't play on "easy mode", but you could, if you wanted to, play on "hard mode" and maybe get some extra treasure out of the bargain.
(3) Have more monsters with goals other than killing the PCs once combat starts. For instance, maybe the mod is bandits, that are so tough they're actually likely to knock many of the PCs out, but they want to hold them for ransom rather than kill them. If Plot is afraid to make mod card fights too tough because they're afraid that players won't be willing to risk death just for some treasure (I don't know if in fact they are), this might be a way to add some risk to the fight in a more measured quantity to start out.
