Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-27237992-20151117180743/@comment-27723099-20151118230729

Minecraft has a bad difficulty level. Combat is mostly about having the best equipment, but it's easy to run away. All resources are easy to obtain in any quantity. The only really challenging thing in the mod is invading extremely hostile environments like Angmar, Mordor, or Utumno. All combat gets easy with "godmith" and quickly becomes almost impossibly hard with too poor equipment. Most of the time I find myself only abusing stupid AI bugs to kill enemies: hide under a tree or between two trees to fight mobs with bigger hitboxes, stand on the top of a 2 meter high platform so that the enemies come to me without ever reaching me, or simply stand and repeatedly knock them back. The combat changes improved the situation slightly but most of the problems persist.

Vanilla tries to make up for this by having many different types of mobs: zombies are normal melee mobs, skeletons are ranged, spiders are fast, endermen have special abilities, and creepers have a completely different way to fight, which changes the tactics needed against them. The mod has all of those types in LOTR style (and adds more new mob types), but never all of them in a single faction. In the biggest part of the world, the player only encounters Gundabad: melee, ranged, and fast mobs, but nothing else.

Since the mod added many new ways to get food, that part was made easier. Also there are many regions where the player can live in peace. The generated structures make it easy for those who are too lazy to build their own houses. You can mine in many biomes without ever having to watch your back for creepers or the like. All in all the survival part seems to be easier than in vanilla.