ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've won a couple of times on normal difficulty, and I'm often bored by the sheer number of enemies in the game who are no threat compared to bosses and some rares. i.e. if you are powerful enough to beat the early-mid-game bosses, killing room after corridor of normal enemies becomes a chore rather than a challenge.

My question is, would this stop being the case on Nightmare difficulty or above? Would basic enemies become dangerous enough to require focus the entire game?

Yes, on nightmare 1027 damage to level 23 char in one action from a normal ranked mob is possible.

Nightmare isn't really that much different from Normal in my experience. It is harder, but you're not fighting tons of rare+ mobs.

Insane is where you really start facing lots of rares and bosses. This makes it more fun in my opinion, but also a lot more challenging and inconsistent because bosses can even have skills from multiple classes. Depending on your class, you may come across enemies you simply can't defeat at your level. It's definitely "consistently challenging" but the challenge isn't entirely "consistent," if you know what I mean.

Yes Insane is a considerably different game and IMO a good bit more interesting than normal or Nightmare. However Insane also has skill inflation which can cause some whacky or annoying things to happen as well (super powered warhounds, super hard to crit heavy armor guys etc). So some addons that increase numbers of rare+s might be more to some people's tastes than Insane.

Interesting. I'm just wondering whether I'll struggle my way through the early game and reach the first boss I can't skip and get smeared on the wall due to power differential. Unless regular enemies are proportionally closer to actual bosses on higher difficulty?

They are not, at least insofar as I've seen, though I don't play on the higher difficulties very often. Everything is more dangerous, and generally the bosses and whatnot even moreso than the general chaff. Regular enemies are more proportional to regular bosses in the last difficulty, not the current one, heh.

Really, as noted above, if you're looking to minimize the power gap, try one of the rare/randboss density increasing mods. Randboss rando, Everything is Unique, one of the more tame rare frequency increasing ones, something along those lines.

Insane basically requires you to do the trick where you drown townspeople for gear if you are melee and the first two tiers are pretty hard, possibly the hardest part.

The game was not tuned for Insane and not even close for Madness. But the game is pretty much challenging the whole way on Insane.

If you're going to play on Insane you'll want this mod
http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/quick-drown-npcs

It makes the process of drowning NPCs to start the game much quicker