With the increase of power of our guardians, the devs have tried to increase difficulty overall to scale with it. However, this difficulty increase actively hurts players who are not using the most powerful builds and weapons. I think that is where a lot of this is felt, players who want to go against the grain with builds which are not utilizing the strengths of the artifact, or running weapons and abilities which do not match surges or are not overpowered in the activities which take advantage of it. In activities with surges and overpowered modifiers, if you are not matching them, you need to think of it as losing 25% of your damage rather than gaining while matching the surge. The activities were built around those modifiers being active, and scaled accordingly. So that is NORMAL damage, and anything not matching is reduced. I personally enjoy difficult activities to a certain extent. I have been working on solo GM's. I am not a top tier gamer, so its a struggle. For me, I feel that there is minimal difference in playing a GM or a solo Expert NF in difficulty, other than the increase in champions... Even the standard Prophecy to the RotN Explore, I feel like it plays the same. But that could just be that my builds have been getting more refined and the damage checks are being removed with mid to higher tier enemies. Where when I was playing mostly lower tier content, I could feel the difference in scale between difficulty levels more abruptly.