Unrelated to the post, but are you also logging feedback on the current Ventures season's modifier?
Smashers are nigh-unkillable (even more than usual) and they one-shot Tier 3 walls. In later Ventures levels, 4+ Smashers can spawn at once and can entirely take out a fully-stocked base before you can kill a single one. The abundance of triple-burst Lobbers and Flingers certainly don't help.
Unviable to run in and smack them with melee weapons, considering melee enemies slow you down to a crawl and Zappers can one-shot (or in this case, two-shot?) you. Abilities are your only real option there, and very, very few Abilities have the firepower to take down a Smasher on their own. Plus, the Nature enemies zap away your Energy.
You need to keep your distance, but are punished for doing so. You need to get up-close, but are punished for doing so. The treasure chests full of weapons and ore aren't worth the trouble, nor are the 1.5 second stuns upon killing melee enemies.
You could play in Public matches, but you can encounter players of every skill level from every stage of the game - plenty of which don't have adequate knowledge of elemental enemies or how to properly build trap tunnels or bases. In the Europe region, there are so many different players who speak so many different languages so attempting to explaining how stuff works is often a lost cause.
This game needed the extra challenge IMO, but making numbers go up to unfair levels is not the way to do that.
devtrackers.gg