Enemies hitting you for huge numbers? Way higher durability on their end? Fight takes longer than five minutes? Maybe some enemy speed buffs and more spawns?
"This game is easy as hell. It's just tedious, not hard."
Putting aside for a moment that it's a fairly common feature for the ones saying this to have went out of their way to equip themselves with the best gear they can get to make the difficulty as tolerable as possible (and sometimes they will bitch really hard when their OP thing gets nerfed) there's a part of me that just doesn't understand when gamers got the idea that anything which isn't a short test of tactical revision doesn't count as actual difficulty.
Yeah sure, go ahead about how devs these days are so lazy to not bother doing anything but beef up the enemies some instead of reprogramming each instance to throw you off guard on higher difficulty settings. Whatever.
That denial though. "It isn't my fault that I'm having trouble with this, the game is just stupid!" There are a lot of things that can change through differences in value. Imagine if I told someone that playing Monster Hunter without potions is no more difficult than playing them with a fully prepared inventory, because your HP essentially being extended by restoration doesn't count as something that makes it easier. "See, all that does is just makes things more tedious." Because you need to have the patience to actually stay on your toes? What about armor then? All those damage+ modifiers you've got on your stuff? "Of course I need those. Sharpness+1 is just too necessary." Let's say you've got your potions, but you don't get to have your extra extra hard hitting stuff. What then? Does the requirement of having to manage your resources for a longer period of time not count for shit? What about how people often have to actually approach the situation differently merely because of value changes messing with their windows of opportunity?
Where the hell did this idea come from? I mean I guess you've got those people who've excused their inability to win something on a handicap as the game being too grindy for a while now, but it seems like there isn't a whole lot of factors that should count for what makes a game challenging anymore. Even one of my friends who couldn't deal with environmental hazards in one boss fight (this was in an MMO) simply said "this isn't even hard" after dying time and time again to them even though you can position yourself to avoid them. What really counts for difficulty in game design then? How efficient you can show yourself off to be?