I would like to share some feedback regarding the difficulty of higher layers of Torghast and some poor experiences had whilst playing solo in these scenarios.
Torghast layer 8 has absolutely no business being as tough as it is. I am a fairly competent player, solo’ing feral druid ilvl 195, I have plenty of damage, healing, defensives and control to manage fights, but some enemies are far far too strong. Most enemies are no problem, a number of casters no big deal, I can even solo elites without the use of cooldowns, or fight 2 simultaneously with cooldowns.
However, the assassins that attack you at random intervals? They do a ludicrous amount of damage. They attack near every second for approximately 2,000 damage, or 7% of my HP as damage per second, not to mention their casts which can chunk for about 7,000 - 10,000 damage. They also have about 70,000 health before even reaching the end of floor 2. It takes more cooldowns to fight a single floor assassin than it does a pack of elite enemies, which is abhorrent, in fact I fear floor assassins more than even the floor or end layer bosses. I would like to see the damage and possibly health of the floor assassins taken down a notch to make the experience playable.
In the fractured chambers there are also an absolute ton of skeletal remains enemies. For the uninitiated, they are seemingly harmless low HP skeletons that path with a caster or two in groups of about 5 - 10 depending. However, upon death they explode, dealing massive damage to anyone within melee range. I am certain many caster classes do not mind this, however as melee player it is unrealistic to be able to survive more than 2 or 3 explosions at one time. These skeletons also apply a physical damage taken increased debuff which is very nasty although manageable with kiting. These enemies need some tuning, either decrease the explosion damage dealt, so melee players can survive the encounter, or dramatically reduce the number of enemies per pack so that the explosions can be managed.
Another commonly cited issue that should be discussed is the stacking buff elite enemies receive. An increase in damage, movement spend and resistance to crowd control upon reaching 10 stacks. While this is a decent mechanic to prevent excessively long encounters with these elites, and emphasizing the importance of killing them quickly, this stacking buff still applies too quickly. Luckily I play a class that has sufficient burst damage to manage most elites, but I cannot imagine some of the difficulties other classes experience with these types of enemies. I would like to see a reduction in the application rate of the stacking buff elite enemies receive.
While these are just three examples, I am certain there are other issues yet to be explored. In its current state, upper layers of Torghast are not playable. While I understand that upper layers of Torghast are intended to be a challenge - they can be, and should be, however they can be made a challenge without the need of un-killable enemies that spawn from nowhere with triple your HP pool and damage output higher than most players.
If you have any other experiences comparable to mine, I would like to hear them so we can better understand the tuning problems associated with Torghast and bring attention to changes that the community would like to see.